Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
... 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
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)
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.)
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.