Category Archives: Disaster
Sahana software for Hurricane Sandy: New York City is using it
The City’s Office of Emergency Management has been relying on Sahana software for its shelter management and registration programs since 2007. Sri Lanka also has it. The Sahana Software Foundation is assisting the City of New York in its use of Sahana software to manage its response to Hurricane Sandy. Sahana software foundation is not [...]
Cell broadcasting used to warn public about Sandy
With slow-moving Sandy leaving New York State, they are counting the dead. It appears that 22 people died. Each death is a tragedy that the disaster managers would have loved to avoid. But can you imagine what the toll would have been if not for extensive planning and early warning? The word “cell broadcasting” is [...]
A plea for closer communication between DMC and the people when disaster looms
Right now disaster awareness is high. A cyclone was heading toward Sri Lanka’s Northeast Coast but has apparently veered off toward the Indian East Coast. Flooding has started in different parts of the country, trees are falling, transport has been affected. Of course, people are very aware of Hurricane Sandy and the US East Coast [...]
TVEAP-LIRNEasia film short-listed for UNISDR award
A short film made as part of Nuwan Waidyanatha’s action research project assessing the efficacy of voice and text in disaster communication has been shortlisted for an award. TVE Asia Pacific’s short film, Do You Hear Me, is one of 11 finalists in the first Asian Film Festival on Disaster Risk Reduction which will take [...]
Summary of the VoiceICT4D project outcomes
VoiceICT4D project page LIRNEasia, through a stakeholder forum, advocated the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center (DMC) to move towards a multi-agency situational-awareness platform by creating a register of alerting authorities and then sharing it’s call center and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system resources for emergency communication. The “Do you Hear Me” video, communicating the need [...]
What use is weather information after the fact?
Yesterday, I was talking with an Indian colleague who was involved in improving the Indian weather information system based on INSAT while working for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The trigger had been the devastating cyclone that hit Andhra Pradesh in 1977. This was also related to initiating my interest in disaster early warning [...]
Emergency communications converge inside the SFU Mobile Comm Truck
There are complexities in interconnecting agencies but more at the social layers than at the technology layers. The Simon Fraser University (SFU) Mobile Communications (MobComm) Truck was designed to patch a Regional Emergency Operations Centre (REOC), specifically the British Columbia Provincial REOC (termed as the PREOC) communicating through the Internet (TCP/IP) and public telephone lines [...]
Sri Lanka: Nuclear hazard detection sites in eastern and central locations too
I was pleased to read that detection devices for nuclear hazards are to be set up in Sri Lanka, even if it was from a foreign publication. I have been one of the few to point out that Sri Lanka lives in the shadow of nuclear reactors, while getting none of the benefits. This announcement [...]
Social medial for emergency communication in Sri Lanka
People in Sri Lanka felt the tremors from the April 11, 2012 tsunamigenic earthquake. Reports indicate that, before the Government of Sri Lanka could issue any kind of bulletin, within 10-15 minutes of the tremors, people were receiving tweets of the event. Samarajiva wrote – “Tweets kept flying. I and several others active in social [...]
LIRNEasia’s 3rd Disaster Risk Reduction Public Lecture: Beyond Tsunamis
LIRNEasia’s thinking, right along, has been, if one is prepared to appropriately warn of rapid onset tsunamis then they are quite ready for all-hazards. Then why did the already established warning centre fail on 2011 November 21. Preparation, Warning, and Response are three linked components of the Disaster Management life-cycle common to all-hazards. Development of [...]
Making emergency communication effective: 3rd LIRNEasia Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture
The 3rd LIRNEasia Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture will be held on 19 June 2012, Tuesday at 1500 hrs at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, 100 Independence Square, Colombo 7. The main talk by LIRNEasia Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha on “making emergency communication effective” will complement the opening presentation by the Director General of the [...]
Bad voice quality suspends Automatic Speech Recognition for Emergency Communication
In order to establish the fact that the voice quality over currently available GSM networks are poor for converting the voice messages to text. These finds are from the Voice-enabled ICTs for Disaster Management project that field tested the use of an Interactive Voice Response system for extending emergency communications to the last-mile. Situational reports [...]
OASIS acknowledges the importance of LIRNEasia’s voice-enabled CERT alerting work
Patrick Gannon (President & CEO, Board Director at OASIS), in an email, “You provide some very interesting information on the open source Sahana effort and examples of using citizen volunteers for disaster situation reporting. The issue is being highlighted in the 2012 CAP workshop FINAL REPORT.” Get more details on the voice-enabled alerting and situational [...]
LIRNEasia disaster management action research: Video on using voice in local languages
Senior Research Fellow Nuwan Waidyanatha recently completed an action research project on how local-language voice communication can be used in early warning and other disaster management tasks. A 10 mt video has just been released.
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