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When disaster strikes, time is everything.
So we need to know the best way to find survivors and victims, identify them and figure out what happened. And we need to do it really quickly.

Preparing for these situations is especially challenging, though, as the environment can change everything about the decomposition process.
So having the AFTER facility here in Australia means that we're going to add a lot of value to Australian law enforcement agencies.
We know how quickly or how slowly the body is going to break down and what that means for our identifiers, for example.
So how easy is it going to be to use DNA?
How long can we still get dental information?
How long can we get fingerprinting?
These are the things we need to consider when being deployed in a disaster.

So what we're doing is we're simulating a disaster scenario.
In this case, we have a domestic terrorism attack.
We invite people to come out and use this as a training activity.
So they have to come on site.
They bring only the gear that they would in any DVI, so any disaster event.
If they were deployed anywhere in the world, they get to bring that piece of equipment and then it's their job to recover any victims, see if there's any living victims still.
And then they need to recover the deceased, identify them.
Any type of evidence also needs to be collected.

This is my seventh disaster scenario that we're putting on.
In the very first year, it was just UTS and one law enforcement organisation.
And since then it's really grown, and now we're seeing we have participants from all across Australia and New Zealand.
And this year we also have some internationals coming to see, just because of the uniqueness of what we're doing during this exercise.

One of the things that I'm really passionate about is developing new technology to find missing persons.
We've been working on developing an electronic nose.
So it essentially works the same way that a scent detection dog does, but is in a robot form, rather.
Which means that some of the issues around dogs we can overcome.
Now we've gotten to our fourth prototype.
We're bringing it out to the disaster site to see how it can perform in the field.
And ultimately, what we want to do is help with real cases.
So we want to show how the research has real world implications.

In the future, we want to continue to grow these types of activities because they are so crucial.
The training that the users are getting out of this is unmatched anywhere else in the world.
If we can improve the way they go about a disaster event, it means that we can recover individuals quicker and hopefully save lives.
And also recover any of the deceased individuals so we can bring information and bring answers to the family members that are anxiously waiting.