All right, I guess we'll go ahead and get started. Let's see, let me activate this, is it escape? Yeah, so thank you for joining us this afternoon. The title of our talk is rather long, we sort of need to work on the marketing for that a little bit, I think. But yeah, my name is Brett Perkison, I'm on faculty at the University of Texas School of Public Health, where my whole career has been here in Houston, and I have a lot of experience dealing with workers in flooded environments. I'm also program director of the residency program there. Yes, ma'am. I'm Ismail Nabil, I'm an associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I think we've been working more or less five years, five plus years, on things. This collaboration is an amazing collaboration between University of Texas and Icahn School of Medicine, and we have other partners in the team as well. This is something that organically came out, this project, post-Harvey, and I think that has definitely shaped my understanding of climate change and its impact on the health of workers. Our funding, our disclaimer, is funding a small business innovation research grant from NIEHS on a phase three R44 grant. So the topic we're going to talk about today is flooding, a natural disaster. But what we'd like for your own businesses, your own responsibilities, is really using this as a model to think of in disaster response, and the applications that it might have to your own organization. So backgrounds, as I mentioned, my whole career has been in Houston, so I was involved in taking care of the evacuees from New Orleans that came in for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For Hurricane Ike, I was along the Gulf Coast and helped set up some clinics. But our story really begins here in 2017, when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Gulf Coast and had an unprecedented amount of rain that came down over a 48-hour period. Really it was the rain, it was 52 inches in some places, and you can think of a column of water 52 inches tall hitting an entire area the size of Harris County. So afterwards, those of us on faculty that weren't flooded said, what can we do for our community afterwards? So we had some N95 masks from previous studies, and through donors and our own supplies, we were able to put together some kits to pass out to workers and residents who were affected by flooded areas in the two or three weeks after the flood, along with instructions from NIOSH on safe recommendations for the reconstruction or the renovation of their homes. This is a complicated slide, but it shows, this is Harris County, where Houston's located, and you can see the darker areas of blue represent areas that were flooded more in depth. Any of the darker areas of blue had over 10 feet of water in their home, and you can see that it's along the tributaries that go through the county, with the exception of the areas on the left where there were some reservoirs that the floodgates were let out to prevent them from overflowing, and so homes that didn't have flood insurance were also affected. So around 200,000 homes were affected in this area. You can also see the different in-depth colors of green represent the social vulnerability index, and the darker the area, it was more affected socioeconomically. And so you can see roughly when you look at this that, as you might expect, areas that are flooded more in depth are more likely to be lower socioeconomic areas, and the areas in yellow, finally, are groups where our department, which were made up of volunteers of faculty and students, passed out these kits. And from my experiences with Katrina and Ike, I really wanted to do some research studies on folks to see how can we learn from this, and so we asked people, as we passed out masks, if we could contact them in the future to see how they were doing. So we were doing that as part of it. You can see us passing out masks there, talking to construction workers out in the flood, out kind of in the hot areas, hot August sun out there in Houston. And this is not atypical for other areas. If we looked at just 2020 from some data from NOAA, all these circles represent areas of the country where over a billion dollars worth of damage was done from an individual storm. So you can see hurricanes figured prominently along the Gulf Coast and on the East Coast, but you can also see thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes, effects of droughts, and wildfires. And so billion-dollar disasters, both to communities and our workplaces, are being affected by this. And so one thing that struck me is that we really are going through these same disasters and there could be some more organization as to how we prepare in the immediate post-disaster climate. And this slide just kind of goes along with that, just showing the different increasing costs if we look at it over time, which kind of goes along with what some of Dr. Patz's slides were. So not only in intensity, but in cost. And what's interesting is, as we've learned more about natural disasters, is that kind of under the radar, there is a subset of worker, construction worker, that is going to meet these demands of these natural disasters. They are known as storm chasers by some, reconstruction workers, and they represent both small groups that are going out into these sites, as well as large industries, large construction industries, if you've heard of ServPro. And these people are the ones that are going into these areas and renovating them and getting them suitable for human habitation. And they often are in some of the most hazardous jobs around and they're very unregulated. And so, as you might expect, they're highly mobile. They go to where a storm is, they help with the initial reconstruction, and then when another storm or natural disaster hits, they go elsewhere. There's often limited power, there's limited supplies, there's limited PPE. A lot of them sleep in their cars, we've found. Sometimes they don't have good access to food or personal protective equipment. A lot of construction workers are illegal immigrants, and so they're also worried at the same time that they're providing these services of being detained. And there has evolved a larger and larger group to work with them. So what we've learned are a few things, in summary, in our initial studies in working with these groups is that really there are health risks, and we can go into more detail from that. Dr. Patts mentioned mold the other night, but also when wastewater treatment plants stop operating, there are a lot of waterborne exposures. I'd mentioned lack of food and lodging, and lack of healthcare. There oftentimes are no pharmacies available, there's no providers available, and so people with underlying medical diseases that are going to these areas often don't have any treatment. It really becomes like sort of the Wild West. I've talked about unsafe working conditions. Many of the new recruits often have no education on how to safely reconstruct a home. That played out in the subsequent study that I did on that, that there was a lack of education, they don't have supplies, and even if they had initial supplies, those quickly play out. It's oftentimes not maybe the immediate aftermath of the day two or three after the storm, but it's in the day two or three months after the storm that people have lack of supplies. Satellite towers are down, there's lack of communication, and then there's also issues of wage theft and personal security risk. Wage theft in that construction companies will say, I'll pay you at the end of the week, and then they're not paid. Part of that is the system of the construction workers. It's also part of the system in that residents will hire contractors with the assumption that they will have the funds from FEMA to pay for it, and then there's a lack of those funds being delivered to them. A lot of workers go without their wages being paid. Into this milieu, we have partnered with a worker advocacy group called Resilience Force, and they are a group that is out of New Orleans. They got started after Hurricane Katrina, and they have about 1,500 workers directly communicating with them using WhatsApp. For those of you not familiar with WhatsApp, this is an ability to communicate with a large group of people, but you're able to remain anonymous. These Resilience Force field workers, often most of them have been construction workers in the past, will go out ahead of the storm, or in the immediate aftermath of the storm, they'll find the hotels, they'll find the construction area or the home depots or hardware stores that are available, and tell them safe places where they can go and communicate that on WhatsApp. It's just kind of this mass communication that goes out. The workers trust Resilience Force to utilize that, but nevertheless, based on my own experiences in Houston and our subsequent field trips to talk with Resilience Force and to talk with day workers, there is a need for better communication, better logistical coordination. Not only in the form of worker advocacy, but also with private construction firms, like I mentioned with SurfPro, a need to do better logistical coordination. That's really what launched the beginnings of our project. Thanks, Brett. Thanks, Brett. I do want to put together a picture of how these workers go into the field. Me and Brett had a chance to go to Louisiana and saw them in action. The hurricane just arrived in Florida and passed through Florida, and they were preparing to go to Florida. There's a lot of challenges for these folks. These are mostly undocumented individuals who take on these jobs from state to state. Then Louisiana and Texas have different laws compared to Florida. They weren't all prepared to take the challenge on, but because of the economic reality, they continue to march on. Some of them just organize on WhatsApp, which is a chat service, and then everybody congregates near a hardware store, and then they just get into the cars, and in some cases, the pickup truck, and just drive to Florida, which is unthinkable in terms of the sheer amount of stress that these guys are going through when they are working in this very difficult environment. That brings us to our work that we've been doing for the past five years, is to build ... This is an interface of a program called PocketArc. In simple words, it's a micro-learning environment on your phone with some degree of agile development. What we can do is we can build it. We have been building it to know, and including all the specific aspects that we've been learning through this journey, to figure out how we can help these workers the best way we can at the level they are. One question that popped up to my mind early on, and I think Brett agrees with it, well, these workers are undocumented and don't have enough money. Why are they going to have a phone like iPhone, or Samsung, or whatever the newest and greatest phone there is? To my surprise, I was a bit surprised by the fact that most of them do carry a smartphone. They don't know how to use it, but their peer leaders are actually helping them figure out some of the functionalities of the phone, and that's very powerful. They are communities of workers that work together, and they have a peer group leader, peer leader, which actually allows them to understand some of the very basic things. If I want to use WhatsApp, if I want to use an application, if I can talk to the leader, they can actually disseminate it across the worker group, and all of them come on board because they trust their peers or peer leaders. With that in mind, we started to design this application predominantly in Spanish, and the other challenge came through is they don't speak the same kind of language. They have a different dialect, they speak in a different dialect, so not everybody understands written words. Their literacy level is also pretty down, so we came up with very formidable challenges as we were trying to build this application. One of the things that we were thinking about is dividing it, this application of micro learning environment, into phase deployment or phase approach to help these workers. The first and foremost was a pre-deployment aspect of it. Think about a worker who don't speak the language, never been trained, going into a hazard environment with post-hurricane, an apocalyptic environment, and don't have the proper shoes, the steel-toed boots, the gloves, the harnesses, the mask to climb up onto the building or the roof work that he or she is going to be doing. One of the important things is to think about training them early, just basic, simple training. What to do, how to wear a harness, how to don up the mask, and how to get hard hat on. These are simple things that have profound impact on these workers because some of the stories we heard from these workers were really earth-shattering and really profound. We saw workers who were never given harnesses because they were never told that such a thing is required to work on the roof. Ultimately, an injury occurred and this person fell from the roof and hit the head on the coma, went to the hospital and were there for days, and finally recovered but was unstable to work on the higher elevations or roofs or ladder work. These injuries are really profound in these individuals who have very limited amount of income to begin with. Training was one of the first and foremost things that we thought about. As I mentioned, most of these workers have never had a proper health evaluation done in the past. Just self-describing their health is an early way to think about how we can help them, how we can understand or address their needs early on. The other piece that keeps coming in is they're not forthcoming. They're not really wanting to discuss, describe, or connect with you right away. Still there's a trust issue that's always going to be there, but slowly and steadily they started to understand that you are trying to help them. And then the next part of the equation is, before you get deployed in these harsh environments, are you prepared to deal with the work that is coming for you? Are you ready to do that? One of the challenges were that if it's a roofing job, if it's a masonry job, if it's a plumbing job, are these guys ready to do the job that they were assigned to do? And that's fuzzy. That's not really, we clearly understand about these workers. How do they organize in a way that they can accomplish the job? And the last and very interesting thing in terms of pre-deployment, so think about this resilience force that me and Brett have been working on, is basically based in Louisiana. These workers are going into Florida in groups of people going in. How does the organization like resilience force who want to take care of these workers, protect them, can keep an eye on them as they get scattered across the state of Florida and work day and night in harsh conditions? So all these questions came up as we were trying to address and build this application. One of the things that we talked about is working with the group, and especially you see here, we call it Welcome Rodrigo. Some of them are not comfortable giving you the names. They don't want to tell you what their last name is, where they're from, what kind of status they have, because they think that you're out to get them, right? And working with that kind of population is very tough. We need to be cognizant of the fact that they are trying to make money and trying to survive in environments that they are not familiar with. So the effort that we put into building the app was more focused on the way that the anonymity of these individuals continue to be maintained. If the communication is going back and forth, we continue to make sure that this communication is anonymous and they can have that anonymity that exists. And that was the reason why WhatsApp worked. It's a, if you are a geek like myself, it's an encrypted application. So the people from outside cannot snoop in and say, hey, you are talking to such and such. WhatsApp is completely encrypted by a directional. That's not the case for other applications, other chat programs that exist. And WhatsApp also is widely used outside the country and worldwide. So it was an easy transition to WhatsApp. So building something that they can use is very, very important. And the other thing is the user picture. So action plan, training, help. Most of the literacy is not at the level that we wanna see in terms of using the application. And again, I told you, they can get the best and best devices, but they don't know how to use it unless a peer leader is trained and can work with them. We also, as I mentioned, we talked about the readiness training. Like we, what is N95? What is N95 respirators? What is the difference between a dust mask and N95 respirators? I know it seems like trivial to us, but it's not for them. And we, when we started this project, we were early on before the pandemic struck. And when the pandemic came along, N95 became a interesting question that we were asking for these construction workers. So think about the environments first. So these guys are deployed in a hugely flooded environments. How many times we have tested an N95 in a wet, moist environments, right? We just discard the mask and throw away. What about these workers? Probably they're given one or two N95 masks if they were given N95 mask to use. So what is the integrity of that mask to begin with to protect those workers in the time of need, especially when the pandemic was raging on? And what is the types of masks they can be using? What are the masks available to them? And how can we address their training status? How can we address, how can they use the proper protective devices? For example, harness, like guess what? Like you give them the harness and ask them to wear it and they kind of struggle with the fact that where should I start? What should I put in? Should I put it from the leg side or wear it from the top? These are simple things for most construction workers, but these guys are not, in some cases, don't have that knowledge to start with. So we were stuck with a very challenging problem, right? We have a cultural differences. We have a language and dialect differences. We have low literacy in this group. And profoundly, this group is very, anonymity is important for that group. But they have commonalities as well. So if you have worked with people who comes from South America, Central America, one kind of thing that was very common to them is a game of football or soccer, we call it here in US. And I think Brett might chime in here is, we develop some characters for them to make it work. We actually try to build some characters that definitely they can represent them. And that might be a way to connect with them and to talk about issues related to job insecurities, using proper PPE and all that. So in this case, Guillermo, what kind of job have you got? And Juan states that I've got a job over Smithville which pays $100 and I'm going to a hurricane hit area. But this conceptual designing of a cartoon sort of talking to these workers is interesting way of connecting with the community that is very, very challenged in terms of literacy. And I might just add, going back to kind of the broader picture, if you're designing workplace programs for employees that it's important there's processes that are in place that really you can use for mapping your own educational programs. And so in this case, we found scenarios when we were in New Orleans where there's oftentimes an experienced construction worker again at these hardware stores that will give advice to the younger construction workers about whether they should take that job in Fort Myer, Florida, and really provide a lot of advice. And so we patterned this storyboard based on that. We have an older experienced construction worker giving advice to a younger construction worker that doesn't know the ropes. We also found when you compared New Orleans to Houston that these workers tend to stay in one location. They tend to be more qualified, more certifications. So to kind of riffing off of that, we create these characters. We have a sort of a superhero that plays football that comes in and provides some advice and really provide something that is sort of riveting. It's not sort of a stale health and safety video. So we're putting this to video so that you don't have to read and incorporating that into pocket art. So, and that gets us to the next challenge, right? And we rightfully said that the comorbidities or issues that this particular community has, the worker community has, is pretty challenging. We, as I mentioned, the injury on the job or people having disability associated with the work they've been doing, it's a hazardous place. It's things that happens. And sometimes it's not easy to address those health needs because they don't wanna go to a clinic because they know they're gonna be charged for that service. And they don't have money or can afford money to be up to date with their health maintenance. But that does not, so it should not sway us from asking the question or at least helping them address some of the challenges. For example, if you're taking a medication that can potentially, that can cause hyperthermia, in hot, wet environments. Or you're asthmatic and you might need nebulization or MDIs to use. Those are things that we can help these individuals to be more effective in the work that they do. And where the clinical care can be obtained for, so think about this. The hurricane has come, arrived. There's total devastation in Florida. These workers who don't know the landscape are moving and going to Florida and trying to figure out where they can get a nearest healthcare clinic which can serve their needs when they are in need. There's no functioning pharmacy, there's no functioning places that they can go to to make things work. So we thought about the app could be also a way to connect these individuals to the right care that they need. So that brought us to the next step. So we did the pre-deployment phase when they were leaving towards Florida. And then the next phase comes in called deployed phase or deployment phase. This is nothing new in terms of Army or Navy and other armed forces that do this kind of planning. But it's very interesting and unique for us to think in that way when you're dealing with hurricane events. We wanna improve the training that they had earlier on during pre-deployment. We wanna coordinate that deployment as we talked about. One of the challenges that we faced early on, and think about this. So you're a worker who has gone to Florida and Florida as I know it does not have the trains, the buses or the public transportation widely available. So it's the cars that drives you from one place one destination to another. You sign up for a job, the contractor picks you up, hands you the PPE and says wear it when you need it, and then drop you off somewhere in a remote location close to an Everglades or whatever. How do you travel back? Because when the job is done or job is ongoing, you need to get back home and there's no home to go back to. So if the job is done and the contractor does not pay you, that is dead in the waters. They did work for the whole day and never get paid for it. They never get picked up from the place they were picked up and dropped off. So all these resource coordination, wage theft, all that was the primary issues that we started to see in this population. Hazard identification is another one that they were not known. So chemical release in the neighboring areas, electrocution problems, a tree falling down, mold infestations, all of the above, all of the other environmental factors that could have made their job much more challenging to begin with. And then we'll definitely talk about post-deployment, but that was another phase of the project where we basically debrief. We are trying to understand what transpired during deployment and then how can we improve that experience post-deployment. Wage negotiation was one of the interesting challenges we faced early on. We didn't design the app early on to think about the wage challenges because we never thought about that, but that came front and center. We are starting to collect simple things, the job site. So in an app, in a phone, you just click the button and it automatically gives you the address. It automatically gives you where the GPS coordinates is. So that was the easy part. And then how they're getting paid, daily, weekly. So there's some degree of contract that these guys signed before they show up at the job. And that is kind of our proof that there was a negotiation that was done. Again, challenging environments. It's hard to connect. So as I mentioned that you can actually pinpoint the job site, the pickup site, and then actually allow whoever, even if you don't speak the language, you can show the map and say, hey, can you drop me off here? Can you pick me up from here? And this is the place I will be. So those are things that are really, really important in terms of helping these workers get there. We have a challenge with specific recommendations. So in terms of, and our focus is hurricane. We are looking at wet environments, but not necessarily wet environments are the only things that we see in climate change disasters. So there's numerous other things, but our focus was always wet environments or hurricanes. And there's specific safety recommendations that comes with it. Like wearing a helmet or harnesses or sort of PPEs that is really important in terms of prevention and avoiding the impact of the environment, basically. And those challenges is a hard thing to understand. And I probably just was gonna chime in that Resilient Source is also branching into wildfire management as well. And it's a very similar pre-deployment, deployment, post-deployment setting. And one of the advantages is we're using one tool for all of those. The tool that does the health education is also the tool that does the logistical management during the disaster, also does the surveillance afterwards. And so it makes it a lot easier and more likely that they'll use it. And so nothing is complete without evaluations, of course. So there's need to be a feasibility testing or pilot testing that. Thanks. So our initial testing, we have a prototype now of Pocket Arc for their phase one development. And we're currently now in phase two development. So for our initial test, we simply went out to consult some day laborers at a local hardware store in Houston. And really this was a real real-time application for Pocket Arc. We had some speakers. I have a number of volunteers that are comfortable working with day laborers and have kind of gained their trust, know how to talk to them. And she was able to recruit 12 construction workers, all of them listed as their primary language is Spanish. And for that, we had really two different sets of tests. We had a pre-written test and we had a practicum test. So the written test was simply 13 questions that discussed their knowledge of primarily personal protective equipment, what kind of hard hats to wear, goggles, gloves. And then the practicum test actually was a table and it had four sets of hard hats, four sets of goggles, four sets of gloves, and only one of which of each of the four was really the proper NIOSH approved safety purpose personal protective equipment. And so the other three were not. And so we asked them, which would you choose? And then they took this test. And so as a result, we actually found that five were able to completely get through both written and practicum tests. And the reason the others weren't is because they got picked up for a job, or two, they simply weren't able to get through the written test. We did have people on hand to kind of provide them with reading to them and that we're able to get through it. And that's really what made us realize that really the amount of literacy that we're gonna have to kind of change our app to. But we did see for the ones that completed the test that there was an improvement in the pre-test score. And then they took the safety training that we provided them on the app. And then the post-test score showed a remarked improvement. The same thing for the practicum, the ones that selected the equipment and then afterwards they selected the right equipment. So it was a nice kind of first initial test of the equipment, but it also taught us a lot about what to develop for the phase two part of this product. So if we looked at the next steps for development, now we've talked to you all primarily from the standpoint of the worker, but we really would like to make this more of a systematic kind of approach and really have an app as seen from the standpoint of the employer, the contractor, or resilience force, the worker advocacy group. And so we really look at the worker for some of the factors that we've just mentioned, but from the standpoint of the coordinator, be that a foreman or a worker advocate, they're the ones that are defining the worksite and really evaluating for the risk hazards, these people that are out in front ahead of the construction workers. And so based on that, the model that we're looking at is that they will recruit workers who have previously met these equipment standard tests that they've gone through. So in resilience forces, 1,300 workers, 1,500 workers that are on their WhatsApp group, the idea is that we'll try to have as many of them as they can is to take this test and get a certification. You know, they have completed the knowledge test. Those people will then be eligible to go into a particular hazardous area and will have that kind of baseline knowledge. And so we'll have a readiness score, if you will. And for those workers that elect to it, they'll also take a medical screening. Do you have breathing problems? Do you have heart problems? And we'll have met those criteria so that medically that they are fit, and that will be part of the component for the readiness. And then at that point, they will be cleared for deployment. They'll also be able to use this app when they go out into the field because of their pre-deployment use. And so then the idea is that out in deployment, there are numerous other tools that we'd like to do. So how do they find lodging? Where can they find food? Where can they find supplies? And another idea is that Superfund sites, for instance, if like in Houston after Harvey, there was a San Jacinto waste pit that had a dioxin leak in an area right after the storm, we could plug that into that, and then those specific hazards could be addressed going in. We're designing this program from the standpoint of resilience force and worker advocacy, but the same rules of thumb could also be used by private construction industries. And that's really where this grant is, the commercialization grant. And so the idea is we develop this for private firms to utilize for their employees, and then for groups like worker advocacy groups like resilience force and others, they can utilize this program for free. And that's kind of the business design for this. So as I mentioned earlier, really the goal is it's a training program that seamlessly transitions into the actual tool that workers use in a deployment setting. This is novel in that it's really designed from the get-go to these large-scale natural disasters. As much as possible, we wanted to use real-time resources because these situations are very dynamic, they're changing, and so tap into databases where we can use real-time resources. And then the other aspect of this is how can organizations like FEMA, city and public health departments also utilize this. When we were out working with Harvey, we did not see any FEMA, we didn't see the city of Houston, but what we saw was just community organizations that had set up stations all over Houston to provide services. And so there's a real need to coordinate, do better coordination. We feel like tools like this will be able to help that. So on our project roadmap, I kind of mentioned that we're in the phase two development, and then phase three will actually be the adoption and commercialization of this and scaling this. Our project design is what we would like to do is have the workers in resilience force go through a case scenario, a real-time case scenario with a disaster, but a planning program only, and look at the results from that and adjust our program accordingly and then make it ready for actual use in a disaster. So that is the conclusion of our program. We've got a number of different references there which will be available. The New Yorker article is really a compelling article that really describes some personal stories of some of these construction workers that are going into these environments and really gives you a feel for that world. One of the initial studies that we did from Hurricane Harvey is there, and some of the results that I was on that shows some of the results about the lack of training, the lack of supplies that we found out as a result of our initial foray into this, as well as some good NOAA websites. So, yeah, we've got a small group here. We'd welcome your questions. Thank you. Good presentation, Brett. How do you see this being utilized outside of just the construction industry and emergency response in general? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing with disaster response is that there's a predictable amount of training that needs to be done. You know, pre-deployment, we know what to expect. We know what resources will be utilized, and then we know what kind of medical surveillance needs to be done afterwards. So I think you can take your pick of potential workers, really any field. If you want to, you know, in Oregon and Washington, if you want to look at the firefighters, I think our particularly volunteer firefighter forces, that this would be very useful. You know, a lot of programs like the military, you know, they have programs like this in place for the pre-training, but where I see the gap in knowledge gap is with small kind of unofficial groups like the day laborer. But I think it's got applications for any similar field. If you don't mind using the mic for the recording. So my question is, are there any supports for helping the workers, maybe those who are more vulnerable, troubleshoot, right? For example, if you're doing education, right? Part of education is making sure that they know what PPE to use and how it's supposed to be cared for. Do you have any resources embedded in the app to perhaps point them in the right direction if, for example, they're not getting replacement filters or steps that they should take if there's a malfunction? Yes, so one of the challenges of these harsh environments are lack of availability of gear, proper gear. And we thought about that part. There are a lot of people or partners who come to the hurricane sites post hurricane and set up temporary shops. And they could be hardware stores or they could be general stores. Brett introduced me to one of the big conglomerate whose only job is to set up a pop-up sort of a food delivery and other system equipment systems to these communities who are hard struck. The problem is we don't advertise it in a way that these workers know where to go to get that thing. You can connect with the Red Cross organizations and others or FEMA who comes on, but they're on certain sites. They're not every single place where these workers are. So I think there's definitely an opportunity for us to connect the dots and give them the direction of where to go if they need something particularly in terms of safety equipment. One of the things that I really realized after Harvey is that a lot of organizations like Red Cross will show up in a few days afterwards. But it's the months. These people are very slow to be able to bounce back. They can't hire construction workers to renovate their homes. It's just one or two people. So it's weeks and months and months. And we need to keep tapping into resources like Red Cross and church organizations, others, to keep supplying this stuff in the weeks and months, and I think we can help with that. Hi, Rob Griffiths from New Zealand. We had three hurricanes in two weeks, and my farm was totally flooded at one point. But previously I used to work for an oil company that had to do a major cleanup in a fairly hot area not too far from here, and the principal problems that we noted were, first of all, heat stress related to PPE use, and the second one was mental health. You tend to assume that these communities are going to be grateful for their help, and, in fact, often they're scared, they're very tense, and they're very antagonistic, and there's a lot of stigma associated with being in the cleanup, and it was less so in New Zealand recently. But are you thinking about providing any sort of telehealth support for people who are actually experiencing PTSD-type symptoms? Yeah, that's a great, great question, and I appreciate your perspective. Unfortunately, we had similar issues in Houston as well with security, and so we talked a lot about wage theft, but also the security of these workers going into this area. I think telehealth would be a great – is something that we should tap into. You know, a lot of times these are acute injuries that we're dealing with so that telehealth becomes difficult, but it may be used for triage or assessment, a lot of ways that we could tap into that. Just a quick addition to that, as the workers were going to Florida, I mentioned Florida's environments are pretty different than Texas or Louisiana, and one of the challenges that I heard was that because Florida's trespassing laws are very stringent, if you are a worker who has not been identified by the landlord, he or she is able to shoot you if you're on the premises, which is a very sad thing because these workers are going into the communities to build them, and sometimes they don't have the right permits or the landlord is not available and somebody feels that they're coming in for looting or ransacking the place, and that's not the case, and they could ultimately pay the price for working in those environments. So all these things are there on the ground, and it's eye-opening for us to understand that. Well, very impressive. You picked a marginalized workforce that I wouldn't even imagine existed, and they're trying to come up with a solution to protect them and train them. Hopefully you'll update us in a year or two about what you do next. Thanks, Beth. I appreciate the input. Appreciate it. Hi, I just had some questions about the logistics of the app itself. Does it require that you have access to the Internet to be able to run properly? Yeah, so I can answer that question. I have a background in informatics and bioinformatics, and one of the things that we have thought about this very early on, and as you said, the cell towers are down and the hurricane has destroyed the infrastructure. There are definitely very interesting movements that's occurring in the telecommunication world. I can give you an example of Starlink, which is being deployed by Elon Musk's group. I have no investment in that group, but Starlink is actually able to provide full cell service in disaster zones and areas, and I think T-Mobile and others will try to deploy cellular functionality through Starlink. So this is one example of creating this connectivity issue problems that occurs post-hurricane. But we thought about making the app fully functional offline, and so everything you collect or everything you see might reside on the phone and not necessarily need an Internet connectivity. And when you come into an area or zone where the connectivity is available, the phone automatically connects and updates the services that's required. There's another way to also think about this. Sometimes the 2G networks could be intact and could be used instead of 3G or 5G or 4G networks, which requires a little bit more different signals. 2G could be just simple text messaging can be delivered at that level when the deployment is ongoing. So yeah, there's ways to think about this. And that's one reason why the pre-deployment is so important. When you've got all your systems up in place and you've got the health education and you've got the certifications, and so then the deployment, you're only utilizing the technology that will be available in a disaster setting. I just had one more question. Does the app allow you to update the hazards as time goes on? Because like you said, especially post-hurricane disaster, the hazards in the first week are much different than the hazards essentially three, four weeks out. So does the hazard identification update the longer the person is there? Absolutely. So there's a lot of things that occurs, right? So we are using interactive mapping. So one of the things that happens with interactive maps is if the FEMA or update some areas where there's a change in the environment, that feedback is given right away through the app to the worker. There's some other things that we think might be helpful in terms of the changing milieu or environments for a worker so we can tap into that. For example, the water has receded. Now the mold problem has emerged compared to the early days. So we can certainly evolve in terms of that. And there's a lot of movement towards real-time monitoring of different issues like water monitoring, for instance. And so we really like to tap into that, so to speak, so that if the bacterial count is starting to go up in some of these real-time data monitoring, that feeds right into the app. Now it may not go to the worker out actually into that site. It may due to what you'd mentioned, the information. But we're also kind of under the presumption that the contractor, the foreman, is in an area that does have the cell phone service maybe 25 miles away from the storm. And so there kind of the brains are coordinating these things and taking into account and saying, okay, the water is now contaminated or the water is now lower. And so there's a lot of air monitoring, water monitoring, a lot of real-time data that we're being able to utilize that we're hoping to tap into. Thanks for the questions. I think that concludes our session. All right. Thank you. Thanks.

Pocket Arc

flooded environments

worker training

disaster response

hazardous working conditions

access to healthcare

telehealth support

mental health services

feasibility testing