Category Archives: Disaster
Myanmar beefs up emergency communications
Cyclone Nargis still haunts Myanmar. With a wall of wave as high as 16 feet at 135 miles per hour, the sea had unleashed its fury across the Irrawaddy Delta on May 2, 2008. Nearly 140,000 lives were perished and 2.4 million displaced people lost everything. It destroyed 450,000 homes, damaged 350,000 others, flooded 600,000 [...]
Symbols in Alerting
I had a dream once – I was walking along a river in China and then an audible alarm emitting from my mobile phone got my attention. When I looked at the screen, surprisingly, a symbol with a red border showing rising water and a human figure running uphill towards shelter, was displaying. Later I [...]
Internet and telecoms restored in quake-hit Sichuan
Last Saturday a 6.6 magnitude earthquake has rocked the Baoxing County in China’s Sichuan province. It immediately reminded everyone the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that killed nearly 90,000 people around Chengdu city in the very Sichuan province during May 2008. Five years is too short to forget the devastation as well as the mistakes. In 2008, [...]
Overview of meteor impact hazard
Nalaka Gunawardene, a friend and colleague, has provided an overview of the hazards posed by near-earth objects. Thousands of pieces of cosmic debris enter our atmosphere every day — most are burned up before hitting the ground (producing harmless ‘shooting stars’). Larger pieces that crash-land are called meteorites. Even then, average ones are too small [...]
Infrasound: A particular form of damage from meteor hits
What we noticed in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the randomness of the damage. Houses that were right next to each other were affected differently: one destroyed another untouched. This was supposed to be caused by the complex interaction of the wave and the topography of the coast. In the case [...]
Meteor strike knocks out mobile networks
How exactly, is the question. In the case of a tsunami or a tidal surge we know what causes the damage. What were knocked out: power? towers? Was it caused by congestion? I hope readers will fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Russians are not the most forthcoming on these matters. He spoke to [...]
Making mobile networks resilient in the face of disasters
There is a trade off between operating networks that are able to keep operating in the face of disasters and keeping down costs. For example, a 24 hr battery will yield a more robust BTS than a 8 hour battery. But as the FCC initiated discussion revealed, 24 hr batteries impose additional costs on operators. [...]
Lasting impacts of IDRC funded research
It was seven years to this coming January that we launched our Last Mile HazInfo project, just one year after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It’s good to know that the project is still talked about. We are beginning work on a Tsunami + 10 initiative that will assess the impacts of post-tusnami. LIRNEasia also [...]
ITU-D facilitates hands-on exposure with CAP-enabled Sahana messaging software
The International Telecommunications Union – Development (ITU-D) sector recruited me to introduce ways in which the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) interoperable emergency communication standard could be operationalized in the region. The audience comprised member state delegates from their respective telecommunications regulatory authorities and their emergency operations centres (or disaster management centres). The workshop: “Use of [...]
They are getting rid of warning sirens in Oregon; Sri Lanka is still installing
The gist of the NYT report is that some residents of coastal Oregon are unhappy about the discontinuance of tsunami warning sirens. But in these matters what one has to look at is the science. Supporters of the county’s decision, including some coastal hazard experts, say that the sirens, comforting as they may sound in [...]
Progress on first-responder communication, but not enough
Both in our HazInfo project and in the work we did subsequently in the Maldives, we addressed the problems of first-responder communication. The report from the NYT highlights the progress that has been made since 9/11, but also the remaining gaps (identified and written about in the 1990s by our colleagues Peter Anderson and Gordon [...]
Sahana software ensures hot meals delivered to Hurricane Sandy victims
“Sahana software is being used to support the collection and fulfilment of requests for assistance and volunteers from the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy: the Rockaways in Queens, Coney Island and Red Hook in Brooklyn, Staten Island and communities along the New Jersey coast. Sahana allows organizations to more effectively prioritize and dispatch resources [...]
Empowering Communities with Voice Technologies for Crisis Management
Use the embedded frame below or click here to view the story. Empowering Communities with Voice-enabled Technologies for Crisis Management on Prezi
Roaming as a disaster response
A significant number of base stations (around 20% or lower) in the Hurricane Sandy affected areas are supposed to have gone down, mainly due to electricity problems. I am sure the systems here in South Asia are a lot more robust in this aspect because our baseline expectations of the reliability of the electricity networks [...]
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