In such a disaster, how can a support team function when their entire headquarters--including computers, data, and technological tools--is lying under millions of pounds of rubble? T

o begin to explore this and other questions, geography professor Susan Cutter took a team of graduate students to New York City Oct. 7–10.

"Our role was to look at how geographical information and geographical technologies were used in the rescue and relief operations. That is, did they use GPS (Global Positioning Systems), GIS (Global Information Systems), or any of the remote sensing technologies, such as satellite images?" she said.

"We met and interviewed the behind-the-scenes people: not the firefighters and police officers, but the people who support that effort and direct them where to go, let them know where the hot spots are or where the rubble pile is very deep. We're looking at how geographic information was used–if it was used–to make those determinations and some of the problems they may have encountered."

Cutter was accompanied by two graduate students, Mike Gutekunst and Steve Jones, and Deborah Thomas, a faculty member from the University of Colorado at Denver who received a Ph.D. in geography from USC in 1999. Michael Hodgson, associate professor of geography, remained at USC to conduct telephone interviews with agencies that are part of the federal response plan. The USC team was one of 16 social science teams sent to the site by the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The center's quick response program enables people to get into the field quickly after a disaster. Quick-response reports from each of the 16 teams will be pulled together into book form and presented at an NSF meeting in New York City in late fall.

A larger proposal submitted by Cutter's team, in conjunction with the Association of American Geographers, has been funded by NSF. The new project will take part of the current study and expand it to look at all geographical issues surrounding terrorism.

For now, the team is focusing on the events of Sept. 11.

"The city lost its emergency management office and that's where they had their data–and as best as we can tell at this point, they didn't have a backup. So they needed to reconstruct not only the command and control center to manage the emergency, but also the whole database system from scratch," Cutter said. "It took about three days to get the office fully operational, which may or may not have hampered the rescue effort, but it means an element in the response was not available initially. We are trying to find out now how critical was the absence of that capability.

"The need to have an off-site backup of critical geographic information is just one of the lessons that we will learn from this," Cutter said. "This particular lesson is applicable to any place, including the State of South Carolina."

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