Smart Badges to Help Building Evacuations

Sept. 10 -- Even two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the images of crowds streaming out of the blazing World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon are still fresh on many minds.

Even more chilling: The remains of hundreds of victims are still unaccounted for, leaving many survivors to wonder what happened to them in the final minutes of the disasterous collapse.

But how do you collect information on hundreds, if not thousands of people, as they're hurriedly leaving a building during an emergency? Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., have been working on a solution.

It's called the Evacuation Monitoring and Accountability System, or EMAS, and was initially developed to meet a stringent requirement put upon the lab by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Since some portions of the lab are involved with sensitive research on nuclear energy and weapons, the lab is required to account for everyone — workers and visitors — within 30 minutes of an emergency building evacuation. And according to Gary Steimer, senior program manager for EMAS, the previous system just wasn't making the grade.

"They had gone through many drills testing the previous system — a clipboard with a sign-in sheet," says Steimer. "If there was an evac, they took the clipboard and checked names off. It never met the mandate for 30 minutes of accountability."

Flashy Plastic

EMAS, says Steimer, provides an elegant advance by using so-called Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, a technology that has been gaining attention of late. And its workings are fairly simple.

Workers and visitors to the lab's Y-12 National Security Complex's Enriched Uranium Operations facility are issued a "smart badge" — a plastic card containing a microchip with a unique ID number. When the person walks through the main entrance, an antenna emits a radio beam that is reflected off the card. The returned radio signal carries the card's ID number, which is then automatically logged into a computer system's database.