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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."
SMS? That has got to be the slowest way to cordinate anything... EVER.
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.
I'm sure there are people who need to look at that info more than we do.
You know what?
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.
--
make install -not war
All other efforts will be in vain. That was the real tragedy in the Tsunami- and it's the reason why a similar event won't cause this large loss of life in the Pacific. We've already got the instruments needed to detect an earthquake as it happens anywhere in the world- the next step is where we failed. There should have been a major warning given out to every government, every police station, every military installation in the area that an earthquake had already happened and to get people away from the seashore.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
If anyone wants to see any videos, there's a load on www.asiantsunamivideos.com.
& th readid=359270
:)
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I disagree, much of the worlds population lives on coastal areas or inland but below or slightly above sea level. Nearly every country with a coastal border can be affected. LA, San Diego on the west coast of the US would suffer enormous casulties, for those in canada, Vancouver & Victoria. The east coast is just as bad. These are only two major cities in each country. Aside from human casulties think what this kind of event could do to your countries economy. All that aside, the tsunami was a result of an earth quake, which as we know can affect nearly every inland place in the world that is near a fault line.
piss off
IT and communications are important to the rescue and recovery effort, but privacy is just as important. There have been reports of missing Swedes having their homes burglarized and the families of missing people being contacted by scammers. It's sick how these criminals would take advantage of other people's misery.
... 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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
My first thought was: Maybe this disaster was needed to update disaster recovery around other areas of the world. But then I realized something: It's rather that mankind is shortsighted when dealing with new technologies, disasters (and everything else).
Like, while the media and biz ppl were focused on porn sites, businesses, etc, the less favored countries couldn't get a chance to use this technology in their favor.
Ironically, the internet was originally designed as a disaster-proof (specifically, nuke-proof) network.
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)
...but what if everyone that has a cell phone had a Ham radio? What would that be like in the middle of a disaster? I don't see it working out too well...
Would be better if we if we had a high-speed wireless network using WiFi phones . An alternative to cellphones is needed. We could construct one if we could contsruct cheap broadcast towers . I am not sure on distance of WiFi though .
It's not the internet that's important, it's communication. My question is, is all this mass communication helping us as a race or conditioning us to get our answers from outside ourselves, making us so dependent on it that we can no longer think for ourselves? Am I the only one who has noticed the decline in the quality of modern writing in contrast to the writings of, say, the 19th century?
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.
...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.)
Strong local men who care and are willing to use their muscle to deliver the goods, clear the way. Talk about the merits of email in this endeavour are just silly.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4145 259.stm
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Interesting, although it fails to mention how exactly alerts would be delivered. It would need to go to a few more people than those who just happened to be running an agent on there PC/Mac whatever and happened to notice it.
Has anyone else thought about how hard it must be to look for someone after a disaster such as this? There are many blogs and other sites where people have posted messages, but AFAIK no attempt has been made to centralise and co-ordinate this.
I can see one very good value-for-money project being to establish a universal people registry, using various characteristics (location, physical features, photo, DNA, itinery, etc.). There are lots of extensions to this people could think up, but the most important thing is to centralise it. I can only imagine the anguish, expense, and inconveniencing of others that goes on as people go from one hospital to another, one website to another, posting so much that no-one will see even a fraction of it all.Yes there are privacy issues which tend to get lost in this confusion, but if the database is run by a reputable organisation (UN?) this may not be so much of an issue.
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?
A bit offtopic but I would like to ask this question to fellow /. readers anyway. Technology no doubt has helped in the relief efforts but had technology really helped in preventing parts of the disaster. For instance, more lives could have been saved if the people in the coastal villages would have heard the warning issued by the government. Unfortnately, these poor people didn't have the money to buy a radio or TV. So isn't it economical reforms that should come first?!
See, for the tsunami early warning system thing, we should just put a link up on the main page here.
/. THE TSUNAMI!
WE CAN
That'll teach the bugger!
I thought that had something to do with Bush and Iraq...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Heh? Here in Indonesia, a group of IT volunteers has succesfully set up a wireless LAN to provide Internet Access although at first they had to deal with unsupportive government officials and lack of hardware support (eventually they flew to Aceh using Australian's Hercules plane). They also build a website to serve updated news and list of victims here : www acehmediacenter or id. They started in Dec 31, and right now there are about three WLAN nodes up and running in Aceh. Thank to these guys, many people can find way to search on their relatives, to know current situation in Aceh regarding relief efforts. Volunteers and Journalists can also use this to send important info on Aceh.
Inland big cities/ports on the Great Lakes would survive. Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, etc. (although Montreal might be hardest hit due to the narrowing of the river leading up to the island). If there wasn't a novel written about this possibility already there are certainly a few in the works now.
Earthquakes and other natural disasters in that area of North America are relatively unknown if you discount violent snow and icestorms, but the locals know how to deal with these regular problems.
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.
You posted this in the BBC story comments earlier today. Nobody cared the first time, either.
fuh.
I live in Vancouver so everytime something like this happens, the paper goes into a huge panic. The fact is that places like Port Alberni, Uclulet and Port Hardy would get hammered. Vancouver and Victoria are both very sheltered and would likely experience a 1-3m wave (similar to a ferry's wake). In addition, the BC coastline is relatively steep which greatly mitigates any potential damage both by keeping the wave from rising and by preventing it from getting very far inshore. We have a lot more to fear from a warm rain in March than almost any tsunami.
Just thought I'd plug my company.
I work for Intelsat, a satellite communications provider. They are providing free satellite service to the UN for establishing field offices.
What was the last law that benefited people but not corporations?
thaivisa.com had a forum ( http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showforum= 57 )up and running very quickly which allowed people to post pictures and names of people who they could not contact and forum members in the area were able to attempt to help them. Also links to sites with data on injured or dead people set up by the government were posted as they came up. This has created a good resource for people searching for information on relatives or friends.
...I obey the laws of physics....
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:
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.
One thing I gained an appreciation from the Tsunami coverage and videos.
It's only partially about the wave height. I understand now why the term "tidal wave" came into being: the wave is like a fast-moving tide. A wind- or wake-generated wave of 1-3 meters is one thing. A tsunami / tidal surge sustained over several minutes is going to do a world of hurt for low-lying districts, and a lot of coastal areas are only marginally above sea level.
Several videos clearly show a sea that's less crashing into the shore than spilling over its banks, and continuing to do so for several minutes. Even though the water is only a meter or so over mean land elevation, the damage it does is considerable.
Sure, it's not flattened buildings and people sucked out to sea. But it is floaded basements, ground floors, electrical systems, utility conduits, septic systems, and the like. That's still pretty disruptive.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
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.
I am sure that an analog system can be used to piggy back a digital signal with a point to point protocol in the Physical layer so that a HAM connection can act just like a modem and a phone line.
/. posters: Doesn't this system already exisit?
The HAM radio protocols do not exclude the use of HAM as the transport mechanism for an IP connection.
And thus you could get a UDP or a TCP/IP connection through a HAM radio setup (perhaps on special frequencies). Thus HAM and Internet are not mutually exclusive.
Privacy is important in any case.
I have known for years that criminal fish the obituaries and then rob houses of people while they are at a funeral.
Maybe the quality of writing that you see from 100 years ago is so good because a lot of the poor writing from that time was just thrown in the trash or used to heat people's houses.
I am sure that you can find a lot of poor writing form 100 or 150 years ago if you go to an old archieve.
Probably what you are complaigning about is information overload. You might want to subscribe to a literary journal where someone else reviews the works. That way you can see what might be good. How about the New York Review of Books?
If you read the random comments that folks type furiously and almost automatically at two AM into their computer because they are bored and unemployed, then you probably have a good reason to be frustrated.
I think that there are those who do not think for themselves. And there are those who do. In the 19th century anything that didn't pass the editor didn't get printed. No all I have to do is hit Submit and, poof, I am published.
If you want quality subscribe to a magazine. That way, once a week or once a month, you can get journals in a paper format where the writings have been reviewed by a professional editor.
I agree, for the cost of a single military jet fighter, they could have provided thousands of "civil alert" radios and made sure each little coastal village and hamlet all got one. pre tuned to an emergency freq, automatically activated like the weather alert radios are. And it should be a transceiver, as there are now multiple reports of all the animals "sensing" the coming tsunami and heading to high ground, etc. This shouldn't be ignored, as a lot of these poorer people are basically agrarians and have grown up watching animals, are around their animals all the time or are observing the wild animals, and note their behavior. It's another form of little understood but effective "sensing" that could be reported back to a central location to act as backup to electronic sensors.
You have to wonder about nations priorities sometimes.
Here's an aside, speaking of military things. Imagine this huge wall of water coming not as a force of nature but as an actual "invasion". In this case,and in one sense, India got invaded directly across the beach over hundreds (thousands?) of miles of coastline and no one in the devastated areas knew this "invasion" was coming. Sort of makes satellites and supercomputers and so called "intelligence" agencies and whatnot seem pretty stupid when you think about it in those terms, great tech gone to waste, when it really could have been used to actually help alleviate this "invasion". Just like in the US, we allegedly have "homeland security" now-a decent concept actually, but in it's application we still get who knows how many drug smuggling planes crossing over daily, and the millions who cross the border by foot yearly, and none of our "high tech" seems to be able to help with that "security". Makes ya wonder sometimes who's driving the bus and how the heck did he get a license?
Directional WiFi is not just a few miles. During the 9-11 terrorist attacks cellphones still worked. And there was an article on slash about new emergency temoporary cell phone towers. Trying to use HAM may work for a just a few but would be mess if you had to deal with massive numbers of people. So if we could establish satellite ,long distance mesh Wifi,a nd cellphone like wifi then that would be more useful in my opinion. Ham is good for limited use but not for the real world anymore. It's radio and radio will be disappearing in the near future too.
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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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.
As a survivor of 1985 earthquake in Mexico City (that officially killed "only" 6000, trustworthy accounts, of which the goverment of the day's was not one, put the figure in around 30000) I can tell you that you learn to trust the means available to you to prevent loss of human life.
After the disaster in Mexico City it was implemented a seismic alert that gives you some valuable *seconds* (around a minute or there abouts) between the moment an earthquake happens (normally in the west coast of Mexico) and when it is felt.
When we received alerts (many of them false) I rarely heard people whinning abuut it, in the contrary, I saw and experienced people doing ordered evacuations.
Knowing about previous catastrophes concentrates your mind, which at the end is a matter of education.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And lets face it, we are bringing this on ourselfs, with our over populated, and resource waisting world. earth wil restore the balance, with or without us.
"It is not because no one sees the truth that it becomes a mistake" (Mahatma Gandhi)
Whatever AC, we are talking about The Daily Telegraph, the voice of the neo-conservatives light of the UK, whinning about the BBC (which has reported widely about US relief efforts as well as problems that have ensued in both Indonesia an Tamil controlled Sri Lanka).
Quelle surprise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Several organizations of the Sri Lankan IT industry, along with the Lanka Software Foundation and Lanka Linux User Group have worked around the clock for the last couple of weeks to create a set of applications to manage the Tsunami recovery program (URL not given to avoid being slashdotted). We made them Free and Open Source from the beginning, and most of the code are already in SourceForge.
I agree with most of what you say, but the last part about natural disasters being relatively unknown, especially in the past year. For instance my own town was hit by a flood this past summer, I live in Peterborough Ontario, though the devastation was nothing compared to the asian tsunami, you would have thought it was the end of the world around here. I'm not kidding when I say people are still crying about their losses around here and trying to collect money. Nobody died in the great peterborough floods, but you wouldn't know it the way people cried and are still crying, plus the city was paralised for nearly a week. Although now many people are starting to shut the remaining whiners up by pointing out just what it really mens to lose everything.
piss off
More importantly, it has shown how important ham radio is when and where disaster strikes. Indeed, in tsunami-affected areas, "modern" communication tools, such as telephone, cell phones, email and web failed to work when needed.
That is blatantly not true. I was watching BBC News 24 for long periods following the Tsunami and there were constant reports about the US resorces being moved into the area, this included plenty of coverage of what those resources consisted of and how useful the helicopters would be to the relief effort.
I don't know who Christopher Brooker ( the journalist ) is but I think he must have some axe to grind.
Also I don't actually know anyone who thinks the BBC has any kind of Anti American bias.
Of course, the base stations would be a bit vulnerable, but they will be less numerous in a airship scenario and therefore it will be cheaper to make the telecom infrastructure virtually indestrutible from acts of God.
Stop the brainwash
In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake telephone service went down but the InterNet stayed up for communication and exchange of seismic data. This quake was two orders of magnitude smaller and only killed fifty-some people, but was plenty scary to us caught in it.
Fortunately Silicon Valley itself was in a seismic "dead spot" and its dangerous bay-fill soils did not collapse. Santa Cruz, right next to the hypocenter, experienced direct shaking damage. And parts of San Francisco and Oakland where at distances where the seismic surface waves peaked at the resonant frequency of structures (about one Hertz) and caused more damage.
I saw your comment and attempted to raise the parent's mod up a bit, but oddly enough accidentally choose "Overrated" sinking it further into the depths of Slash. Just ignore this comment. I'm using it to get rid of my unfortunate moderation.
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
The problem with centralization is that it inspires turf wars and stomps on innovation (I guess that is a political philosophical statement, but I find it's mostly true in my view of the world).
That's what's so great about a search engine (e.g., pick your favorite like google), they crawl the web so you can find the nooks and crannies like the blogs that have the messages you are talking about. Why create something new and a new bureaucracy (which after this crisis is over will search out totally random and inefficient things to do to maintain its survival/existence) when we already have something that works?
You do realize that the cry mentioned will come from not just the rich.
Only for a very strange definition of who is the rich. As long as the work and goods are there, the average consumer cares not one whit where they actually come from.
Also it's not just the rich that complains about cost.
Only because the right wing has brainwashed ordinary people to vote against their own physical and economic interests.
I know you all around here hate people with money, but try to keep some perspective.
No, we don't hate people with money- we hate people who steal money by profiting off of somebody else's work.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Metamodded the flamebait moderation 'Unfair'.
Taking down unfair Moderators one metamod at a time...
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam