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."

Comments

Re:SMS?

[BaldGhoti]

If you get only twenty seconds of network coverage a day, SMS is far superior to actually making a phonecall. One can only assume that a majority of the cell towers in the area were disabled or destroyed.

MMM

[Doc Ruby]

A US investment in "event specific" WiFi and VoIP deployments would both prepare the "Homeland" for disasters, natural and manmade, and put American companies at the forefront of the emerging Mobile Multimedia Millennium that's turning the WWW upside down. Our flexible media industry could take disasters in stride, offering lots of lucrative training during planned events that will reduce costs and increase lifesaving efficiency during emergencies. In the meantime, it would create jobs, taxable profits, and make the US a lot more fun.

Videos

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone wants to see any videos, there's a load on www.asiantsunamivideos.com.

If you want to help mirror, please pop along to this thread:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=& th readid=359270

and PM the thredstarter for info on how to get your mirror online.

Currently there's ~15x100mbps boxes and an unmetered gigabit box mirroring the content, and we're still struggling.

Any coders who could help modify the main script would also be welcome, as the central server is suffering under the load and it's a Dual Xeon / 4gb RAM.

Thanks for any help any of you can bring :)

Just make sure ...

[mikael]

... when you lease multiple outside lines for redundancy, that the carriers actually do use separate paths all the way through, and don't go through a single point any way along the line.

I once worked for a company who had multiple fiber-optic links for their WAN. For redundancy, we had two ISDN links to a remote site. Unfortunately, both links went down because they were both piggy-backed over 'virtual ISDN circuits' on a fibre-optic cable which happened to
run over a bridge.

Due to a flash floods the bridge collapsed, along with both ISDN circuits.

IT is not the answer to this problem

[teneighty]

I don't question the generosity of spirit behind this kind of effort, but lets focus on the reality here: many of the worst hit areas barely even have telephones, let alone IT infrastructure.

What they really need is: Good government, education, sanitation and medical expertise, communication infrastructure and civil engineers - roughly in that order. Even with early warning systems, Aceh would have still been completely devasted - the water went roughly 9 MILES inland in some places. In any case, Sumatra was hit within minutes of the quake. Granted, Sri Lanka, India and Thialand would have benefited greatly from an early warning system (as illustrated by one family had one of their own - a 10 year old girl who paid attention to her geography lessons - story here)

Old "MSM" Media twists disaster coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

We all suspect that the BBC carries a heavy anti-American bias, and nowhere has this become more apparent than in the BBC coverage of the tsumnami disaster. The following excerpt from the Telegraph gives the scoop:

'Don't Mention the Navy' is the BBC's Line

Last week we were subjected to one of the most extraordinary examples of one-sided news management of modern times, as most of our media, led by the BBC, studiously ignored what was by far the most effective and dramatic response to Asia's tsunami disaster. A mighty task force of more than 20 US Navy ships, led by a vast nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, and equipped with nearly 90 helicopters, landing craft and hovercraft, were carrying out a round-the-clock relief operation, providing food, water and medical supplies to hundreds of thousands of survivors.

The BBC went out of its way not to report this. Only when one BBC reporter, Ben Brown, hitched a lift from one of the Abraham Lincoln's Sea Hawk helicopters to report from the Sumatran coast was there the faintest hint of the part that the Americans, aided by the Australian navy, were playing.

Instead the BBC's coverage was dominated by the self-important vapourings of a stream of politicians, led by the UN's Kofi Annan; the EU's "three-minute silence"; the public's amazing response to fund-raising appeals; and a Unicef-inspired scare story about orphaned children being targeted by sex traffickers. The overall effect was to turn the whole drama into a heart-tugging soap opera.

The real story of the week should thus have been the startling contrast between the impotence of the international organisations, the UN and the EU, and the remarkable efficiency of the US and Australian military on the ground. Here and there, news organisations have tried to report this, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Germany, and even the China News Agency, not to mention various weblogs, such as the wonderfully outspoken Diplomad, run undercover by members of the US State Department, and our own www.eureferendum.blogspot.com. But when even Communist China's news agency tells us more about what is really going on than the BBC, we see just how strange the world has become.

One real lesson of this disaster, as of others before, is that all the international aid in the world is worthless unless one has the hardware and organisational know-how to deliver it. That is what the US and Australia have been showing, as the UN and the EU are powerless to do. But because, to the BBC, it is a case of "UN and EU good, US and military bad", the story is suppressed. The BBC's performance has become a national scandal.

Warning systems are useful...

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

...but nowhere near as useful as educating people.

For example, in the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, the earthquake that triggered the tsunami on December 26 just about flattened everything. Now, many people who live by the sea in earthquake-prone areas know that large eathquakes can trigger tsunami, so it's prudent to head for higher ground, warning or not. However, in Banda Aceh, that didn't occur to anybody, and when the tsunami hit, everybody was in town, cleaning up after the quake.

So just explaining to people along the coast that they should head for higher ground after any major quake would save a lot more lives than a warning system.

(Interestingly, the sea gypsies in the region suffered few casualties from the tsunami, because they knew from their folklore that when the sea suddenly receded a long way, it was going to come back, and fast. So at the first sign of the approaching tsunami, they headed for the hills.)

Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't it Ironic that the IT world can do nothing more than create a "virtual conference" from "bloggers", neither of which most of the tsunami victims would ever know about, even before the disaster?

WiFi Airship Hubs

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to be immune to most quake-related disasters. These could be dispatched where communication lines are down, and even in non-disaster areas they could be used as competition to the cable and phone lines.

Connecting families

[Midnight Warrior]

In every distaster, be it a natural disaster like this one, or refuge camps from civil war, the NGOs which run the aid efforts must use some sort of software. The classic problem appears to be connecting families. If I were a relief worker (and I've never been one), I think the best software would provide:

• Short video clip saying their name, village name, and names of parents and children (if any).
• Local dialects spoken, unicode records of their names (I imagine most refuges are illiterate and workers must guess at their names), and any relatives whose names they can spell.
• Also, GIS coordinates of their original home, if available, would be helpful. This really could be as simple as finding a village name and recording that, or if they gave you an address in a city.
• Still frame, mug shot that facial recognition software could compare against photos provided by family members, if they become available. (hint: use facial recognition where false alarms don't get people arrested, but rather are welcomed)
• Some sort of indexing system that could operate over low bandwidth, like what might be available over HAM radio. Treat the file on a refugee like a BitTorrent link and as one person at another site gets the records from other sites, cached copies start appearing around the mesh of camps speeding up the search process as time drags on.
• Except for the video capture, don't have extensive hardware and software requirements (read high cost per terminal)
• Give each person an RFID bracelet so that refuge workers can find people quickly. If the camp gets raided, people can tear off their bracelets, or if they get relocated, they just need to check in and their demographics are copied to the local camp.
• Let a relative looking for the lost open a case and now it becomes a question of data mining and the application of existing tools.
• Relatives looking for lost people could indicate the approximate location, the language the person(s) speak, and letter sequences known to be in the person's name]
• People who lived there that could effectively communicate with aid workers could assist in correctly spelling names and addresses, making the need for translations to occur only once.

Okay. I know I'm dreaming, but all this stuff can be done with real databases that support blobs, and torrent links aren't that hard to index. Drop facial recognition into a central facility (say the NGO headquarters) and they can issue recommendations for people to hook up. Heck, make it a Knoppix-like live-CD where the local HD is for cache and data acquisition, and building a reliable workstation is a piece of cake - distribute CDs and replace broken hardware quickly and efficiently.

Have any NGOs really looked into starting open-source projects to do these kinds of things or do they already have adequate tools of their own? Anybody have any insight? (they're all probably in the Pacific right now)

I say open-source because NGOs are not in competition for anything except money, and sometimes not even then. Given a uniform software base, they could work together and participate much more uniformly and thus speed the disaster relief efforts all that much more. Add the cost of running open-source and the myriad of commercial vendors looking for a piece of the action (not all will be as generous as ESRI is for now) will be numerous. Open source is the only way to keep the cost down, and the NGO could still pay someone to develop this software, but agree to keep the work in the open.

IT situation in Banda Aceh

[cloudness is x]

I am writing this message from a terminal of the central posko (dispensary and supply post) of the Red Cross in Banda Aceh. As a volunteer here, I can tell you that communication through cellphones and satellite phones have been a real pain with satellite signals always going on and off, and voice quality being very bad. GSM phones sometimes fare better. I am here mainly because I couldn't get in touch by phone with my contacts from the Dept of Foreign Affaires, with whom I was first supposed to work with.

Here in the posko the only reliable way to communicate is by the Internet. The IT guys here have set up a nice wired and wireless network which ease the communication with Jakarta, Geneva, and all our relatives. Important reports are going though and help the central coordination of the relief efforts. I am keeping a blog for the medical students of my university so that they learn at the same time the other side of disaster medical relief efforts and international 'humanitarian' organisations.