Homogeneity and heterogeneity in disasters

The problems of homogeneity

The video sequence of the collapsing WTC towers has probably been burned into my memory forever. It was unique in many ways. There was of course the shock, the unbelievable cruelty... But there was also astonishment and surprise. About the fact that they collapsed at all, the fact that they collapsed both and the apparently choreographic elegance the towers collapsed. To some this was so unbelievable, that they called for conspiracy theories. After the disaster, the experts looked at what went wrong when conceiving and building those towers. Questioning the used materials, the fire protection measures, the building statics calculations.... But at a more abstract level there was something more fundamental, most people seemed to ignore: the homogeneity of the towers.

In May 2004 the computer worm Sasser caused a serious worldwide epidemic. In 48 hours at least 1,3 million PCs were infected and the infection rate continued at half a million per day. Till today, nobody knows the exact figures. How could this happen? Because the exploited vulnerability existed in a Windows library file (LSASRV.DLL) shipped with all Windows versions (98, NT, 2000, XP, ME). In 2004 these were about 94% of all online computers (3% left for Linux and additional 3 % left for Mac). So, the infection rate and the global spreading of Sasser and other worms only became possible because of the homogeneity of operating systems.

We could continue the list of examples about the raise of fascism before world war 2 and the homogeneity of minds, different blackouts of the internet, power supply and telecommunication networks and the homogeneity of networks.


The attractiveness of homogeneity

Of course and for legitimate reasons we do everything to achieve homogeneity and to avoid heterogeneity in our daily life: standardization efforts, procedures, unification of concepts, etc... What a nightmare if paper sizes (A4, Letter) weren't standardized, if there were no standards for screws, USB, IP addresses, ..... Software development is in general a huge effort of standardizing tasks, processes and concepts. The benefits are very clear of course.


The impact of homogeneity and heterogeneity in crisis situations

The underlying problem is that homogeneity designed for ease and efficiency in normal situations is quite often also beneficial for disasters to strike, for exactly the same reasons.

In crisis communication we have a natural heterogeneity of organizations (first responders, police, fire fighters) , of procedures, of formal and informal communication channels and of the respective telecommunication means (fixed telephony, mobile telephony, IP, Tetra, pagers, FAX). The multitude of systems and technologies is the result of a great independence of each of these organizations. In the past, the public or civil fire fighter organizations just didn't consult the technical or purchase department of the police corps before investing in a communication system or equipment.

In general this lack of homogeneity is not only considered as a major cost factor but also as a problem for efficient crisis communication and disaster recovery. How can the fire fighter's analog radio system communicate with the police officers TETRA network?
But as exposed above it has also some hidden resilience benefits in disasters and might minimize the impacts from outages on overall communication efficiency. If one system or network fails the other ones may remain in place.


Interconnecting heterogeneous communication systems

To benefit from both worlds' advantages, you may consider for the involved organizations to put an homogeneous overlay messaging application over the heterogeneous communication systems in place.
This idea is at the heart of the unified incident and alarm management system that our company is actively developing since several years. AlarmTILT a multi media, multi technology messaging system specially designed for incident and crisis communication applications bridging between existing communication networks and devices in those situations.