ADVERTISEMENT

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When the message arrived from the Alaskan wilderness, it was simple, brief, and urgent: tipped raft. The two paddlers who sent it had just almost drowned, and their food and gear had disappeared downriver. But they had one thing going for them, a small, handheld emergency beacon they could use to share their location and ask for help. It sent a signal more than 3,000 miles south, to Montgomery, Texas, where responders helped coordinate their rescue.

Almost anywhere in the world, if someone calls the equivalent of 911 on a satellite phone or presses the SOS button on a dedicated GPS tracker, the message likely goes to a small team in Montgomery at the International Emergency Response Coordination Center, or IERCC. Unlike your local emergency dispatch center, it’s a private, for-profit venture. A rotating crew of six is on hand at all times to report the incident to search and rescue personnel, direct them to the alert’s point of origin, and help coordinate the response until the sender is safe. The Texas center has assisted more than 10,000 rescues in 169 countries, from the Scottish Highlands to eastern Tajikistan. “We are the only people that provide a monitoring service which is truly global,” says Peter Chlubek, co-founder and executive chairman of the IERCC’s parent company, Geos Worldwide Ltd., which specializes in travel safety and rescue services.

While similar emergency monitoring services exist for particular regions, including North America, it’s tough to find a satellite network operator or GPS device maker that doesn’t use the IERCC. The Texas team’s network now monitors some 634,000 devices (satellite phones, GPS beacons, activity trackers) used by nature lovers, athletes, and adventurers in places where cell signals can’t reach. Hardware makers such as Garmin, Globalstar, Inmarsat, and Iridium say the IERCC’s expertise and global network of emergency responders are worth a small cut of their monthly satellite network subscription fees, like the 911 fees that wireless carriers charge—about $1 a month per device, on average.

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

“I don’t know of any other organization that has the database and the level of understanding and capability of triaging with all those different first responder organizations,” says Morris Shawn, the president of Roadpost, which sells hardware and software that monitor worker safety in remote locales.

The IERCC’s headquarters are in a somewhat drab, four-story office built by a Cold War-era doomsday prepper, with unusually thick concrete, backup diesel generators, a helipad, five-layer bulletproof glass, and a 40,000-square-foot fallout shelter next door. (The shelter is now a data center.) In front of the response team’s cubicles, a trio of wall-mounted TV screens usually displays maps marked with natural disasters and other current events that might be relevant. The staffers chat and joke around when they’re not working calls, but a switch flips when an SOS comes in, heralded by the kind of loud, shrill klaxon used in movies to signal a missile launch. Brittany Allemang, the center’s director of emergency operations, says she can hear it in her dreams.

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

One staffer tries to contact the emergency numbers listed on the account of the person in distress to gather as much information as possible about their route, plans, and possible companions. A second contacts the local search and rescue organization, using a meticulously detailed map overlaid on Google Earth. Some agencies are responsible for relatively small regions, but New Zealand’s national search and rescue agency, for example, covers an area four times the length of the country, including a stretch of the Pacific Ocean and part of Antarctica. (Yes, they’ve done rescues there.) Even with some variability due to weather and the distance to the closest responders, the average IERCC rescue time is 5 hours, 46 minutes; on a typical day, staffers respond to anywhere from 30 to 60 SOS messages.

Things were much quieter in the early going, says Kevin Stamps, one of the center’s first hires after its 2007 founding and now Geos’s vice president for North American operations. “You might get one call a week,” he says. “When an alarm did go off, it almost knocked you out of your chair.” Geos was founded by Chlubek and his brothers Mike and John in 2004 with retired cop Bob David. The brothers spent the 1990s working on nascent GPS tracking systems for vehicles. They created the IERCC as a low-bandwidth service for Globalstar, which needed to keep making money from its aging satellite network while it hustled to get new satellites into orbit. Geos and Globalstar struck a deal that the Chlubeks later repeated with Globalstar’s various rivals: The satellite maker sells emergency Spot beacons that run on its network, and Geos runs the emergency response center.

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

Stamps drew on his experience with rescue operations in the U.S. Coast Guard as a model for the IERCC’s first standard operating procedures. An early test came in 2008, when the first hires holed up in the office during Hurricane Ike and found themselves coordinating a rescue in their own backyard. “This was, at night, the only place lit up,” Stamps says.

Other companies took note as the team built out its network and database of search and rescue organizations. In 2011, Geos worked closely with a GPS navigation company called DeLorme, now owned by Garmin, to unveil an emergency communicator called the InReach. Back then, Globalstar Spot users could only send their locations out into the void and hope help was on the way, but DeLorme’s InReach device offered rudimentary two-way chat with friends, family, and—in the event of an emergency—dispatchers. This year the IERCC began hiring about three people a month, up to a current total of 30 emergency response coordinators, partly to handle an upswing in distress calls.

The center has 26 partners and renews its deals every three to five years. Chlubek says it’s close to breaking even on its $2.5 million annual budget. The parent company says its annual revenue totals about $10 million. Chlubek says Geos, self-funded since its inception, is profitable and has grown about 22% annually for the past three years. The bulk of the money comes from subscription programs that alert members to travel hazards or defray search and rescue expenses; the company also monitors commercial assets and remote workers.

Former Chief Executive Officer Mark Garver left the company this summer after he pushed Geos to expand into monitoring agriculture and supply chain assets; the Geos board preferred to stay focused on travel safety and the IERCC. Garver has since started Agri-space, an agricultural monitoring startup. Geos hasn’t named a new CEO.

This Small Team of Dispatchers Saves Lives Via Satellite

Stamps recalls sleeping on the floor of his office for three days in 2013 when resource shortages delayed a rescue in Tajikistan. Waiting for news from the outside world can be torture, he says. In the Coast Guard, when an alert comes in, “your adrenaline shoots up, you get ready, you jump on the boat, you’re headed there, and you have control over what the outcome of the situation is,” he says. In the Montgomery office, things aren’t always so simple. Once, a person who claimed a friend had been killed by a bear drew an IERCC staffer into a frantic, nine-hour ordeal over what turned out to be a drunken hoax.

Doug Nidever blacked out for real last year while he was about 100 feet up the frozen Chouinard Falls in California’s Yosemite National Park. One moment, the 65-year-old professional mountain guide was climbing; the next, he was plummeting down a wall of ice. He thinks he fell about 50 feet, and his fellow climbers lowered him the rest of the way. He tried to tell them he could walk the 45-minute trek to the nearest road—he’d been a first responder with Yosemite’s Mono County Rescue in the 1970s and ’80s—but one of them had already called 911 on his satellite phone.

“I told those guys, after all those decades of putting people in a chopper, it was kind of a treat to get a ride out,” Nidever says with a laugh from his home in June Lake, Calif. Low blood pressure was the diagnosis, he says, so he’s learned how to manage it better, and he’s started climbing again. He’s still without an emergency GPS beacon of his own.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.