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IT and Natural Disasters
rikomatic writes "The Asian tsunami in December has dramatically shown how much SMS, email and the web are now indispensible parts of disaster recovery. The folks at the Digital Divide Network have organized a virtual conference on 'How New Media and the Internet are Reshaping Tsunami Relief Efforts' on Wednesday, Jan 12 at 10am, EST. Among the featured speakers will be Dina Mehta, co-founder of the Southeast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog. In the hours following the tsunami, she and a group of South Asian bloggers created the volunteer-driven web portal for tsunami relief news and resources. Beyond using IT to coordinate post-disaster relief efforts, early warning is another critical need. Hopefully the UN's World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan later this month will address the IT infrastructure needed to make sure that people get advance warning before the next natural disaster strikes."
I'm sure this isn't the only Geospatial vendor but ESRI pretty much makes their software, technical support and data free to agencies supporting disasters. For the Indian Ocean disaster, check out this link.
The three French cell phone operators have joined forces to facilitate the collection of funds via SMS (in French). An interesting initiative as well
Ham Radio.
Google for your country's equivalent to the ARRL.
Hams were the only functional communication for many people after the Loma Prieta quake hit California. Hams ran the only functioning communications network on 9/11. And yes, hams were there for the tsunami victims too.
If you need a technology that'll enable coordination of disaster relief -- or even just help out by offloading a few million "Yes, Mom, I'm OK, and I'll talk to you when I can" messages from overloaded communications channels, chances are you're going to be using ham radio.
Better yet -- become a ham yourself. In most countries, it's cheap and easy. And if you're reading this, you're already geeky enough that it'll be a hell of a lot of fun no matter where you live.
Another poster on this thread was talking about SMS. When you have no cellular towers, you're not going to get even 20 seconds a day of uptime.
And that's when you'll be helped by a ham.
My dad was into ham radios (jamaica) for a while and during hurricanes, and power outages he was still talking to people around the world. It's simple, and redundant (runs on a car battery) and most important it's proven. I'm sorry but the internet should never be relied upon for communications during a disaster it's just not reliable. It is also dependent on too many things. Electricity, phone lines, networks.
The internet views a block as an outage and routes around it.
While working in Tokyo when the 'LGQ' (7.8) hit in the South, the only way people could get messages out was by the 'net - this was in the mid-90's.
Not exactly new media or the Internet, however a friend of mine was in Phuket when the waves hit - fortunately he was located in a bungalow perched on a hill and witnessed the event unfold.
Remembering a couple of his friends were in Krabbe, a little more to the east, he called them on their mobile. They fortunately answered and he warned them about some serious waves heading their direction. This gave his mates a few extra seconds to get their shit together before the connection was broken. They did survive although many around them did not.
We'll never know, however those couple of seconds just to jolt them into action (how many people simply stood and stared in bewilderment) may have been what saved their life.
One of the largest problems I currently see is in the area of victim and missing registration. I wrote twice about it in my blog. I first made the following analysis: Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it?
To answer the first question there are two systems that I found with a bit of googling: A Japanese group has build a system.
Their presentation to ETSI can be found here. It has a great name: I Am Alive. This system seems to be currently in use by the Thai governement and Red Cross.
The Australian governement has a system which is described here by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).
I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an
excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.
I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.
The United Nations Reliefweb is also a great resource on all kinds of relief efforts and it gives good information on what kind of resources and people are nescessary.
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