 A warm welcome to everyone joining us for this RICS session on the future of incident response leveraging technology. My name is Clay Johnson, I'm the acting director for the division of preparedness and response. Next slide please. Our agenda. Each of the presenters will give approximately a 10 minute overview of their areas. We will have a Q&A session and then we will end the formal session, but we will stay on for a couple more minutes. Next slide please. As an overview, we've all experienced amazing challenges in our lives and our work over the last two years. The technical session on the future of incident response leveraging technology allows our distinguished panelists to share insights on how technology is now used to support efforts to protect the health and safety of the public during a wide variety of events. Next slide. Our next panelist is Liz Wilford, who is the fleet emergency preparedness director for Southern Nuclear. She will be providing perspectives on advancements in technology for response centers and coordination with offsite response organizations. Next slide please. Our next panelist will be Vic Cusimano, who is the chief of the technical specifications branch here at the NRC. Vic will be talking about the NRC experiences in leveraging technology. Next slide. Chris Vaughan is the geospatial information officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he will speak to advancing innovative technologies within the emergency management community. And our last panelist will be Mr. Florian Baku, the response system coordinator with the IAEA Incident and Emergency Center, and he will be speaking to the IAC developments for information sharing in nuclear or radiological emergencies. So thank you all to the panelists. And now we're welcome to Liz Wilford. Thanks for the great introduction, Clay. I appreciate that. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for the opportunity to present here today. I have a really long title to this presentation, but really what I want to share is what Southern Nuclear's learned in the last couple of years during the pandemic and the advances we've made in technology, and really the key takeaways we can't go backwards from what we've learned. Next slide. So again, this all started around COVID, and we had these things we still had to do due to regulatory commitments, the communities, and emergency preparedness. We didn't really stop. We just had to figure out how to do things differently. So out of necessity, we learned a lot. It was pretty difficult in the beginning, but I got some pretty interesting things I'll share with you that we learned. So personally, I'm not the most technologically advanced person. I'm not an early adopter, and I can recall Microsoft Teams being rolled out to our company. And I saw the little icon and thought, oh, it's cute while I dialed into my bridge line and was very content with doing that and really wasn't interested in being on video or any of those type of things. But fast forward, you know, probably a year later, the mentality completely changed. It's like, why are we going to drive to go meet people and face to face? Why would we be on a phone call and not be able to see the expressions on other people's faces? It was the shift was so quick. It was kind of remarkable. And at Southern, it was about a 24-hour turnaround before we went to everybody in the office to completely virtual. So it took a little lagging time to get up to speed with Teams, but I'll show you some of the things we learned there. Next slide, please. So in Teams, you know, all the platforms that we have, Zoom has very similar things. Teams has it. And we just slowly, when you roll something out to the nuclear organizations, you know, it's almost like a new toy. So everybody goes through and sees what they can find new in the system. And one of the best things we discovered was during a couple of drills, we were trying to have two different conversations, and somebody was dialed in to their phone and somebody was on a computer watching one meeting and reading another meeting. So this live transcription ability in these breakout rooms, it really, what we found, it drove up our efficiencies in how we responded to different events. We were able to, you know, everybody says there's no such thing as multitasking. Well, I beg to differ. When you use Teams, you can go back, you can read things, you can share information for a ton of people all at one time. So great capabilities there with all these virtual platforms. Next slide, please. What you can see here is how our fleet is laid out. You can see we're pretty spread out. We have an EOF that supports three of our sites, soon to be four sites with Vogel 3 and 4. In the past, we were developing drills by going to the sites and running them in simulators. We couldn't do that during the pandemic. You know, you couldn't go to, you couldn't really travel due to company policies, you know, different things like that. You couldn't find rental cars. So we got creative out of necessity. We used GoPros to mirror images of these teams to cast what was going on in the simulator. So you felt like you were really there. And one of the best things we found is that we could get our whole fleet to help create drills and look at different things all at the same time versus traveling to one place. And you don't have a person there. So then you have to redo it again. So all this geographical distance was collapsed. And we could all do something at the same time. And another function our teams was able to record these sessions. We could go back. And if we missed something, we could easily record it and go back and see it again and redo it. So it really upped our efficiency. It saved us quite a bit of money on travel and time in the car. And it's a six hour trip from, you know, the corporate office to the Vogel office. So it saved us tons of time on the road and really upped our efficiency and drill development. And we were able to get more people involved and the right people involved without having to take a lot of time traveling. And that led us to start thinking about, you know, if I can do a dose assessment in Birmingham from my house, you know, why couldn't I do it, you know, from Ogil for Farley? And it presented this concept of a remote VRO, which I'll talk about a little bit more later. Next slide, please. So shifting gears, the pictures you see here is our Joint Information Center and how we assembled for our press conferences. So what you'll notice in that first picture in the top left, if anybody can see that, there are five out of seven people in that room are on a telephone talking to somebody outside of that room. And it's more than likely they're answering all the same questions to different people. So with this virtual workplace and this hybrid response, they can all be logged into a Teams meeting or a Zoom call. And everybody can see the answers that the off-site see or that they asked us and everybody can get the same answer at the same time. The information is so much faster that way and so much more clear. Another thing we found by working this way and getting rid of the brick and mortar and going through a virtual, you get a lot more engagements. We went back and we looked at like our drill records and our critiques and we were getting a lot more feedback and questions answered and asked and answered in half the time. So just a great lesson learned there. And then you can see in this bottom right corner, this is one of my favorite pictures. There's about 10 people in the room and seven of them are writing stuff down, taking notes, and only one or two are talking the spokespeople for the drill. What do you think happens the moment they're done with the discussion? Everybody turns around and starts, hey, I missed this, what did you get? So with this live transcription, it's all there. It's all written down. They can actually engage and ask questions and participate. So again, we got a lot more out of these virtual press conferences and joint information center drills than we did prior to the pandemic. Next slide, please. This is just another illustration of how we've shifted gears into, we used to have, you know, 50 people in a room and we'd go back and forth and people would be taking notes. You get the same amount of people. You still get to see them on camera. And then, again, you have this ability to use a chat function. So, you know, at times you have trouble getting a word in edgewise. Well, with this platform, and just like we're doing here, you have this function where even if you run out of time, you can go back later and follow up and provide additional information. So our efficiencies went up there as well. Next slide, please. All right. As I mentioned before, you know, the way we were designing drills during the pandemic led us to think, hey, if I can do dose assessment in my house in Birmingham, why couldn't I do it if I were at the plant? You know, so this augmented ERO that we expect to drive into the plant sites to support the drill, the timeliness of their response could be increased by, you know, at least an hour. In some cases, some of our plants, it takes up to, you know, 70 minutes to drive from your home to the plant. And then you got to set up, but if I can pull out my laptop, you know, as soon as I get the notification of an emergency and start doing dose assessment immediately, it improves our response time immensely. Some of the, you got to work out some of the kinks with the communication and getting the right people on the right teams meeting, but that's not anything we aren't doing every day. So we as an industry are working with NEI to pursue this further. Obviously not every function can be done remotely, but the ability to get the right people to respond at the right time. There's just endless possibilities there. Next slide, please. And taking this a step further, we're working with our training department for both maintenance technical training and an emergency response. So if you look at this first picture, and if you advance the slide a little bit more, some other pictures will pop up. But I was playing with my kids virtual reality glasses, these Oculus things, and you can actually tour the Chernobyl plant right now with these virtual reality glasses. So our maintenance department is looking at, you know, functions they can do there. And I think the possibilities of what we could do an emergency response space are just, you know, you can't put a top on it. I mean, you could keep going and going, we can't minimize the capabilities there. And one of the other things with not being able to do a lot of training in person and having small classroom sizes, not being able to spread out like we otherwise would. We had our Alabama power friends come up with this, they call it nuclear in a nutshell. And what it is is just two or three minute long videos talking about different segments of our emergency response and their training videos that you can watch at any time, anywhere. So it keeps their proficiency up without having to sign up for a class or have multiple sessions of it. So it's just another efficiency built into what the way we learned during the pandemic. But all these things, you know, we're just, they were kind of out of necessity. And when we go forward at this point, there's no reason to go back. It's just saved so much time and really opened our eyes up to the ability to respond to emergencies differently and remotely. And it's just really an exciting opportunity for us to continue to have better response, more timely response. And as a side, it helps save money and resources as well. So that's all I have for my presentation and the way with this virtual meeting works, we get to introduce the next presenter so I get to introduce Vic. And the way I want to do that is tell a joke to Vic and see if he knows the answer to this. Vic, what do you think is the most popular meal at our nuclear plants? Ham and cheese sandwich. Vision chips. Vision, oh my God. On that note. Thank you all. I actually said ham and cheese because at one point I was talking to someone who did incident response, and that was the only meal they had for about three days during an event. That's all their contractor brought in. So Vic Kusumano, I'm a branch chief here at the NRC in tech specs. And for about six months last year, I spent my time in our incident response organization trying to take a look at what we've seen what we learned during the period in which the world shut down. And I had a lot of things that Liz just said, so my presentation might be a little bit shorter. But the thing I wanted to point out is that, you know, change is just how we are right now those of us have been around a while remember the only way you used to do business correspondences by mail. And then FedEx came along and answers were expected by the next day, and then email, you know, if Clay emails me something and I don't respond in a couple hours he wonders if I'm even working. Things change all the time the paces picked up a bit. But this is just life right this is just how we change. Next slide. So in communications. That phone on the left there is what was on my desk about 25 years ago, you had to beat your desk to use it but I'll tell you what that's a much better speaker phone than what's built into most of our phones today. But you had to be at your desk, then that pager thing came out. Right. And all of a sudden you were expected to be reachable, you know, anytime anywhere and it wasn't just for doctors. I may or may not have thrown my pager off the 59th Street Bridge driving to Manhattan one day, but I knew I'd have to go look for another darn payphone somewhere. The last picture on there is where we're at now that screen on your phone or on your desk at worker at home is the way to get in touch. And, you know, like Liz was saying, we're probably not going to go completely backwards from this. There are just too many advantages. So what sets you up for success here. That's a view of our emergency response center which some of you will get a virtual tour of, if you haven't already. The timing worked for us. I'll take credit and say it was great planning on the part of the NRC, and there might have been a little bit of luck involved but before COVID came upon. We transitioned from a fairly rigid wall in not very scalable very location centric incident response program which was working fine for us. We transitioned to one that better matched the national incident response center, which turned out to be more scalable, more role focused rather than location focused. And it turned it turned out it lent itself much better to incorporating remote responders. So we were fortunate in that way, and Dave Nelson our CIO got major pat on the back from the chairman and in his plenary that you know a few months before we locked down. He took all our desktop computers away and replaced them with laptops. So on, I think it was March 17, we were all able to pick up our computers and go home and most of us didn't miss a beat. So, you got to think ahead if you think that the way things are today is the way things are going to be tomorrow. You're missing a you're missing an opportunity to be you're setting yourself up for failure. So be prepared and hopefully preparation breeds luck. Next slide. So we did a couple of things. We looked internally as to what were our experiences here at the NRC, and then a few of us myself included reached out to the rest of the world to see how they did. And that's how, you know, I met Chris and I met Liz was was through some of that outreach. Our experience was pretty good. I mean like I said we didn't miss a beat and conducted more exercises than we normally would have during that time frame, and it actually responded to one a weather event on the Gulf Coast. We use the same tools you did I mean we started out with Skype and transition to teams. And like Liz said the tools, it's like having a new toy. I just discovered the whiteboard feature, we're having a good time with that. I've got to keep the people in my branch from drawing silly pictures on it but that's an aside. So we met with our internal stakeholders in the regions and got best practices and heard a lot of common themes. One of the most important was incident response is the one thing we have to get right. There's not a lot of wiggle room there. So we have to be very cautious about how we embrace new technologies. You want to be able to take advantage of the good bits, but not put your core mission at risk so we'll talk a little bit about that. And then we look external to the agency. Next slide. We benchmarked ourselves against other international regulators I really want to thank the folks at IAEA for providing us a lot of their experiences in writing and to IRSN for taking a lot of time to talk with us about what they saw in France during their extended quarantine periods. Other federal agencies, FEMA, Homeland Security, EPA all shared with us their experiences and they were different in a lot of ways than ours and we'll talk about why in a second. And other state and local regulators, Montgomery County here in Maryland, Fairfax County and neighboring Virginia, the state of Maryland's emergency response organization all participated in sharing information with us. And then in the industry side, I got information from the New York City emergency response 911 folks. We reached out to Duke we reached out to Liz at Southern and heard from the safer folks the ones who run the shared parts inventory system here in the US that a lot of the nuclear plants use, as well as running the flex warehouse in two locations in the US where they keep generators pumps and all that stuff that can be shipped to wherever there's a need, should there be a real emergency. And they shared their responses are responses the biggest takeaway from all of this was though, your tolerance for how much you can incorporate remote response into your organization is going to very tremendously with your mission. Here's an example are Chris and FEMA, their mission is a lot more boots on the ground command and control. Let's get this thing done. Then the NRC. So their tolerance for remote response I'm expecting you're going to hear is a little bit less than ours. The most not all but most of our mission during an incident would be oversight communications, things like that what it does lend itself a little bit more readily to remote incident response. So the mission matters. So what did we find here next slide. We were able to accomplish most of what we needed to do. And most of these things fell into pretty much four categories. We, we found like, like Liz did that much of our work can be done remotely. We do want to caveat that with just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do that thing. But in our case we found that, you know, we could do it. And in some cases, the thing we were trying to accomplish you know what remote performance that task was the best way. And I'll give you an example of that in a little bit. But then we found that there were some things that were better done in person. If you had your choice, being there in an emergency response center with your fellow responders was the preferable way to do something. And the fourth category of things we found were some things we're doing it in person in one of our pre-staged emergency response centers was the only way to do it. And we'll talk a little bit about those two categories. So next slide. Where were, where did we find emergency response to be preferable? What did it, what did it buy us? Liz did a good job describing how it worked at her organization. I think our experiences were similar. It expanded the pool of people we had to respond. You know, we were able to get the right people with the right expertise, regardless of where they were online, pretty much immediately. Yeah, we have people, we have geographic diversity already here at the NRC between headquarters in the four regions. We have more full-time remote tele workers than we had before. And that number might grow over the next few years. We now have people in San Francisco. We have people, places we don't have a regional office. And those people might be in a time zone that makes more sense to support an event. They might have expertise we don't have elsewhere. And those folks listening that are, you know, working at the NRC, if you know something that we need to know about during an event, we are going to find you. We might get you out of bed, but we have the ability to do that now where we didn't easily do it before. Taking commuting out of the question, you know, I'm very happy not to spend as much time on the DC Beltway as I used to. But from a practical point of view, taking commuting out of the equation for a lot of folks, at least here in the DC metro area, that takes an hour to two hours off of your report time for an incident. That might allow us to go to shorter shifts and do other things or split some of your time in a response center, some at home. And that might allow us to have a more sustainable response over the long term. We were active for a long time during Fukushima. That wears on staff. And having the flexibility to do it a different way might increase our sustainability of response. One of the things we found actually did work better was document creation. We do a lot of reports during an exercise in an event. We actually found that using Teams and SharePoint and OneDrive and having the three or four authors of a document. Editing that in real time on a screen, talking to each other about it, we were able to produce paperwork a lot quicker than sharing Word documents and emails. It was just a much better way to do it. So some things work better and some people mentally like that environment better. They might not speak up in person in a big room, but they're much more willing to share their knowledge in a Teams environment in a chat. So the personalities matter as well. Yeah, think about the people side of your equation. So next slide. What is in-person or being in a staged center? The better way to go. Well, the first thing is just having redundant, robust power systems and communication systems. If this is the one thing we have to get right, there is a lot of sense in having at least a portion of your response in a protected environment. That was redundant, robust power systems and communication systems. During personal experience, during one of our weeks where we had a couple of drills going on, that week I lost power on phones in my house twice. For hours at a time. That's a challenge, depending on your role in the organization. So having some sort of a protected systems environment is important. And some portions of our events require access to classified systems, classified communications. If you have a security event, you're going to be using classified equipment, classified communication systems. Most of us don't have those in our basements at home. So there are things where you're going to need that protected environment where you've got a skiff, for example. And Liz alluded to this, I think she didn't mention it, but on one of her slides, how much of communications is visual. And that rich in person communication face to face is important when you have those high trust conversations. Briefings are sometimes better done in person prepping senior leadership for briefings external to our agency is sometimes better done in person. Situational awareness being able to look out across a room and see which part of your team looks really exciting go find out why right, but we're able to do some of that by dropping in on teams chat rooms. And I did use the live transcription so I could listen to one and read another and that alleviated some of what we've lost by being together. But not all of it. So I just want to moderate that a little bit. The last thing I heard as a common theme from talking to folks inside and outside our organization was some of our training is better done in person. Now, some of our training is better done, not in person because you can reach more people. Some of it can be asynchronous in time. Those small nuclear nuggets that we were talking about earlier, those are great. So but but some of it does work better when you've got someone standing over your shoulder. On the screen and telling me know this is what you need to be looking at. So, though, and just one sort of funny thing when I was talking to our folks that manage the safer organization the flex warehouse. They have all those backup diesel generators and everything they did remind me that virtual oil changes are really hard to do some things you just have to be. So, next slide. So just in closing. I agree that we can't go back, but we have to go forward smart. There is no one right answer. We can't be rigid about this. The future is going to be some sort of a hybrid response organization to get the benefits of both and mitigate the risks that both have. We have to recognize that even though some of our positions in our response organization might be better suited to an in person, being there in person. That's going to vary with the nature of the event. You know if you've got a security related event at one of your nuclear plants, the information traffic is going to be mostly classified. That's going to drive you to a much larger in person share of the response than for a very slow developing weather event, you know, coming in on the Gulf Coast where the right answer might be an almost completely virtual response at least in the beginning. So let's be smart about this let's recognize the advantages, but also recognize that things are going to change with the type of event, the complexity event, even where you are. It's okay to ramp up an in person response when things get crazy, and then ramp it back down and go virtual again or more virtual so if I had one message to leave is there is no one one size fits all. And we have to think and be smart about how we do this. That's what I heard from our organization and yours. So with that, I will love to hear what Chris has to tell us about how things went to FEMA. No. Thanks. Thanks, I I'm sitting here rocking my brain what am I going to tell Florian so Florians after me and so let's let's see if we can list that a good precedent here so thanks thanks so much so first of all thank you very much for inviting me to be a part of this esteemed panel. just in preparation for this presentation so it's great to be with you all today. I'm gonna try to bridge a little bit of what Liz and Victor just talked about and then also add a little bit about what we do from an all hazards approach and so I concur with my two previous colleagues a lot has changed in my role at FEMA. I primarily support when we activate I support something called the National Response Coordination Center and I've been through a number of activations you know things like you know the presidential inauguration we did that virtually and and a lot of what I saw happen is actually broke down so many barriers you could argue that this is a disadvantaged comms environment disadvantaged communications environment well when everybody is disadvantaged and everybody is sitting in their you know their house or their virtual workspace it really forces people to use same similar communication platforms and in fact I would argue that it increased our knowledge management right so you heard Liz and Vic talk about you know we used to mail correspondence and then we you know finally moved into the era of email and there was time frames well what I'm seeing especially when we activate for large-scale hurricanes is those chat sessions those teams environments whether you know technology agnostic zoom Amazon chime whatever there's there's there's this flow of information that is occurring and I think that next revolution that we're going to actually start to see is what people just started talking about of capturing that knowledge that's you know passed verbally now it's it's passed in a text and technology is such and it will be such in the very near future where that information is stored and curated in a way that becomes actionable and so let me talk a little bit about that from my perspective so once again my background at FEMA been here for about 13 years is as the geospatial information officer now next slide please and what we do in my team in particular is to help support decision makers and understanding the size scope and extent of a disaster and so a lot of the stuff we do is actually virtual remote we actually we really one of our primary things is remote sensing and so this is a good example of of a plane flying over this could be a plane this could be a satellite where you're literally when essentially this term remotely sensing the environment and so during things like this is an example from Kentucky the Kentucky tornadoes that just occurred this past December we can fly a plane over post incident and measure the level of impact to an environment very very quickly and in fact one could argue that we could do this not in replacement of the ground responders but you can really get a very comprehensive understanding of impact of how many structures were impacted how many government buildings were impacted how many nursing homes schools hospitals all of those things can be assessed virtually and I would argue that these last two years due to coven really pushed that agenda so not only is our communications changing on how we communicate with each other but also the way that we perform our assessments and the way that we you know understand uh an incident as it unfolds so I'm going to speak a lot today about an all hazards approach uh to emergency response please keep in mind you know thankfully we don't have you know uh nuclear power plants melting down often thankfully right so and and that's the good thing but you could take the same concept of an all hazards approach whether it's a tornado hurricane flood zombie apocalypse nuclear power plant situation and follow the same all hazards approach and get to the same crisis decision answers that you know chances are going to be the exact same questions that senior leadership is going to need to know immediately following a incident so that's where I'm coming from today so next one all right so here's a good example of how we do what we do right so once again the hazard flood hurricane uh tornado nuclear uh sub-burning man made um we spent a lot of our time actually curating data so a lot of our data we have a new product that we're actually about to release it's called USA structures it's a data set that encompasses the entire continental United States and all of our territories and it does identify the um you know those key elements that key infrastructure such as police stations fire stations nursing homes government buildings and then we model we model our impacts on that so there's a number of ways for us to do incident awareness and assessments to estimate the level of impact and then we actually use a number of remote sensing I talked about that a little bit remotely sent sources such as UAS a man aerial systems which would be a great capability if a power plant goes down you can send a UAS in versus having to send in a man aircraft and exposing that pilot to potential radiation so that's a great example where UAS would be perfect in this kind of situation another good example a real world situation that we had not that long ago about a year and a half ago two years there was a volcano explosion in Hawaii and we actually primarily used UAS the heat the duration we needed to monitor the flow of that volcano UAS was a perfect solution for that so we use a mix of remotely since technologies with a mix of sensors on them to understand and extract relevant information they also have a large crowdsourcing campaign that we often use and leverage so once again this whole concept of virtual you know I can use folks in Kansas I can use folks in South Dakota I can use folks in upstate New York to help us virtually assess damages or or sift through this mountain of information that is occurring in and all around us and so we use crowdsourcing technologies to curate information as well as to assess damages from all of this information both open reports as well as imagery that's collected and then we spend a lot of time actually curating or working on our applications to disseminate this information and and I would argue that you know the world around us is changing primarily my role has been in what what is called GIS a geographic information systems but things are starting to change where you know you're getting more data analytics data science and trying to show the compilation of all of that and so a lot of folks coming out of undergrad or grad school today are statisticians economists mathematicians you know and and that's really a lot of the foundations of artificial intelligence so not to throw too many buzzwords into this conversation but you know you're hearing it from my colleagues my fellow panelists information is all around us capturing that information curating that information pulling in these live real-time sensors and feeds equals the need for better technology such as artificial intelligence to help pull it all together to pull those streams and identify and generate new insights to help senior leaders make relevant decisions and so we we we also spend a lot of time curating and reporting out things through infographics and and very curated reports to make sure that leaders can make a decision based on the most relevant information and then we're also spent a lot of time pushing and pulling information for mobile applications a good example of that would be the rad responder network you know there's there's mechanisms to pull information in through live data streams but also to report information and through mobile apps and for us it's all in the name of supporting a disaster survivor and it's what my colleagues just talked about reducing time reducing complexity enhancing situation awareness all of these things are are are happening and they're only getting done next one so i talked a lot about this already i'm going to breeze through this slide very quickly but you know for us this all hazard approach really follows you know what's the steady state situation how do we bring in disaster models crowd sourcing imagery we have a number of crisis management systems that you you heard heard us talk about it whether it's web you see or other types of crisis content management systems and how do you push pull that information for mobile applications and support first responders so our search and rescue teams you know deploy out immediately vik talked about you know ground response there is still a big need for ground response in the initial phases of an incident how do we get that information from those boots on the ground in addition how do we push all this information from remote sensing and modeling to those first responders to offset or reduce the amount of physical presence that may need it you know to to fast you know fast forward that information that we're sharing but we've got ways to do that and to us it all focuses and curates back to a structure by structure assessment so whether the model is assessing the individual structure of what we think the likely impact is that structure hospital fire station nursing home as a result of a nuclear explosion uh you know or how do we you know assess that virtually from a remote sensing perspective or if need be from a ground-based perspective from a search and rescue operator in the field with a mobile app all of it is in the name of knowledge management and sharing that information uh in real time as fast as possible as accurate as possible and as fast as possible next one here's here's a good example of what I just talked about how we do that once again this thing called us a structures uh all of this information that we're collecting actually in fact fuses back to this individual structure so what I mean by that is a home a residency nursing home like the government institute you know if 15 people are looking at the same nursing home and assessing it from their own programmatic view our way to fuse all of that is back at this USA structure level and so we're building out these tools these capabilities to help fuse this information and have that very granular information almost in real time uh to then report back up uh report stashboards and visualization and do that deeper dive analytic assessment immediately following next time can't can't get better than this right so here's here's here's a good example of how this fuses together it's the president of the united states uh looking at one of our products he's actually pointing at USA structures this was I think two days after the tornadoes affected Kentucky and so we know the level of impact to residential structures commercial structures government structures you know fire stations nursing homes and and you can imagine if you will the same similar thing you know from an all hazards perspective could occur as a result of a of a nuclear situation right and so you're talking about plume modeling and you can intersect all that rich detail from a model perspective and then you fly and invalidate that with remote sensing imagery or ground based damage assessments for mobile applications next slide and it's really the fusion of this information that generates additional insights such as socially vulnerable information what's the power outages in the area what's uh the hazard exposure you know where where do I really need to prioritize my response and the way we do that is is a ordinal ranking system and that helps us prioritize limited resources such as commodities water bottles tarps infinite toddler kits meals ready to eat so we take this information to make actionable decisions on resource deployments next slide all right next slide please yeah I briefly mentioned the idea of artificial intelligence so this is this is really where the world of geospatial technologies are starting to really you know hit this zenith and it's really a compilation of imagery cloud technologies this this advanced modeling deep learning machine learning kind of concept where you can you know for hurricane Ida in particular we used all this high resolution imagery following hurricane Ida and I believe we assessed over 600 000 structures within an hour that's the scale and the speed at which we're able to do these kinds of things now so think you know in the terms of you know an nrc kind of incident response very very quickly being able to identify impacts very quickly and being able to fuse that and generate that insight to senior leaders in a very rapid fashion next slide I talked already briefly about uas once again using that all hazard approach these are tools and technologies that we use on a routine basis this is a good example of uas being flown following the surfside structural collapse and so we were able to measure volumetrics we were able to to monitor change over time as they were extracting debris and rubble from the collapse of this this apartment building we're able to measure the volume of of the debris and how quickly we were able to make progress to search for survivors next slide I'm going to I'm going to start skipping through this I'm going a little over time and I don't want to take any more time away from my my colleagues next slide please artificial intelligence we talked about that rapid rapid assessment through all these technologies next slide I think I I think I sent the extended version of this presentation to sally so next slide let's get through this let's get this holy cow keep going next slide next slide I am looking for my wrap up all right here we go this hopefully this is my last one so we really are trying to you know there's a lot of information a lot of data that we're curating really we're trying to shoot for a 10 second product so wrapping all this up fusing all this information what's the impact what's the social vulnerability what's the type of population that was impacted trying to present this to our senior leadership and a product that they can understand in 10 seconds or less what we're trying to convey that's that's our goal that's what we're trying to shoot for so with that I'm going to actually just stop it I think that's that's that's good enough for today and turn it over to my colleague Florian I'm going to follow Vic I do have a joke but I'm going to say that it's a terrible dad joke I'm a dad I got a bad dad joke in my head but I'm going to pass it over to Florian and get off the stage thank you thank you thank you thank you Chris we'll go straightforward into this presentation where I want to tell you a bit some of our it products the platforms which we develop to stay in contact with our counterparts and to allow them to feed us with information and also at the end maybe I'll say a few words about how we were doing in the last year or so with the with all this involving of the technologies in what we do with the training with the exercise is not preparedness like like you guys were were presenting a bit before on on your work my name is Florian Baccio I'm the response system coordinator in the instant emergency center in the agency and we'll get you quickly I hope to this next slide please I want to as I said talk a bit about these tools which we have developed the basis of work a bit and then about these tools the use here means all these acronyms I hope that we can go quickly through and give you a quick image on what we are trying to achieve with this next slide please we are basing our work here on the international conventions basically the two very important conventions for the notification of a nuclear accident and the convention for assistance in case of a nuclear accident or a biological emergency we also have to take care about the statute of the agency and of course we are elaborating a lot of safety standards and arrangements which are binding for us in our work and also binding for our for our counterparts we work with more than 400 organizations directly in our response work but also we work internally here in the agency with a large number of people from all the departments and we try to be prepared and be able to respond all the time and I'm just going to say about our roles we have roles both in preparedness in EPR and in response I would not insist on the ones on the preparedness where we need to build capacity in member states capacity for EPR and for implementing these standards I just stop a bit on these roles in the response next slide please where we have to deal basically with a few things the notification and the information exchange when the emergency hits the taking care of public communications as a UN agency we need to perform this we need to do also assessment and prognosis as a task which we got after Fukushima basically to come with an opinion to come with a if you wish our judgment on the situation based on our standards and based on how we see these standards being implemented we need also to care for assistance matters when assistance is required we need to have a process and we have to have the resources in place to deliver this and finally we need to have this what they call interagency coordination where we need to work with many UN agencies and try to come to a common language and put the synergies on these things next slide please the first tool which we strongly use and it's we invest a lot in this thing we were looking many years ago at some solutions with advantages and these advantages like for instance web doc and other things and we choose to develop our own path we choose to to go forward and have this platform for communications based on functions and roles and based on standard forms which are available to our counterparts the platform is very very strong and we keep it robust in terms of it in terms of the security of information and it allows our counterparts to start communicating and to to share the information this is called a unified system for incidents information exchange in incidents and emergencies and it's our main communication tools a tool we have a next slide please a tool which is important in supporting these communications and it's about the monitoring data we collect monitoring data from existing networks in the member states and we reference this monitoring data to what we call for instance the operational intervention levels and this will give a very quick image on what is the situation on the ground in terms of you know the need to implement or not the certain protective actions and so when we are we are collecting a lot from Europe we've got data from Japan U.S. Canada but of course we need to do more to collect data from all other existing networks we don't build networks and monitoring systems we just collect from our counterparts this this data that's the monitoring part the next slide please for the assistance tools we are we're using both our unified system for instance and emergencies and the run it mechanism and concept we have developed response and assistance network and it is up to now we have 37 member states in run it telling us how they could possibly help we organize this information and on the system on the uzi we can collect requests for assistance offer of assistance we are matching these things and we are able to to dispatch on resources and also of course resources in member states we have a very clear process for this and we were maybe in the last decade we had a couple of cases per year or so on average when we need to deploy missions for instance to give medical advice or missions to look for screening of radiation or to recover radiation sources and actually just last year we were kind of delivering our first if you wish 100 virtual mission of assistance by giving for instance medical advice in a case where in Thailand we there were a couple of individuals which were exposed in a in a research facility the mission was of that nature that we could document and have the medical doctors looking at all the facts and then being able to come with this very very good medical advice so that was the assistance next slide please assessment and prognosis tools we have put together a manual to deliver these to tell our counterparts how we do the process here so that we are well understood that we can be well supported and we are running the exercises for this with them and next slide please we have developed certain what they call tools to do this for instance one of our important tools is the reactor assessment tool we have of course given access to our counter parts to use this and to go for the various type of reactors going for the known conditions to be able to say what is the status of the critical safety functions for instance again based on the information from the counterpart and allowing us to elaborate a quick report on what is the the status summary what is the the known information about the facility and what is our brief assessment saying that our assessment is we see that for instance actions taken are in line we say the the safety standards of the agency and are corresponding to the to the necessities of the of the response phases so these tools are are important we have them we have tools for for instance the actual assessment but also for public information also some tools to orient the response of say the nuclear security specialist all these are available and they are they are used by our counterparts a lot and they give a good perspective on what are we aiming so then at their end they would know what is the information expected on their side for us then to to be able to fulfill this next slide please we have a tool which is called airframes emergency preparedness information management system and it's a it's a strong tool allowing our counterparts the member states to self assess where they are in terms of epr and then allowing us to to to see where the needs are in terms of technical cooperation projects and then and the systems activities on how we can enhance their capabilities in epr based on their self assessment and then based on missions which we deployed we have these approved missions which are which are to evaluate what is their status of implementing the various criteria in the safety standards and again this would allow us and them to have a good orientation on what are the priorities in terms of of helping now in the next slide I just want to say a few words about how we internally train our system we have in the house the instant emergency center in the agency but this is just the the nucleus of what we call the instant emergency system we have a few hundreds of people which are trained to response on the various functions everything by the plan everything by the procedures and we were very active in in this during the pandemic and in the last couple of years with keeping this this system working as we we had to come up with the number of of of tools allowing for the remote training and the remote participation we got an internal home home page where people have access all the time to this information they can take they can take sessions independently from remote to to to refresh their their knowledge and we we are mixing this also with the sessions of training and exercises in presence so we we combine these things and just to mention a few words at the end about the the training next slide please it's it's about a strong transition from a entirely in-person approach to blended learning approach where we have these sessions by the by the trainers in a in a virtual environment so we are putting also this pre-class assignments small group sessions to practice also in in in person then we have are using intensively the the teams and the the Webex environments to carry on with our lectures we also do a lot of pools to keep the teams dynamic you know with the slide and other other types of pools and also a lot of e-learning and how to do videos which are available to our to our staff members to to keep them active on the on the training program we also embed this in what we call we have a management system for the for the learning and discounts for for each of the individuals in their you know evaluations and pdr's and allows them to to follow the progress and allows us to recognize this this progress and we continue to take very much care of the rules also of the of the covid of the pandemic so in all our in-person sessions you know the use of the mask there's assigned sitting and all these things we have to very very carefully take care because we could see a vulnerability here you know if in some training or exercises we could affect other people then we will lose the capacity in to some to some extent so we were we were very careful about this and of course we went to see how we can really work from remote the remote access for the is responders you know taking care of all the security and the the the security of the information and this is done of course with the IT support and we have done good good progress in trying to use the tools from remote and assembly the teams in a combined way some people working from remote and some people working from from here in in in person that's that's what I wanted to to to share with you with this yeah thanks thanks and back back to you Clay thanks thank you so much and a big shout out to all the presenters very insightful very informative and I I got a couple of nuggets that I can use for the future so thank you for that we're going to shift into some Q&As and I would like to start with a question for Liz um how do you deal with common mode failure in case of a cyber attack yeah thanks Clay um that's a really good question I like that question a lot so I mentioned during my presentation we're working with NEI with Charlotte Shields we're writing a white paper about the remote ERO and that's a common question you know what if your internet fails what if you know your platform fails or there's something wrong there and really the answer is pretty simple if you think about just nuclear power in general you're always going to have a backup you're always going to have a comp measure available in case something goes down so even back when we had fax machines you know there's a failure there that's possible so what's your backup to communicate in that case so um there's a lot of different options you know we can always I suspect will maintain bridge lines a redundant independent communication method um and then the the case of remote response if your network goes down you always have the option to go back to the regular augmentation driving into the plants um one thing we've also thrown out there within our fleet you know right now we have uh three sites operating reactors well the likelihood of an event happening at all three sites at the same time is relatively low so at each site you have personnel available to respond remotely with a pretty strong infrastructure there and and communication and and backup diesels and things like that so there's a lot of different options to to take their backup measures to how to communicate but um just like any technology we'll have a a backup and a backup to the backup so um there there's a lot to be done there but we're working through that with the industry and the the NRC Ray Hoffman and uh Jesse Kigachu have been um very helpful in in working with that and coming up with a viable option for comp measures wonderful thank you for that Vic I have a question for you does the NRC have minimal requirements or minimum capabilities for remote responders you're on mute okay somebody had to do it it had to be me uh I'm not aware of any uh minimum requirements for remote response I think we're being flexible right now uh and matching what we have to do with what we can do but I think that's something we are sorting out and one of things I worked on for the last six months while I was working with clay was what does that remote response look like and how much of it should we plan to be doing you know what's the capacity we need to think about for an emergency response center you know it's probably not going to be a hundred percent so I don't know there'll be a minimum but uh I think rather than a capacity it might be more a minimum in uh performance thank you Vic and Chris let's see um are there any remote communications platforms that permit encrypted messages uh well so that's out of my lane I'm sorry I don't know the answer to that one great question um we do have a whole group dedicated to disaster burn sheet communications um you know uh especially integrated comms environment you know especially after a tornado or hurricane goes through we'll deploy in our own communication packages so I would have to defer to them for that great question but uh um yeah out of my lane thank you thank you Florian uh question came your way how do you manage all the connections with so many types of technologies used by all the member states well we um we can be established our arrangements and we have um you know publish these arrangements we are running uh manual workshops where we invite all our counterparts and we we try to stick to the book we say look we've got many communication channels the strongest is this website of ours which is secured and by the way we link to the previous questions for encryption we have set up portions of of our system to to have to handle encrypted information both in in in transport and in storage and uh some specific users would have access to this to this area where information is is encrypted but coming back it's setting the arrangements you know exercising practicing the arrangements and turning them guys whatever you have there at your end at the end we like to to promote them to use these arrangements and these channels of ours so you know try to to accommodate and have your inputs in our system to whatever internal arrangements you may have so that we can keep on the communications thank you for that um let's see um Chris I believe I have an easy one for you uh how did you transition from your university bachelor of arts to this rolling FEMA oh somebody's somebody's doing some digging um no that's that's good yeah so I have a a bachelor's bachelor's in sociology and a master's in counseling psychology how the heck did I get into all this technology stuff well it's actually because of the military so the military ended up in the uh intel field intel career uh from the military and then that transitioned into you know roles within the intelligence community but I had a natural affinity for um disaster response so um it's it's actually kind of a perfect world for me I lean techie you know I love kind of trying to figure out how technology can support crisis decision making and then ultimately uh you know for for disaster survivor uh outcomes and so it's just kind of a perfect blend and then also I would have to say a lot of the stuff what I was going through college you know the technology just wasn't even close to where it's at today so there's you know there's a lot more folks coming out of undergrad and graduate programs um that that that have a lot more exposure and academic prowess than I do on the technology side but it's you know it's uh it's it's it's got to take a blended approach you know to make sure that uh you know the decision makers know what the techies are saying so I feel like I'm walking in two separate worlds but yeah somebody's doing their LinkedIn homework well thank you for that thank you um Vic another one for you uh does the NRC have difficulty finding the right technology that meets your needs and is interoperable I think I'm gonna go with the short answer is no um one thing we learned during the last couple of years is that our our OCIO the chief information officer and his team uh think ahead uh they're plugged into what we need uh I really haven't found anything that need to be lacking uh over over the last couple of years that they didn't resolve really quickly or had already been working on by the time we raised so now I know I think we're good thank you um and just to be responsive to the earlier question uh I I was informed on the side that uh signal teams and zoom can all support into and encrypted communications so if anybody was wondering I didn't know that either um um let's see um Liz we do have another one for you um do you know what the most unpopular entree is at nuclear plants I do not know that how do you melt down so it's pretty bad yes they are bad um let's see it looks like we're running out of questions no more coming in um so Chris I guess the last one goes to you uh with all of your data collection with all of your remote sensing do you run into bandwidth problems especially in disaster areas absolutely uh without question um if you start talking about imagery just imagery alone you're in the gigs if not terabytes of you know the the data we collect can be very uh intensive uh a good example of that is is uh we we fly one of the data types that we have is lidar light detection and arranging it's very heavy in terms of data processing um but I would say that that's really where the advantage of cloud compute technologies has advanced to say the art in all of this and so you know you can take uh imagery or lidar or other kinds of sensor technologies from a plane fly it to the next closest node that allows you to upload to your cloud provider of choice let the cloud do the the the heavy processing and honestly that's when I get back to the slide that I you know presented you know we're trying to present uh a lot of information contextualized information into a product that a senior leader or leader's plural can can take advantage of all of that really heavy back-end processing data collection right and so the outcome is the answer not the process of the workflow or the raw data so a lot of our time has spent trying to uh enhance uh efficiencies in the workflow of the processing of that really heavy stuff but we wouldn't be anywhere today if it weren't for cloud compute technologies terrific thank you for that answer and a big thank you to all of you for your participation for your insights and for sharing this wealth of knowledge if the there's a lot of useful information here so a shout out and a thank you and I believe that ends our session