Disaster Recovery For Haiti's Cell Phone Networks

spun writes "A disaster recovery team from Trilogy International Partners, LLC was among the first responders to arrive after the quake in Haiti. After seeing to the safety of their staff, they worked quickly to bring up emergency generators and restore service to the devastated country. Winners of a State Department medal for their previous work in Haiti, the company appears to be a model not only for proper disaster recovery response, but also for ethical corporate behavior. Their quick action has no doubt saved thousands of lives, but Haiti still needs our help." Keith Calder, who used to work on Slashdot ad stuff before we had big corporate owners, is now a film producer of last summer's Battle for Terra. They are giving away signed copies of the DVD to the first 100 people who make $25+ red cross donations. It would be cool to see generous Slashdot Sci-Fi fans make a difference. If you are curious or voyeuristic about the devastation, Google Maps has satellite photos.

Comments

Many Avenues to Help

[stoolpigeon]

I wrote a journal entry earlier today about some of what the organization I work for is doing in Haiti. There are a lot of others in play too and some great ways to help. Hopefully after this stops being the story of the hour, the assistance will continue so that country can come out of this with some kind of up side to it all.
 
  The Navy is on the way and as a former sailor I'm pretty proud to see them rushing to help as they so often do. Helicopters are going to be key for quite a while I think.
 
We'll see the world step up in a big way here I think, and once again we'll see one of the nicer sides of America and how this country can be very generous in times of crisis - not just our government but in the direct giving and participation of the citizenry.

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[jgtg32a]

Aircraft Carriers are very nice in these kind of situations, a clear airfield and IIRC those things can produce a lot of fresh water.

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[spun]

The hospital ship Comfort is on the way and so is the supercarrier Carl Vinson, which can provide power and over 100,000 gallons of desalinated water per day. The problems facing Haiti were severe even before this disaster, but afterwords, what little government they did have has, quite literally, collapsed. In other recent disasters, there has at least been continuity of civil government and some kind of coordinated response from within the country. That is simply not possible in this case. Even the UN headquarters there has collapsed.

One of the first things our military did was to get air traffic control up and functioning. The control tower at the airport had collapsed, and there is simply no power in Port-au-Prince. The US cutter Forward was among the first on the scene, and began directing flights into the country. U.S. Southern Command dispatched a team of 30 engineers, planners and a command and control group to Haiti on a Puerto Rico Air National Guard C-130 Hercules, which arrived soon afterwords and took over this vital function.

The biggest problem is going to be getting things out of the airport and to the people that need it. Reports indicate that the harbor is badly damaged and supplies will need to be trans-shipped through the Dominican Republic and driven into Haiti. This seems to me to be a job for the Seabees. Does anyone know if the Nimitz class supercarriers like the Carl Vinson carry LCACs?

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[edittard]

Getting supplies off the planes, onto some kind of vehicles, and out to refuge camps will take some planning and coordination.

How about mules? Bonus - they're edible!

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[spun]

I just want as much help there as fast as it can get there so try and show us up.

Sure, as do I. But it is important to note that there are other avenues of diplomacy than guns. If you want to get as much help there (and to the next place) as fast as possible, support a political party that actually funds the USAID. It will do more for our national security than any amount of purely military funding.

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[LWATCDR]

Maybe so but one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Carl_Vinson_(CVN-70) can make 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has a hospital, and a bunch of helicopters. It can also provide communications and ATC services.
Of course this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Comfort_(T-AH-20)#2010_Haitian_Earthquake will also be a big help as will.
Actually what they need is money. If everybody in the US just gave $5 it would be a huge amount of money. Just be sure you give to a real charity. The SCUM of the earth are already setting up fake donation websites.
If in doubt the Red Cross, Doctors without Boarders, and Catholic Charities all have a good track record and I believe are all already "in country".

Re:Many Avenues to Help

[Hurricane78]

Man, these are the moments, where I am proud to be human. There may be much evil going on. But sometimes we just seem to switch to another mode. Where we work together and act for the good of us all.

Maybe we humans just have too comfortable lives. Cavemen were small groups who had to work in that mode, to survive.
Like the Hadza for example.
I’m of course not saying that I want more catastrophes. Just more of that outside-normal-rules teamwork.
We would already be much further in evolution...

Digicel still working

[Anonymous Coward]

"Caribbean mobile operator Digicel Group Ltd. said Wednesday that its network in Haiti is still providing domestic and international phone service after a major earthquake devastated the country."
Digicel have also gotten their network in Haiti back working again. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100113-709435.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

Re:Digicel still working

[grcumb]

Digicel has also donated $5,000,000 in cash to Haiti. To put that in perspective, Chase Manhattan donated $1,000,000, less than a single one of their executives made in bonuses this year.

I organised a bit of emergency aid delivery with some folks from Digicel Pacific in the days following the Samoan tsunami that left thousands of people homeless. Not only are they very good at logistics, they also actually care about the people they serve. With their assistance, we were able to deliver solar/wind-up radios to affected families quickly and efficiently. Digicel shipped them for free and even paid for a bunch of them themselves.

This is due in no small part to the fact that Digicel is privately owned by Denis O'Brien. For all his faults (and he has a few), he genuinely cares about things like this and he insists that his people do too. I suspect that publicly owned corps just don't have the freedom to actually express humanitarian interest the way a private corp would.

Digicel are more or less the McDonald's of cell phone carriers in numerous developing nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific: They offer cheap, reliable service with few frills. Their Internet service (where I live, at least) is expensive but available, which is more than can be said about the situation before they arrived on the scene. It's no accident, therefore, that during rioting some years ago in Haiti, people actively defended the towers and buildings owned by Digicel. They were too valuable to burn.

For my part, I take significant comfort from the knowledge that they recovered from utter disaster so quickly. My country receives on average 1.5 hurricanes every year, and sits squarely on the Pacific ring of fire. We've had two 7+ earthquakes already in the last year and we've got a warning level two volcano boiling away in the north. Happily, we're not so crowded and impoverished as Haiti, so our buildings have (so far) staid intact.

Re:Better yet!

[Zedrick]

Yes, much too soon. I enjoy tasteless jokes, but people are still dying over there.

enforcement of engineering code

[fermion]

There are many complaints about government interference in free enterprise, but I think the financial crisis, in which banks loaned money to people with no income with the assumption that they would flip these properties, or cash out the equity as the property appreciated, and therefore the knowledge that the buyers had no stake in the property, and this crisis in Hatia, pretty much shows that one function of government is to develop and enforce proper standards to insure the security of the country.

The reports indicate that Hatia has received significant financial support from the international community in the past. The reports indicate that the government has not used this money wisely, i.e. to develop infrastructure and insure safety. The reports indicate that money existed to make at least some building and some private dwelling safe, but such a thing was never done. We had people paying for modern building that would survive anything but earthquakes. At least the resources should have been put into place to make building that did not immediately kill the occupants. I understand that money was not widely available, and Hatia barely has a government, but I think we can take some lessons on what the minimum responsibility of a government must be from this example.

Re:enforcement of engineering code

[istartedi]

I always think about this during disasters too. Yes, complaining about the permitting process is a favorite sport. When 50,000 die someplace else and fewer than 100 die here in a similar event, then you understand what it's all about. OTOH, how many deaths are caused because people are homeless and/or don't have health care because permitted structures are more expensive? Death due to disaster is easily measured so the permitting process looks like a winner. Deaths due to opportunity cost are more difficult to measure, so we just don't know.

Unfortunately, this is Haiti. The point is moot. They've had a hard enough time keeping a stable government and figuring out how to deal with their limited resources. They should be so lucky someday, to get to the point where they are complaining about the permitting process.

Re:Cellphone yet?

[stoolpigeon]

mobile is almost everywhere and will effectively be everywhere soon. it's actually a key ingredient to solving some of the challenges present in the developing world. FOSS is a big part too - such as the Ushahidi folks who are helping out in numerous ways with the situation in Haiti - from their base of operations in Nairobi.

Pictures from the ground in Haiti...

[daveschroeder]

Devastating...

Re:Pictures from the ground in Haiti...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm sure that they'd be more than happy to talk to somebody with the right supplies.

The trouble is, if you ask for in-kind donations, you are liable to get everybody's expired canned fruitcake and the contents of their secondary sock drawer. At best, that requires a lot of sorting. At worst, you have to pay to dispose of somebody else's trash, while they pat themselves on the back. I'm sure that if somebody who actually knows something about what sorts of supplies are useful called up and offered a pallet of them, the answer would be yes.

It's like computers. If you are operating on any scale, ad-hoc donations of everybody's random emachines would be worse than useless. Unless you have massive amounts of free labor, and a lot of time, you'd be stuck in driver hell until the sun burns out. So, you are much better off with cash, which can easily be converted into pallets of identical machines in known shape. This doesn't mean, of course, that you would say no to somebody offering a pallet of identical hardware; but you'd be an idiot to tell the public that they could dump anything old and computer shaped on you and then feel warm and fuzzy about it.

Re:Pictures from the ground in Haiti...

[kent_eh]

1) How do you propose to drive that truck load of food you donated from your location to Haiti? It's an island, y'know.
2) Money is a lot more portable than stuff. It will be used to buy supplies (at wholesale prices and quantities) close to where it's needed.
3) Like it or not, transportation of emergency supplies and volunteers into the disaster area costs money.

Cellphones ONLY

[spun]

Haiti has nearly no land lines. Cell phone networks are cheaper to deploy than land lines. If you had bothered to read the summary, you would have read that this company was down there before the earthquake, and had won a medal from the State Department for their work building communications infrastructure in Haiti.

More emergency comms for Haiti

[zogger]

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2010/01/14/11290/?nc=1

Industrial Strength MagicJack?

[assemblyronin]

What about an air-droppable military grade (i.e., MIL-STD) device with a generator/battery/solar power source that sets up a cellular phone hot spot, and can link with the national carrier?

There are plenty of technical hurdles to overcome, but if they're recoverable and 'inexpesive' enough to deploy on a one-to-two week bases. It would allow for rapid dissemination of communication signals across a disaster area while the more permanent infrastructure is brought back online.

Re:Less ironic than before

[spun]

Much less ironic. This actually was and is a heck of a job. First rate response on our part. I don't want to make this political, though. In some ways, we are better prepared to deal with international emergencies than internal ones. But this type of preparedness and international developmental and emergency aid was a major plank of Obama's platform, so I'm glad to see him actually living up to a promise.

Re:Cellphone yet?

[jank1887]

many developing countries are skipping the wired infrastructure altogether. It's generally easier/faster to set up a mobile network. It can also be more resilient, adaptable to change, etc.

Re:Better yet!

[Jeng]

If the DVD's were going to get tossed, then using them to obtain disaster support sounds like a good use of the resources.

Re:Cellphone yet?

[compro01]

Covering a large but sparsely built up area perfectly is a lot easier than covering a small, but heavily built up area perfectly. Big buildings of radio-unfriendly materials like steel and concrete make a mess of things, requiring many more cells in unusual configurations, whereas coverage in open air is completely consistent and you can just throw down towers in a simple grid.

Haiti the manmade disaster - debt crisis

[RichMan]

Checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
And a few of the external links.

This has been a man made disaster for 200 years. We should also respond to the man made act as well.

sat terminals

[zogger]

40 sat terminals are being established, along with 60 broadband terminals, from the ITU. A lot of stuff has to be moved in, because so much was destroyed

http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2010/02.html

I was looking at various pics of the destruction, and it is trite and often used, but it looks like a major giant airforce just carpet bombed the place.

I have never been there, but based on other articles I have read about real poor areas with cellphones, a lot of the people depend on charging kiosks / local services to recharge their phones, because domestic electricity is so rare. I would imagine most of those facilities are now smashed as well.

Not so fast down the memory hole...

[copponex]

The reason Haiti is in the shithole is because it's been occupied and abused by foreign powers. We've been involved since the end of the 19th Century, when legendary Marine Smedley Butler, in his own words, "was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism... I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in."

Haiti was occupied by the United States from 1915-1934. Since then, marines have been sent to Haiti numerous times. The CIA played both sides of Duvalier while his paramilitary force, the Tonton Macoute, assassinated dissidents and anyone who dared oppose Papa Doc. In a final embarrassment to the Haitian people and to the very idea of democracy itself, the Bush Administration sent the Marines to help finalize the coup in 2004 by kidnapping Aristide and sending him to Africa, once again throwing the nation into chaos.

It's good that the US Government is assisting the Haitian people during the disaster, and I never discount the generosity of the American public. Just don't be surprised if they don't treat us like friends.

A new book on the subject, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment by Peter Hallward, scrupulously documents the events leading up to February 29, 2004, and concludes that what occurred during the "rebellion" was in fact a modern coup d'état, financed and orchestrated by forces allied with the US government. Hallward provides extensive documentation for his claims in interviews he has given on the subject. -Wikipedia

Thanks for pointing that out

[spun]

I'm sure a lot of people don't realize just how culpable we are in Haiti's misery. We can't change the past, but we can do better in the future.

Re:Thanks for pointing that out

[spun]

Well, the colonial period of Europe may have ended long ago, but the US has continued it's own imperial goals in this hemisphere right up to the present day. I think if we just got out of the way, and stopped installing puppet tyrants, the people of Central and South America, and the Caribbean, would do just fine.

I want to stress that I do not hate America. We are a great country, and capable of great good. But first, we must learn to do no harm.

Re:Thanks for pointing that map out

[copponex]

Unlike Haiti and Cuba, the politicians in the Dominican Republic have done exactly as instructed by Washington DC. This is the single metric by which nations are measured - democracy, free speech, genocide, totalitarianism, and fascism are all equally tolerable as long as you know who the boss is.

Don't take my word for it - read about it for yourself.