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

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.)