Yesterday, the report from the investigation of the chemical accident at Helsingborg in feb 4-7, 2005 was published. The report presents a number of issues that needs to be improved in how Swedish fire and rescue service manage large scale emergency response operations. From my perspective, the issue that caught my attention was the fact that the software LUPP, a CSCW-system intended to be used to collect, store and distribute important decisions, actions and other incident related information, was not brought in to use at the begining of the emergency, but only later on in the response work. There are a number of reasons why LUPP is not used in the early phases of response work. This not the only emergency in Sweden, where the fire and rescue services have had problems in using LUPP as intended.

Nevertheless, this morning I recieved the CSCW2006 Call for Participation, and to my big suprise, one of the highlighted topics for the conference is on ‘-Systems for emergency preparedness and large-scale rapid deployment (e.g. disaster relief)’.

Hopefully, the CSCW-conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada could be the place where people from the ISCRAM-community (IS in Crisis Reseponse And Management) will meet and discuss with the respected researchers from the CSCW-community.

The report from the chemical accident is in Swedish and can be downloaded from:
www.helsingborg.se and more information about the CSCW2006 Conference can be found at www.cscw2006.org

//Jonas