◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek November 11, 2019PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
BRANDON
THIBODEAUX
FOR
BLOOMBERG
BUSINESSWEEK
23● A small company’s team of
dispatchers handles the world’s
most remote emergenciesWhen 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.
“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 hardwareand software that monitors 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.
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. Another 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.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