If a toxic waste spill occurs during transportation, OSHA currently requires five methodologies of communication for all first responders. This typically includes pagers, cell phones, two-way radios, e-mail, and a home phone number. OSHA’s intent with this is to ensure that all responders have the highest possibility of being reached in the event of an emergency. However, this is a daunting task for a dispatcher that has to notify potentially hundreds of individuals in a short amount of time. Time is of the essence for this type of emergency response. Not only is there a potential direct impact on the environment and local community, but organizations who manage these types of materials also have to contend with compounding fines imposed by OSHA with each passing hour (As much as $100,000.00 per hour). This new function with two-way technology could provide the dispatcher a significantly faster way of being able to confirm notification from their first responders. Oil transportation management agencies in the United States alone report as many as 20,000 incidents of oil spills or similar accidents annually.
Another request was to increase the speed of messaging to individuals in the field. Many of the wireless service providers offer proprietary ways in which developers can send messages into their systems and are making improvements in this area on an on-going basis. We opted to support the most common forms of messaging for this study, which were/are the SMTP protocol, WCTP protocol, and the SNPP protocol. Some customers were interested in participating with the study using one-way alphanumeric pagers, with a dial-up connection utilizing the TAP protocol (members would call into central and confirm the receipt of the dispatch for the study). This prompted us to add a manual update for these one-way users so they could record responses if needed. In addition to these functions, we added multilevel security, the ability to send messages to an unlimited number of groups and individuals, a log file, message response tracking, pre-defined messages, etc. This was all placed into an easy to use interface for interactive wireless dispatching. Although the application was designed to be used mainly on our own Extranet (www.respondnow.net), the application could also be installed in-house on a computer server running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Unix for organizations that wanted to host the application themselves.