Slashdot Mirror
I Downloaded an App. Suddenly, I was a Rescue Dispatcher. (houstonchronicle.com)
Holly Hartman, a journalism teacher for 22 years, writes an incredible story: After watching nonstop coverage of the hurricane and the incredible rescues that were taking place, I got in bed at 10:30 on Tuesday night. I had been glued to the TV for days. I read an article about the Cajun Navy and the thousands of selfless volunteers who have shown up to this city en masse. The article explained they were using a walkie-talkie-type app called Zello to communicate with each other, locate victims, get directions, etc. I downloaded the app, found the Cajun Navy channel and started listening. I was completely enthralled. Voice after voice after voice coming though my phone in the dark, some asking for help, some saying they were on their way. Most of the transmissions I was hearing when I first tuned in were from Houston, but within 30 minutes or so, calls started coming in from Port Arthur and Orange. Harvey had moved east from Houston and was pummeling East Texas. Call after call from citizens saying they were trapped in their houses and needed boat rescue. None of the volunteer rescuers had made it to that area from Houston, but as soon as the calls started coming in, they were moving out, driving as fast as they could into the middle of Harvey.
Sounds a little militia-y to me! Must be those Nazi Racists I keep hearing about trying to drown all the brown people, right?
I wonder if this could be used to fight crimes as well as natural disasters, things like citizens arrests and/or people with registered handguns could respond to people in trouble probably more quickly than the police could haul their lard-asses out of the donut shoppe. I could be at someone's home who is being broken into anywhere within a 5-mile radius of me in less than 10 minutes, assuming I'm home, carrying .357 and looking for perps.
And that I can only communicate with drones or their pilots.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Suddenly, I was a vietnamese callgirl.
I've been relaying messages for someone in the Miami-Dade area. She has internet connectivity, but not cellular. Her only method of communicating with her mother is via cellular (call or text), and she doesn't have any other text type gateway apps set up. However, she does normally use Zello which is non-functional for her even though she has data. So I'm not sure if Zello is overloaded there, or if it requires more bandwidth than is currently available. Either way I'm posting this to point out that Zello is not functioning for at least some people in the thick of it, even though they can use FB Messenger and other messaging apps of the sort.
Better known as 318230.
What's the point of rescuing those people who displayed a total lack of intelligence by remaining in what they knew would become a disaster zone?
It was known for days that the hurricane was coming. It's not like it happened out of the blue. People had lots of time to evacuate safely.
Even those without access to a vehicle, or those who have mobility issues, had ample time to make arrangements or otherwise rely on government-provided evacuation services/shelters.
It's no secret that hurricanes can cause severe problems for people who do not evacuate. Even children know this to be true.
So why bother rescuing anyone who was stupid enough to stay? Why risk lives saving the stupid?
This is how I became an instant air traffic controller. I stumbled upon this app, thinking it was a game, when suddenly I saidYou are cleared for takeoff
I followed it up immediately with the clarification This channel is reserved for drones and drone pilots only. Please clear the channel for them. Thank you for your cooperation.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Is that if you're in the affected areas it's pretty unlikely to work. You see they need either a good cellular connection of wifi to work. In a storm of the nature of Harvey and Irma one of the first things to go is electric power which renders both of those inoperable.
Only thing that works somewhat is radio - I have analog and digital radios just for that purpose.
Never seen a better advert on /.
That's a good question. Fortunately, because the rescuers are volunteers, we do not have to answer it. If they feel like helping people, it is up to them — even if it can be argued, that they are rescuing fools, who'd be better off dead.
And then we can revisit the mandatory charity of providing health care to the fools, who haven't bothered procuring health insurance in advance, school-lunches for kids, whose parents can't afford them, etc. Whoever feels those people should be helped, is welcome to do that on their own — without the government confiscating money at the point of weapon from others.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wow. This article describes what I tried to do in 1995 for the Kobe earthquake, 20 years ago. But it suggests ways things go wrong as well. In the linked article the journalist put massive effort in and helped some people. But she also told everyone repeatedly that help was coming, even when she knew there were no boats in the water. I do not want to judge, since it sounds like she was doing a superhuman feat that nobody else was there to do and that was the best that was humanly possible. In the end compassion directed her to make some decisions and compassion later haunted her enough to write the article, and explain everything so that others can help in the future.
At that time I was at a new Internet provider that opened for business just before the quake, and I hoped to get Tokyo University to act as a call center to pick up calls for help. There was no news coming out of the area and no phones, but Internet lines were working. We would put it together on a web page and coordinate grassroots disaster relief, sharing people's needs and who could bring help there. In the end we couldn't do it for two main reasons. News organizations refused to cooperate by sharing what they saw from a helicopter, and Tokyo U. said there were too many bureaucratic problems with cooperating. In the end while I was able to provide some support on my own, mostly by relaying information and helping people who were in the area to upload pictures, there was a limit to what was possible. And then the most amazing site was created by a Stanford student if I remember correctly. Nowadays there are lots more systems. I believe the phone company or was it Yahoo made one that lets you say if you are safe.
Since data connections are usually more resilient than voice service (and even voice over data apps degrade) there will likely continue to be a need for data-based systems in emergency situations. I don't know why the emergency support dropped to such a horrifying extent that nobody else could help. I hope the article stimulates more people to recognize the need for better support of communities in disaster areas. If 911 gets overloaded or ignores a key communications channel like this app, then perhaps there should be a way to bring more people on board from different walks of life in an emergency and coordinate online. In fact anyone online even far away from the disaster area could have done so. This journalist took up the challenge but it shouldn't have to happen that way ever again.
To add to the Texan mentality; nearly 80% of Rockport Texas was destroyed by Harvey. This included the schools.
The kids at these school had to register in other counties in order to continue their schooling.
The football team of Rockport, in order to stay a foot ball team, has forgone going to school this year in order to stay registered in Rockport, so they can play football this season.
A hurricane destroyed their entire home town, and they CHOOSE to be a year behind in school, just so they can play some football....
To a great extent this is why ham radio is still around. I applaud folks good intentions to jump in and help, but counting on cell towers to stay up is courting a bigger disaster. There will be storms/earthquakes, etc that will take down the cell towers, the fiber that connects it, the electricity the supports it,and the diesel supply chain that keeps back-up generators running. Ham radio frequencies can reach hundreds and even thousands of miles to areas outside of an impacted area and are often the only line of communication in a disaster. We also need to enable the FM receivers that are built into modern cell to support broadcast of "critical, need to know information."
Ham radio operators have a similar type thing we can use called echo-link. You can't download it unless you have a Ham radio license though. Sometimes I don't have my mobile radio with me, so instead of carrying a walkie-talkie around, I can punch up a repeater using echo-link and use it similar to a walkie-talkie. 99% of the time, I'm just copying the mail on the weather spotters repeater.
I am not a rescue dispatcher but...
Try this then: trance music + police band.
You have to play with the volumes of both until you get the right balance, but once you do it's strangely pleasant to listen to. Obviously, cities like Baltimore and Chicago have more chatter than Halifax.
I actually use this as background when I played Eve, it was a perfect level of 'activity' that made it seem so much less of a boring empty universe.
Probably NOT as entertaining if you are, in fact, an emergency services dispatcher.
http://youarelistening.to/chic...
Lots of cities available: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Brisbane, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Halifax, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis, Montréal, Newark, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, St. John's, St. Louis, Saint Petersburg, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan, Wichita
EDIT: nice. Slashdot can't be bothered to use a posting system from THIS century, but they can detect and abort my post because I dared to paste a list! OMG.
-Styopa
With New Orleans, most people were "My home is flooded. Im gonna wait for the guvmint come rescue me".
In Houston, most people were "My home is flooded. How can I help my fellow neighbors in this time of need?"
This... just sounds all too familiar.
I get the human interest angle, and there's Disaster, and Hurricanes, and Courage, and Resilience Under Pressure.
However promoting the Zello angle seems a little lame. How exactly is this different than listening in on a police scanner? Or ham radio? An old-fashioned party line or a telegraph station? Doing a ride-along? Because Internets?
Adding "internets", "by computer", or "app" to a story does not fundamentally change the story. It's still about citizens asking for help. And rescue authorities, or courageous citizens coming to their rescue.
Am I being too cynical about the focus on the app?
so then I was neck-deep in water with a turd floating around me.
I fail to see how this betters my situation. Please enlighten.