◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek November 11, 2019EdSolidaylikensdatacenterstotheSpruceGoose,
theenormouswoodenairplaneHowardHughes
flewjustonce.“Everybodylaughedathim,”saysthe
Indianastaterepresentative,“butit wasn’ttheair-
planewherehemadehismoney.”Thebigswing,he
notes,helpedcatalyzea fortuneingovernmentcon-
tractsforHughes’saircraftcompany,eventhough
theoriginalvisionwasa miss.Thisis howSoliday,
a Republican,seesa newlaw hehelpedpass,
whicheliminatessalestaxesforanunprecedented
five decades for a company that commits at least
$750 million to a data center in his state.
The legislation is aimed squarely at luringStamps 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.
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
might also want to think about getting an emergency
GPSbeaconofhisown.�MatthewBraga● Indiana tries to lure the likes of Amazon and Facebook
with long‑lasting tax breaksOne State’s
50-Year Bet on
Data Centers
THE BOTTOM LINE The IERCC isn’t quite profitable on its own,
but its status as a global 911 dispatcher has helped solidify its parent
company’s position as a provider of remote emergency services.24