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

[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?

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

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: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.