Gulfnews: Cyclone victims ignored repeated warnings

A false tsunami alert two months ago led thousands of Bangladeshis to ignore warnings as Cyclone Sidr approached, costing many lives, villagers and officials said on Tuesday.

“This time we did not take the number 10 danger signal seriously because the government has been issuing these warnings quite often. We have rushed to cyclone centres in the past and then headed straight back,” said Abed Master, a teacher in Golshakhali, one of the worst-hit villages in southern Bangladesh.

Officials said they had struggled in vain to persuade villagers – used to the Bay of Bengal’s many lesser cyclones and storms – of the danger they faced.

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The victims of cyclone in Bangladesh are poorest among the poor. Their views about effective warning system “lacks credibility” to the concerned bodies.But it is a real bad news when the merchant mariners have slammed Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) for suddenly raising the cyclone’s severity within an hour. It clearly demonstrates the BMD’s professional incompetence. Reuters provides the chilling details.

I was in Macau attending Mobile Asia 2007 when cyclone SIDR was brewing in the Bay of Bengal. BBC and CNN were updating its movement since November 12. To put a perspective to it, their weather commentators said SIDR’s intensity was similar to Katrina.

Both the international TV channels consistently mentioned Bangladesh being the very possible victim. Unlike in New Orleans, the international TV news crew did not physically report from the coastal area of Bangladesh. But the SIDR dominated their news and it gained prominence gradually.

The sensors — four in the Bay and two in the Arabian Sea — will look for changes in ocean water level and send readings via satellite to the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) in Hyderabad, the hub for the system.

The Rs 125-crore early warning system will also use a network of seismic stations, tide gauges and computer simulations based on seabed studies to issue alerts about tsunamis — waves sometimes triggered by undersea earthquakes.

Continue reading “Tsunami sentinels on duty under sea – Six sensors in place, six more to be added”

Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest community-based organisation, and LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy think-tank, collaborated on a 32-village pilot project that sought to identify the best technologies for reaching villages; to identify the significance of organisational strength and training for risk reduction; and to assess the participation of women in these activities.The community-based approach implemented in the project is different from a public-warning approach, but has lessons for government communications with first responders and for community organisation and training as well.

For example, the project field tested addressable and remotely activated satellite radios that have coverage over the entire Bay of Bengal region. Other equipment deployed included Java and Symbion enabled mobile handsets capable of generating loud alarms and multi-language alert messages.

The Bangladesh Network Office for Urban Safety (BNUS) of the Department of Civil Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) is co-organising a workshop with LIRNEasia entitled “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-based Last Mile Warning Systems” to discuss the findings of the Last Mile Hazard Warning System (Hazinfo) Pilot Project as well as share the lessons of community-based last mile warning systems in Bangladesh.

The workshop is part of a series of dissemination workshops that aims to gather experts, community volunteers and community organisations involved in early warning activities from the South Asian Region.

This workshop will be held at ITN Centre, Buet on October 25.

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Now, Phil Cummins, lead author on the Nature paper and a geologist at Geoscience Australia, believes this is not the case.He said: “I reviewed the geological literature and found the evidence for a lack of tectonic activity along the Myanmar coast was not compelling.”

Historical evidence

Recent GPS data, he said, suggested that the plate boundary was at sea in this area, hidden below thick layers of sediment.

Dr Cummins added: “Although these GPS measurements are sparse, these show that there is active deformation near the Myanmar coast that is consistent with a locked thrust-fault offshore, which is the type needed to generate tsunami.”

Computer simulation of tsunami
A computer simulation shows the havoc a tsunami could wreak
The geologist also looked at accounts of an earthquake that occurred in the area in 1762, which wrenched up parts of the coast by between 3-7m.

His computer simulation of the quake, which he believes would have measured magnitude 8.8, showed that a similar event today would have significant impacts.

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I have read about the mudslide triggered tsunami as a theoretical possibility (cannot actually recall specific mention of a historical event). The danger with this particular form of tsunami is that there is no prior earthquake for the sensors to catch. The only thing that can detect the resultant tsunami is a tsunami buoy of the kind that is now installed in the sea between Sri Lanka and Thailand.

When Smith Dharmasarojana speaks, I listen. This needs to be taken very seriously. What we in Sri Lanka can do is to improve the national warning system and prepare the villages, particularly on the East Coast, to respond fast and effectively. At the regional level, I guess we need to move forward on installing more buoys in the Bay of Bengal.

briefs…

BANGKOK: Mountains of mud on the Indian Ocean floor could tumble down in an earthquake and trigger a tsunami that could lash the resort island of Phuket, Thailand’s disaster centre said on Thursday. The mountains — some more than seven kilometres high and 10 kilometres wide — are believed to have formed from sediment carried into the ocean by rivers running from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand. They sit near India’s Andaman Islands, said Smith Dharmasaroja, chairman of the National Disaster Warning Centre.

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In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it was evident that if Sri Lanka along with the other affected countries had an effective disaster warning system in place, many lives could have been saved. The lack of a national disaster warning system compounded by a non-existent local warning communication system and public training makes it unlikely to this day that hazard information will reach individual households at the “last mile” even if an ocean-based tsunami detection system is deployed. The current project, driven by civil society organizations, has extraordinary potential for saving lives and restoring a sense of security to the affected people in Sri Lanka and hopefully around the Bay of Bengal.

An experimental research design is being adopted to evaluate the role played by a number of factors that contribute to the design of an effective last mile hazard information dissemination system. The specific objectives of this research project are to evaluate the following factors:
1) Reliability of ICTs as warning technologies;
2) Effectiveness of ICTs as warning technologies;
3) Contribution of training to an effective warning response;
4) Contribution of the level of organizational development of a village to an effective warning response;
6) Gender-specific response to hazard mitigating action;
5) Degree of integration of ICTs in the daily life of villages.
The project proposal is available as a PDF document.

The wind was not held back

Below is a talk given 6 years ago entitled “To hold back the wind.” That was an attempt to get disaster preparedness going. It failed, obviously. The walls of water came in with no warning; thousands died instantaneously; millions are homeless. Parentheses refer to 9/11 in the US for scale: in a few hours on the 26th of December more that 17,900 (3,000) died out of a population of 19 million (280 million). More than a million are homeless (mostly office space was lost). More will die due to epidemics caused by thousands of unburied corpses, bad water, etc. (insignificant). This is just Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia’s immediate focus is the Bay of Bengal region. We have lost over 40,000 people by the present count. Everything I said above re Sri Lanka applies to the region. We will give food and shelter; we will comfort the living and bury the dead; but we will and must do more. We must create the conditions to minimize deaths on this scale.

The speech below is what I gave at the Workshop on “Effective Use of Telecommunications in Emergency and Disaster Management,” organized by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka on the 30th of November 1998, just over six years ago. That workshop brought together everyone in government working on disaster management as well as relevant civil society organizations and all the telecom operators. It was addressed by the Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and the Media and by the Deputy Minister of Social Services who was responsible for disaster management in that government. The workshop was preceded by an interim report that had been prepared after extensive consultation with stakeholders. The workshop resulted in a final report with multiple annexes, recommendations, and even a Cabinet Paper authorizing and requiring the Telecom Regulatory Commission to be the focal point for effective use of telecom in disaster management in Sri Lanka. TRC staff were trained in disaster management and work was assigned. The subject of disaster management became so important that the staff of the TRC collected funds to place communication equipment in the ambulances of the National Hospital, remedying a stunning gap discovered in the course of the research. One would think that this was a policy process that had been run by the book; that it would yield the desired results. Or so I thought when I left the office of Director General of Telecommunications and Sri Lanka in June 1999.

The test of good policy is implementation. The test was the tsunami of the 26th of December 2004. The government of Sri Lanka and the Telecom Regulatory Commission failed. There were no early warning systems using telecom technology; there were no procedures to prevent the networks from crashing in the face of the surge of calls; there were no priority schemes for disaster management workers; there were no emergency telecom kits ready to be used; and two days later, newspapers are still carrying reports that the dead cannot be counted for the lack of working telecom facilities.

At this moment, the focus is on disaster recovery. In the face of the unprecedented scale of human suffering that has been unleashed on this poor land, that is understandable. But I will swim against the tide and state that we must use this moment to also look beyond the immediate and urgent needs and think of how we could have reduced the suffering and saved lives if only we had prepared in times of calm. The foundation of disaster management is disaster preparedness.

That is what we were trying to do back in 1998-99 when we worked with all the disaster management agencies. Obviously that did not work. It is possible that the reasons for failure were the lack of incentives meaningful to Sri Lankan bureaucrats and politicians; the tendency in government organizations to denigrate and nullify initiatives associated with the predecessor of the current leader, and so on. But if we leave aside these uncharitable explanations for the moment, what we are left with is the explanation that the previous effort was badly timed; it was undertaken at a time of calm, when the disaster had to be imagined. The valuable work that was done got neglected in the press of everyday matters.

So now is the time to engage the people responsible for disaster management. Despite the fact that our hands are full and our hearts are heavy, this is the moment we must attend to the task of preparing for the next disaster. LIRNEasia will use its capabilities for this task, redirecting some of the funds set apart for other projects to initiate a regional project on the effective use of ICTs for disaster management. Natural disasters do not respect national boundaries as we saw from this tsunami. Our response must also not respect national borders. But we must work and we must prepare. Otherwise, another 50,000 lives later, we’’ll be having this same conversation.

Please await details in the coming days.
Telecom in disaster management

Why LIRNEasia?
Enormous amounts of money are invested annually in ICTs. The potential of information and communication technologies, or ICTs for economic and social progress is substantial. ICTs aren’t necessarily the answer to higher incomes and development in itself; but together with other factors, they provide a means to improve people’s capabilities and knowledge so that they may better their lives. ‘Asia’ is the collective name for the countries roughly encircled by Russia, Turkey, Egypt and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. There is little that the entire region holds in common. Within this vast continent, lies South Asia, home to the largest concentration of poor people in the world. Yet Asia is seen as driving the global economy and is home to some of the world’s highest ICT industry performers. Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate as well as the second highest estimated number of Internet users in the world. Taiwan (China) has the highest number of mobile phones per hundred inhabitants in the world; Hong Kong (China) has the third highest (ITU, 2004). But Asia is also home to some of the lowest: the Internet is used by less than one per cent of the population in DPR Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Cambodia, just to name a few. There are less than two telephones (fixed or mobile) per one hundred people in several of these countries (ITU, 2004). Broadband penetration is barely worth mentioning in many of Asia’s poorer nations. In terms of ICT sector performance, there are many Asias. ICT use in Asia and developing countries is held back by laws and regulations. The existing policy and regulatory arrangements do not help people use ICTs to live their lives; they actively hinder them, for the most part. Very often, especially in South Asia, laws and regulations restrict, or even preclude the exploitation of new low-cost technologies, such as Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is ideally suited for developing countries, it is a very low-cost and convenient technology developed by multiple small manufacturers because the United States government chose to unregulate two bands of frequencies (2.4 GHz and 5.8GHz), also called the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands. Subject to minimal safeguards, people were free to do whatever they wanted in these bands. Today, pretty much every laptop you buy has got Wi-Fi built in. The equipment is cheap and ideal for countries where purchasing power is low. However, the frequency band that Wi-Fi operates in is regulated in most other countries. In Sri Lanka, for example, the law requires operators to obtain a license for ‘every frequency emitting apparatus’ from the telecom regulator. Although some operators, like LIRNEasia’s service provider have managed to include Wi-Fi services within the scope of their licenses, the full potential of the service cannot be achieved unless the law is changed. Unlicensing or deregulation of this band would greatly reduce the cost of making use of this technology, allowing the cost to users to reflect the true cost of the technology, not arbitrary regulatory charges. This is the kind of thing that we will seek to promote and facilitate.

Our Mission
LIRNEasia’s mission is to improve the lives the people of Asia; by making it easier to use the information and communication technologies that they need; by changing the laws, policies and regulations to enable those uses; by building Asia-based human capacity through research, training, consulting and advocacy. To that end, LIRNEasia will endeavor to transform governance and regulation of ICTs in the Asian region from obstructive, inhibiting regimes, into ones that will allow opportunities for people to use ICTs in ways that will improve their lives and to expand opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to introduce new products and services with a minimum of government interference. Our immediate priority is building a team of Asian ICT policy and regulatory professionals that can work on equal terms with the best in the world. Initially concentrating on the South Asian and Bay of Bengal areas, LIRNEasia will soon expand its scope to the rest of Asia, with the help of our regional partners. Sri Lanka will anchor this effort, but it will be a genuinely regional initiative, drawing on human capacity from the region itself. We will focus on creating and disseminating independent, useable, actionable knowledge, through applied research, on documenting and disseminating regional best practices, on training and on some forms of short-term advisory assistance to governments/parties who request it. Our primary audiences are government (including bilateral and multilateral donor agencies), the private sector within and outside Asia and civil society. We emphasize Asian expertise, but are not exclusive about it. We do case studies, but our policy is to abstract from the complexity to produce information that other countries can use.

Our culture

‘We aim to build a virtual organization that will one day make working from Bhutan as easy as working from this office. We will work in teams; we will work flexibly and we will work effectively. The organization centered on this office will help each person work to their full capacity; it will be a learning organization; a place where creativity is valued and debate encouraged. It will not be a place to clock in and out from; to engage in office intrigue; or to worry about the next promotion. It will add to your productivity, not drain it.’ -Rohan, LIRNEasia office opening

Currently, LIRNEasia’s physical presence consists of two full time staff, an executive director and a compact 15 by 20 ft office under the leafy shade of an ancient Mara tree at the back of the parking lot of SLIDA, the administrative training academy of Sri Lanka, in Colombo. Neither our size nor our location will in any way limit our possibilities. With a small administrative core, much of our work will be facilitated through extended networks across Asia. The value of this is parallel to that of networks according to Metcalfe’s law: the total value of a network is greater than the sum of the number of its users. We already have several researchers and partners across South Asia involved in our first projects. As far as technology and cost permit, LIRNEasia will function as a virtual organization, with small ‘wireless, paperless’ offices located in a few South Asian countries at a second stage. These offices will function primarily as administrative units, as well as communication points, where, for example, someone in Dhaka can participate in a project meeting, taking place in Colombo via video conferencing facilities at a Dhaka office. As well as a facilitator of innovative ICT uses, we aim to be an exemplar. Our office is one of the few Wi-Fi hotspots in Sri Lanka. At LIRNEasia’s inaugural event, the 2004 WDR Expert Forum at the Mount Lavinia Hotel, a temporary hotspot was provided for the participants, so they could check their email from their seat at the forum, saving them the hassle of going down to the hotel’s highly priced Business Center for Internet access. We also hope to collaborate or make use of the Distance Learning Center Limited, an advanced video-conferencing and IT-based teaching facility at the SLIDA office, onsite. Our website is a user friendly work and discussion platform, adapting innovations from the blogging culture. Animated discussion and debate, and is open to anyone interested. Whilst making innovative use of technologies, we emphasize the building of relationships and common values among our team members. Regular colloquia are held for our local partners to share information on discuss hot topics. In the future, we even expect that our regional partners can be virtually present at these, by the use of whatever technology possible. For the most part, the project teams will not be in the same country, so for this reason it is very important that we have effective mechanisms for the seamless coordination and completion of our work. Additionally, the significance of Colombo office as the base of LIRNEasia’s operations will gradually be reduced over a period of three years.

Supporting organizations
LIRNEasia is the Asian affiliate of LIRNE.NET, collaboration among leading universities in Denmark, the Netherlands, South Africa and the United Kingdom and now LIRNEasia. LIRNEasia’s programs over 2004-2005 will primarily be funded by IDRC [International Development Research Center] of Canada, which supports many projects in developing countries, and has over the last two decades supported hundreds of research projects in South Asia, including the ISP, Pan Lanka Networking. LIRNEasia’s work will also be funded by infoDev, a World Bank unit that has partnered with LIRNE.NET since 2001 in the World Dialogue on Regulation for Network Economies. LIRNEasia is a non-profit organization incorporated under Sri Lankan law but intending to operate throughout Asia. LIRNEasia was officially launched on 17 September 2004 during the World Dialogue on Regulation’s Expert Forum in Sri Lanka.