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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.
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.
[insert witty sig here]
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.
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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.
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.
SMSs can make it over a patchy network when voice calls will not. It also allows easier cataloging and management of multiple nodes. Instead of having a person to speak to every remote outpost a computer can aggregate status reports, help requests and so on.
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)
NEED HLP FST PLZ SND ASAP!
Have you metaroderated recently?
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.
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?!
SMS? That has got to be the slowest way to cordinate anything... EVER.
Cellphone network operators can broadcast one SMS simultaneously to all cellphones in an area. If they had broadcast a tsunami warning by SMS right after the earthquake, a huge number of people would have been saved. Not only rich people with cellphones would be saved, since they would spread the warning to people around them, and those in turn would spread the warning further.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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.
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.
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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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.