MONMOUTH COUNTY, NEW JERSEY · OCTOBER 2012 · THE LESSON THAT WOULD NOT BE FORGOTTEN
The story of SafeGround spans a decade — from the flooded streets of New Jersey to a LoRa mesh node on a Mediterranean hillside. This is a project born from lived experience of what happens when systems fail.
The Origin
"The most important lesson of Sandy was not technical. It was temporal. We had the technology. We had the knowledge. We had the people. What we lacked was the system built before the storm arrived."
— SafeGround founding team
Full technical and narrative documentation of the SafeGround project.
In the days before Hurricane Sandy made landfall in October 2012, a group convened through EdgeKnowledge — an apolitical philanthropic think tank — assembled a rapid-response network. Disaster experts with field experience from Katrina, Haiti, Japan, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami shared knowledge, mapped response frameworks, and prepared.
The Friendship Train Foundation — a humanitarian mobilisation network — supported this effort, helping to coordinate resources and expertise across organisations that rarely operated in the same room.
When Sandy hit, infrastructure failed as predicted. But the experience on the ground was sharper than any model had suggested. In the immediate aftermath, with patchy communications, the team turned to long-range radios. The radios worked. Everything else had failed.
What emerged in the weeks and months that followed was a prototype model for disaster resource coordination: the Sea Bright Resource Center (seabrightrc.org), built in partnership with the Monmouth County Long-Term Recovery Group (MCLTRG) and engaging with FEMA. A replicable template for community-anchored disaster response infrastructure.
The next chapter was GBREX, where the lessons of Sandy were translated into a technical platform. As Technology Lead, the work extended to encrypted peer-to-peer data transfer designed for post-disaster zones — medical records, case management, and micro-economic tools running on mesh-networked hardware, independent of centralised infrastructure.
GBREX proved the concept. Mesh networking, designed from first principles for adversarial environments, worked. What was missing was a scaled, open, globally-deployable standard aligned with international mandate.
For years, the project existed in the background — documented, refined, waiting. In 2022, the United Nations launched the Early Warnings for All initiative at COP27, committing to universal multi-hazard early warning coverage by 2027. The mandate gave the work urgency it had never had from a policy direction. SafeGround is the response.
The lesson of Sandy was not that we lacked technology. It was that we hadn't built it in time, in the right places, for the right people. SafeGround is the attempt to correct that — at scale, openly, and before the next storm.
Project Timeline
Mission
SafeGround is an open source project. There is no proprietary lock-in. Every protocol, hardware specification, and deployment model is designed to be replicated, adapted, and improved.
The Team
SafeGround was created by and is led by Dr Frances Kiernan — Emergency Medicine physician, NHS Innovation Fellow, and project lead from inception. Dr Kiernan was part of the original Sandy response network in 2012 and served as Technology Lead for GBREX and the Monmouth County Long-Term Recovery Group.
The team includes specialists in community engagement, clinical mental health support (provided by leading UK specialists), and education. The project has roots in EdgeKnowledge, the Friendship Train Foundation, and a decade of hard-won experience in post-disaster response.
We are actively seeking collaborators across engineering, public health, policy, and community development.
Get Involved →Full Documentation
The SafeGround White Paper provides the complete technical and narrative record of the project: architecture, protocols, hardware specifications, EW4All alignment analysis, and the implementation pathway for pilot deployment.
Dr Frances Kiernan & SafeGround Team · Version 1.0 · April 2026