DHS S&T awards $1.9M contract to G&H International to help FEMA create standardized community disaster resources

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to revamp the Community Lifeline Construct program to better standardize and integrate community resources systems, and it’s using a more than $1.9 million contract with G&H International Services, Inc. to achieve it.

G&H will design, test, develop and implement a Community Lifeline Status System (CLSS) for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to increase awareness and resilience in communities post-disaster. Its forebear, the Community Lifeline Construct, was created in 2017 to increase FEMA’s response and effectiveness, but even so, there remain no systematic means for the identification, processing, and analysis of data needed to optimize the status of these lifelines.

“A lifeline makes it possible for critical government and commercial services to continue operating, which is essential to the preservation of human health and safety, as well as economic security,” Dimitri Kusnezov, DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology, said. “The increasing frequency and severity of adverse events require a more comprehensive means of tracking the stability of communities across all sectors.”

The CLSS will hang on FEMA’s seven community lifelines: safety and security, food-water-shelter, health and medical, energy, communications, transportation, and hazardous materials. A data-driven approach will be taken to these, backed by FEMA guidance, lessons learned from both exercises and real-world incidents, and state, local, tribal, and territorial emergency management agencies and private sector partners.