Category Archives: Disaster
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Business approach to disaster recovery by Haiti’s largest foreign investor Digicel
Some countries chafe at the fact that their largest investor, employer and/or tax payer is foreign. In many developing countries, this is a mobile operator who came in under the radar to a small and unimportant sector and by growing rapidly became the largest entity before the nationalists could stop them. Such was the case [...]
Cyclone Thane: Early warning and preparedness saves lives
We complain every time early warning is not given or false warnings/evacuation orders are issued. But praise must be given when right action is taken and lives are saved. Indian authorities are to be praised. Witnesses in Chennai and Pondicherry said trees had been toppled, there had been power outages throughout the night and disruption [...]
Disagreeing with Smith Dharmasaroja: Importance of focusing on the most important issue
Smith Dharmasaroja is a hero of mine. Disagreeing with a hero does not come easy. But he is wrong to give equal or greater weight to national tsunami detection and monitoring systems than to communication of last-mile warning. It may be that the fault lies in the reporter in ordering the comments, but it does [...]
Sri Lanka: Seven years after tsunami, lack of information and preparedness prevails
The government itself has found the early warning actions of the designated national authorities deficient and is talking of setting up workaround mechanisms. Nothing really new, other than sadness that seven years and large commitments of resources have not taken us much farther than we were back in 2004. What is even more worrisome is [...]
Sri Lanka: Bypassing the national disaster early warning center
Based on theory and analysis, we have strongly advocated that early warning should be issued by government. I have even gone so far as to suggest that those who issue false warnings should be prosecuted. Thus, it comes as shock to read in the Sunday Times that the government itself is planning to bypass the [...]
Emulating Speech-To-Text Reliability with ITU Difficulty Scores
The P.800 Difficult Percentage (or Difficulty Score) is an International Telecommunications Union Standardization sector recommended method for testing transmission quality in one’s own laboratory. We adopted this method in our feasibility study to enable Freedom Fone for emergency data exchange. The project studied the design challenges for exchanging the Freedom Fone interactive voice data with [...]
Dam safety rises on Indian policy agenda
The Mullaperiyar Dam has been considered unsafe for many years. Nothing much has been done about it, partly because Tamilnadu and Kerala cannot agree on the remedial measures. Now Kerala is going hard, possibly energized by a feature film called Dam 999. Mr Joseph, quoted below, is a Minister: Mr. Joseph told reporters here on [...]
Crowd sourcing emergency information with Interactive Voice
The usefulness and ease-of-use of interactive voice, with Freedom Fone, for Sarvodaya Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members to supply incident information was blogged two weeks back. Now the question is “how is all that information put to use in responding to those incidents?”. In here we tell parts of that story. CERT members call [...]
Communication for risk reduction talk at DMC Symposium
It is very important to keep the conversation going in a field like disaster risk reduction. The Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center, in collaboration with UNDP, is organizing the Third National Symposium on Disaster Risk Reduction & Climate Change Adaptation on 24th and 25th November 2011. The presentation from LIRNEasia is here.
Interactive Voice is Useful and Easy-to-use in managing Crises
We conducted controlled-exercises, with Lanka Jathika Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya (Sarvodaya) Hazard Information Hub (HIH) Operators and Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members. The HIH data center is in Moratuwa. The study using interactive voice, field tested the technology in Colombo, Matara, Nuwara-eliya, and Ratnapura Districts. Figure to the left shows an average ease-of-use of 3.95 [...]
Hardening critical infrastructure: Lessons from Florida
Done for Florida’s electricity utilities, but applicable to other infrastructure as well. A short summary by Mark Jamison, but I assume a longer report exists. In the aftermath of the 2004-2005 hurricane season, when eight named storms caused a total of $15.5 million in customer losses from power outages, Florida embarked on a comprehensive reform [...]
No walls can stop tsunamis
I recall a meeting within weeks of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, convened by the current President (then Prime Minister), to seek the views of intellectuals about rebuilding. The most memorable suggestion came from the late Arisen Ahubudu, who began with a reference to Madagascar once being part of Lanka and ended with a proposal [...]
90% of deaths and 73% of people affected by disasters in first half of 2011 were in Asia
It used to be that we had the majority of deaths and the developed economies had the majority of economic damage from disasters. But according to the authoritative CRED-CRUNCH newsletter, Asia seems to absorbing the most of all forms of damage, including economic losses. Whereas 42% of disasters [in the first half of 2011] happened [...]
Human, not natural, disasters
Smith Dharmasaroja is on the ball, again. He was right in telling Thais to get ready for a tsunami, and he’s right in telling them they have caused the conditions for the floods. Floods are the biggest problem for most Asian countries. Attention must be paid. As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a [...]
Twitter as crowdsourced early warning
The idea of using information supplied by people for early warning is extremely attractive. So much so that one politically-correct person wanted us to rename our project from “last mile” to “first mile.” We didn’t because in our model it was the last mile, the end of the warning chain, and we have little tolerance [...]
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