One of the worst storms was Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in the fall of 2017.
The model they began experimenting with in 2016 was put to the test the following year, when a series of hurricanes battered the Gulf Coast in what would become the most expensive hurricane season on record, ultimately inflicting over $200 billion in damage. This innovation seems to have come at just the right time. “This is just one of those groups that came out of necessity and just has now relied on technology, social media, and beyond, to do things that the government organizations may not be equipped to do,” Shawn says. Volunteer dispatchers started using Zello to communicate with civilian boat operators, and they used Glympse to track their movements and match people in distress with the closest available volunteer.īy all accounts, it has had a dramatic impact on the Cajun Navy’s ability to organize and onboard new volunteers and coordinate their response in the field.
“If I ever go onto talking about Ingress and my nerd side with members of the Cajun Navy,” he says, “they’re like, ‘Oh, there he goes again.'”īut however nerdy their origin, the group saw the value in Shawn’s insights and started building a protocol for how to use them. Shawn realized these game strategies and tools exactly fit the needs of the Cajun Navy, which needed to communicate with a geographically dispersed group of volunteers and precisely track the location of everyone in the field.
Chief among those apps were Glympse, a location tracking app, and Zello, which turns any phone into a walkie talkie. The upshot for the Cajun Navy was that the best Ingress squads used third-party apps to communicate with teammates, track their locations, and coordinate their movements-in real space. (A few years later, the game developer Niantic would leverage the technology and insights from Ingress to create the viral sensation Pokémon Go.) Players “capture” land by visiting places in the real world and then weaving them together to create larger and larger virtual territories that have to be defended from the other team.
The game consists of two teams competing for control over virtual land that corresponds to real physical locations. In his spare time, Shawn was an avid player of a location-based, augmented reality game called Ingress. His inspiration came from an unlikely source: a smartphone game. Soon after getting involved with volunteer rescue efforts, Shawn realized there was an opportunity to improve how volunteers organized themselves and handled requests for help. Shawn Boudreaux, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, was one of those new recruits. Many of the same people that came together ten years before returned, along with hundreds of new volunteers. The Cajun Navy remained more or less dormant until 2016, when major flooding hit south-central Louisiana. Speaking to the state legislature a month later, Governor Blanco described the response: “(Military and first responders) were joined by an unprecedented brigade of ordinary citizens who drove a fleet of school buses we commandeered, and they steered hundreds of private boats down flooded streets and toiled without pause to rescue at least 70,000 people.”Īs Shawn described it, they were simply “a loose conglomerate of people who came together to help their neighbors when their neighbors needed help.” It was a powerful movement that showed how volunteers could dramatically complement the efforts of first responders. By that evening, Louisiana’s governor and other state officials had put out a call for private boats to join in the rescue effort alongside the National Guard and other official first responders. Underequipped state, local, and federal authorities scrambled to deal with what would become one of the worst hurricanes in US history, leaving over a thousand people dead and causing over $125 billion in damage. “You want to hear my nerd story?”Īs with any organic movement, it’s hard to say when exactly the Cajun Navy started, but most would point to August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. When you ask Shawn Boudreaux about how he got involved with the Cajun Navy, his responds with a wry smile.