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Evacuee wristbands have Steiner Ranch connection

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During Hurricane Ike, more than 7,000 Texas evacuees wore identification wristbands, part of a new tracking system spearheaded by a local resident.

Lesia Dickson, who lives in Steiner Ranch, was part of the crew that created and deployed the new state evacuation wristband system dubbed the Texas Special Needs Evacuation Tracking System, or SNETS.

This is the country's first radio frequency identification statewide evacuation system.

Other evacuation systems have been developed at this point (but) “without any doubt (SNETS) is the most all-encompassing tracking system with more command and control,” said Dickson, who is director of sales with Radiant RFID, the Austin company that developed the technology used in the evacuee wristbands.

To handle Hurricane Ike evacuees, the Texas Military Forces alongside Radiant, set up three embarkation, two shelter and two air hubs that ran flights from Beaumont to College Station.

At these hubs, emergency workers registered evacuees' names and drivers' license numbers into a database, then issued each a plastic wristband imbedded with a radio-frequency identification chip.

The new SNETS was developed to better track “special needs” evacuees, or those who are unable to drive themselves to safety because of age, medical and/or financial reasons.

“This particular event, from our standpoint has gone very well,” Dickson said. “The problem with Ike is that we had to chase that storm.”

Radiant's wristbands - which are a patented, one-of-a-kind design - were used to evacuate people prior to Ike making landfall from Corpus Christi to Bay City, outside of Houston.

The wristbands worked very effectively in those areas before the storm switched to Galveston, Dickson said. Chasing the storm was the tough part.

Major areas of evacuations including the Southeast Texas towns of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange had a few hours of notice because of the shift of the storm.

“The storm eventually outran us. A lot of those we would have registered we couldn't get to in time,” Dickson said.

“We'll probably reevaluate how we staged equipment to see how we can get closer during an event quicker,” she said.

Prior to Ike, Dickson, not unlike many from the Radiant team, worked a 17-day stretch with one day off.

“We were working 12- to 14-hour days mostly setting up getting ready and supporting but in the field they were working longer hours than I was. I really can't complain,” she said.

Dickson's family was involved with the emergency efforts too on a temporary basis. Her husband, Randy, spent a few days working on implementing the system. Their 15-year-old son Luke was deployed last weekend with a team to Beaumont to work on the efforts there.

SNETS got its start after the massive, chaotic evacuations that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita three years ago. At the time there was not a system in place to keep up with evacuees being shipped by bus or by plane.

With Katrina alone, 470,000 evacuees ended up in Texas, including 9,000 special needs cases and 2,000 children who arrived without parents. Of theses evacuees, more than a quarter had no form of identification, reports indicate.

Based on Katrina and Rita, the problem was a lot of people had to be tracked down and no one could say for certain where people were, said Kenneth Ratton, vice president of sales and a Radiant owner.

Other issues were that people would get separated from their wheelchairs or oxygen tanks. There were also cases of stolen animals in Rita's aftermath including one case where someone with false documents drove off with a trailer full of thoroughbred horses, Ratton said.

“Our system allows you to keep up with that,” he said of Radiant, which got its start tracking conference and trade show attendance four years ago. Its offices are off of 290 West between Oak Hill and Dripping Springs.

After reviewing the Katrina and Rita evacuations, the state of Texas tapped Dickson, who then worked at AT&T Inc., to help it improve the way it handles future disaster relocations. That was two years ago.

At the time, Dickson was a technical sales consultant for telecommunication's giant AT&T and the onsite representative for the Governor's Division of Emergency Management. She was part of a three-person team which included representatives from the University of Texas Center for Space Research and the Department of State Health Services.

“We brainstormed on what the solution would look like,” said Dickson, who, after 25 years at AT&T, retired in January and became director of sales at Radiant.

They came up with SNETS; the gear and software used in the system is largely off-the-shelf, making it easy for the state to use and maintain. For example, the system uses Motorola Inc.'s hand scanners which are the same kind widely used by retail stores to conduct inventory. AT&T is using its landline and wireless networks to carry data.

In addition to Radiant, AT&T and Motorola are two of the other partners in the state's $4 million SNETS project. Radiant, whose portion of the project so far has totaled nearly $1 million, received its first order for wristbands in August 2007.

Several weeks ago, Hurricane Gustav was actually the first deployment of the new system. About 7,000 evacuees wore SNETS wristbands.

Results for SNETS so far have been good.

There were many cases in Katrina and Rita where people could not connect or find out information about loved ones for weeks. With Gustav there were four non-connected people after three days, Ratton said.

In one instance with Ike, a family member called to find out information about his brother who he heard died in a shelter but through the tracking system, he was found alive and well.

“It was nice to be able to tell the brother and make that connection,” Dickson.

In addition to helping people and reuniting families, Radiant is rewarding to Dickson on another level since she worked on the wristband idea from its infancy.

“It was my baby from the start,” Dickson said. “One of the great things is seeing it roll out now and I can see stage three, stage four and so on as this comes together more over the next several years.”

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