NASA Upgrades Web Site To Help Workers Cope With Natural DisastersNASA Upgrades Web Site To Help Workers Cope With Natural Disasters

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has enhanced services offered on its crisis center Web site to communicate better with employees as the hurricane season begins this week.

The InsideNASA intranet, built on Vignette's Next-Generation Web Presence platform, helps employees at 11 U.S. facilities stay informed about office closures, evacuation procedures, and when it's safe to return to work. Information on the site also will guide employees to make a "safe-arrival call" when they reach their destination.

About half of NASA's offices are in the paths that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita took last year, says Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its North Atlantic hurricane season prediction last week. The agency estimates there will be 13 to 16 major storms, of which eight to 10 could become hurricanes. About four to six of those could turn into major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher in the 2006 season.

NASA's improved emergency operations Web site has a national warnings page that monitors hurricanes and other natural disasters, integrating with more than 2,000 links. Data on wildfires, tornadoes, flash floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other disasters that give little warning is automatically fed into the site.

There's also a real-time feed from the Department of Homeland Security that monitors terrorist threat advisories. The site has approximately 130 portlets, small windows of content, such as an animated real-time weather map, Holm says. An announcement portlet offers all the latest information at NASA submitted by employees, she says.

Vignette's Web-connector portlet feature made the integration simple, Holm says. It takes about three minutes to create a connection that lets outside information stream into the site. Alerts are sent out if the connection breaks or the connecting sites go down. A VPN provides employees with remote access from virtually any device with Internet connectivity, such as a Research In Motion BlackBerry or a Palm Treo.

"Just for my group, we budgeted about $300,000 for the project this year," Holm says. "It includes personnel, management training, operations, content and disaster support, and publishing and information architecture." That doesn't include the Vignette software or servers on which it runs.

Four major hurricanes hit the United States last year, including Katrina, which killed 1,300 people and caused $80 billion in damage. Rita hit Louisiana and Texas, and Wilma briefly turned into the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record.