On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian roared ashore near Cayo Costa, Florida as a Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds around 150 mph.
The wind and storm surge of over 15 feet heavily damaged the Sanibel Causeway, severing the only link between the mainland and the barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva, effectively stranding the communities of over 6,400 residents with limited resources for an uncertain period of time.
Agencies across the region – including the Florida Highway Patrol, Tampa Police Department and Florida Department of Transportation – sprang into action with high-water rescue vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicle teams to assist local and county law enforcement with search and rescue and damage assessment. With the bridge now impassable, drones became the primary tool for assessing if people were stranded, identifying areas of greatest immediate need for rescue or relief supplies and surveying damage to critical infrastructure.
“During Ian, there were massive areas flooded and with bridge infrastructure that was now questionable,” said Bryan King, senior solutions engineer at Skydio. “At the same time, interagency cooperation was essential. Whatever agency was in the best position to assess the scene needed to do so, as getting back to that location could take several more days. Houses were wiped out, but you could get a drone up there.”
LiveU and Skydio coordinated drones and situational awareness technology to support mutual aid partners in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
LiveU
Hurricane Ian caused extensive damage to the Sanibel Causeway, leaving island communities stranded.
LiveU
LiveU and Skydio coordinated drones and situational awareness technology to support mutual aid partners in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
LiveU
But another challenge remained – agencies getting and staying connected to critical systems and communicating with mutual aid partners when cellular towers were down, radios had limited range and different agencies were working with different platforms.
King and his colleagues from Skydio deployed human and technology assets to the area to help facilitate critical communications and drone missions for things like ISR, SAR mapping and scanning.
“Connectivity has become a utility like water and electricity, and on most days it is just fine. In times of crisis, though, you realize just how much we depend upon it, particularly for emergency response. Everything from basic voice and radio communications to accessing the cloud to use advanced mapping software is taken for granted until it’s not there,” said Jared Brody, head of business development, public safety and critical infrastructure at LiveU.
“LiveU’s technology bonds multiple network connections and technologies such as SAT, LTE, mesh and Wi-Fi and utilizes them simultaneously, adding extreme resilience and reliability,” explained Alex Joyce, head of public safety technology at LiveU.
“Once this reliable connection is established, applications ranging from live video streaming and sharing for situational awareness, remote internet access, accelerated file transfer to get large images and mapping files from austere environments and even ad hoc voice communications are possible,” Joyce added. “In this way, LiveU enables an entire ecosystem of valuable but often disparate systems.”
“The LiveU team had arranged to ship multiple units of LiveU’s Situational Awareness Solution to Florida in advance of the hurricane to provide real-time video transmission from drone units in the field to mutual aid partners in the region,” said Brody. “This was coordinated closely with the teams from Skydio, who were also bringing in additional drones to support our shared customers.”
Greater than the sum of the parts
Instead of relying on a spotty or nonexistent connection – or even failover from one carrier to another – LiveU’s IP bonding technology aggregates the capacity of each available network connection – whether 4G or 5G cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi or even mesh radio – into a single bonded connection adding bandwidth aggregation, carrier diversity and redundancy.
That bonded uplink then becomes a pipe wide enough to transmit a variety of sources like video, audio, images, mapping and survey scans and other information.
Beam me up, Scotty
LU-REQON1 is the device that decodes and transmits real-time video and other data from any source to any destination.
LiveU
Not dissimilar to the transporter in the original Star Trek that beamed Captain Kirk to other planets and back to the Starship Enterprise, LiveU’s bonding technology breaks apart the data into smaller components for transport and reassembles them at the end, bytes intact.
LU-REQON1 is the transporter – the device that encodes and transmits real-time video and other data from any source to any destination. The device takes data from up to six network connections, splits it into packets, transmits the packets over the bonded connection and decodes it at the destination, allowing teams to create and share a common operating picture, regardless of source or viewing platform.
Weighing about two pounds, LU-REQON1 is a fully integrated device including battery, antennas, and modems all in a single tactical device.
Training for a rainy day
Failure to communicate has serious consequences, so forward-thinking agencies prepare for the unexpected in advance.
“A common operating picture across multiple agencies is one of those areas that often needs to be set up during a blue sky scenario,” explained Joyce. “This means leveraging training opportunities with multiple agencies, whether it’s tri-annual FAA-mandated exercises for airports or any other opportunities for local emergency management agencies to get together and basically stress test with an example.
“There are often failures during those exercises, and those failures are good because those failures bring light to gaps with these different agencies’ ability to work together.”
LiveU consults with multiple Florida agencies, including the Florida State Guard, Florida Highway Patrol, Fish and Wildlife, FDOT and dozens of counties and municipalities, to continue to close interoperability gaps and improve how their Situational Awareness Solution can help public safety agencies prepare for and respond to the next hurricane.
Disasters don’t wait for you to be ready
LiveU developed the technology for the broadcast industry long before Hurricane Ian, but the natural disaster gave LiveU and their partners and customers one of the early stress tests to help guide improvement. Hurricanes Milton and Helene gave further opportunities to deploy the technology with additional agencies and continue making improvements.
“A common operating picture is the goal,” said Brody. “We’re discovering LiveU can become a backbone to unify disparate systems. Agencies can pull different solutions or devices into the LiveU platform that can then be redistributed out so they can see it on the platforms they’ve already invested in.”
When a disaster undermines the very infrastructure responders rely on, maintaining a shared view of unfolding conditions becomes essential. Hurricane Ian demonstrated that even well-prepared agencies can struggle to communicate when networks falter and each organization brings its own tools to the scene. By enabling video, data and voice to flow across any available connection and into a single operating picture, platforms like LiveU’s Situational Awareness Solution give responders a reliable way to coordinate decisions and direct resources in real time.
Agencies that plan, train and build cross-agency interoperability ahead of a crisis are better positioned to protect their communities. Redundant connectivity and unified information-sharing aren’t just technical advantages – they’re the foundation for faster, safer and more effective emergency response.
For more information, visit https://www.liveu.tv/solutions/public-safety.
