The Noggin Blog

Emergencies happen suddenly. They flare up, instantly posing a threat to life, critical infrastructure, and the environment at large. And once they get going, they don’t stay static. Emergencies are highly fluid events by definition.

When it comes to air travel, the saying, “birds of a feather flock together,” takes on a troubling connotation. In 2016 alone, the U.K. recorded more than 1,800 confirmed bird strikes, or eight in every 10,000 flights. Similarly, statistics in the U.S. point to an estimated 13,000-plus bird strikes in this country every year. Passenger lives aren’t usually at stake in these incidents –there’ve only been 25 fatalities due to wild bird strikes between the years 1990 to 2013, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). But the risks of bird strikes aren’t exactly insignificant either.

If you take a bird’s eye view, the state of volunteerism seems pretty healthy. The volunteer rate in the U.S., for instance, stands at around 63 million people, roughly a quarter of the total population. And that’s only a few basis points down from the 29 percent that government statisticians recorded when they first started tracking rates of volunteerism back in the early 2000s. The importance of those volunteers to the health of the economy (not to mention the mission of their nonprofit organizations) can’t be overstated either. Some estimates show that volunteers contribute upwards of $150 billion in services.

Photo by MONUSCO/Sylvain Liechti  [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

According to the Airports Council International, passenger traffic at the world’s largest airports increased over five percent. Total traffic to the world’s top twenty busiest airports almost reached 1.5 billion people.

 
Airporters of the world! We’re only a few days away from the Third Annual British-Irish Airports Expo, the singular event where suppliers and providers showcase their latest cutting-edge solutions and industry-propelling concepts. We’re excited to announce that Noggin will be there too, bringing the latest in crisis management technology, Noggin Crisis, across the pond to London and right into the airport space.

Welcome to our newest blog series ‘Get to know Noggin OCA’. This series will highlight features of our enterprise resilience software platform, Noggin OCA, that help all types of business manage disruption, smarter. The next 4 blogs will focus on the key features that help organizations efficiently and effectively manage resources during an emergency. 

Photo by Matt More/FEMA  [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

Efficiently deploying resources in time-sensitive emergency situations isn’t easy. Just take search-and-rescue (SAR). Time is absolutely crucial in those operations, as the possibility of success rapidly dwindles with the passing of days, if not hours.

Think stress clouds your judgment and impairs decision making? Sorry, but if you’re not a neuroscientist, sociologist, or psychiatrist, you don’t even know the half of it. We're not any of those things, but we thought it would be worthwhile to dig into some of the research in the field. We want to share some of the findings, because they’re of particular interest to crisis management practitioners out there.