Between a rock and a hard place

The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The Bengkulu earthquake of 2007 September 12^th shows that this is unlikely to be repeated. What we must guard against now is indifference to warning; of populations that will refuse to evacuate in the face of real danger.

Tsunami prediction is an inexact art practiced in conditions of imperfect information and time pressure. In the Pacific Basin, which has had the most experience with tsunamis, 75 per cent of all warnings are false. But this causes little harm because the false warnings do not get through to the general population for the most part.

Tsunamis are short-fuse hazards. It took 90 minutes for the 2004 India Ocean tsunami to reach the South-eastern coast of Sri Lanka. In September 2007, the earthquake occurred at 1110 UTC or 4:40 PM Sri Lanka time. Tsunami Bulletin 001 issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at 1124 UTC (4: 54 PM Sri Lanka time) projected arrival times of over three hours.

Time must be allocated to decision making at the national level about issuance of watch, warning or evacuation messages; and decision making and action at community level, including evacuation if appropriate. This means that the time taken to communicate the watch/warning/evacuation messages must be minimized.

This does not mean, however, that evacuation orders should be given as quickly as possible. False evacuation orders will reduce public response over time.

Given the massive costs associated with evacuation orders (not only in lost productivity but deaths, injuries and other negative outcomes), government must be the sole authority. Given the certainty of blame if a tsunami does hit, over-use of warnings and evacuation orders is likely. It is important that procedures be established not only to make considered but quick decisions about watch/warning/evacuation messages, but also to counter the bias toward excessive warnings and evacuation orders.

Disaster risk-reduction professionals know that false warnings are an artefact of the inexact art of predicting the onset of hazards: but the general public does not. If they are subject to too many false warnings, they will not respond even to true warnings.

Now that we have gotten over the problem of issuing no warnings, we have to address the problem of false warnings.

Rohan Samarajiva, Ph.D.

Project Director, Last Mile HazInfo Project &

Executive Director, LIRNEasia

Jakarta Workshop Agenda

Jakarta HazInfo Workshop Report

Inauguration
Elements of a Community-Based Early Warning System | Rohan Samarajiva

Session I
From Emergency Response to Community Preparedness | Jan Sopaheluwakan
Methodology, Preparedness, Training and Community Organization: HazInfo Experience | Natasha Udu-gama

Session II
Tsunami Early Warning System: Lessons Learned from Padang City | Patra Rina Dewi
First Responder Action: Sri Lanka Experience | Nuwan Waidyanatha

Session III
Experience from Padang | Aim Zein
Transmission of Warning to Local Levels: Sri Lanka Experience | Nuwan Waidyanatha

Session IV
Determination of Hazard from the National Level: HazInfo Experience | Natasha Udu-gama
Tsunami and Disaster Mitigation Center at Syah Kuala University | Muhammed Dirhamsiyah

Session V
Roles of Policymakers, Regulators, Private Sector & Civil Society | Rohan Samarajiva

The workshop included a variety of stakeholders from Indian government, civil society, international organizations, private sector, and NGOs. Mr. Mihir Bhatt, Honorary Director of AIDMI, along with Mr. Mehul Pandya, Risk Reduction Transfer Initiative Coordinator and Ms. Vandana Chauhan, Urban Risk Reduction Coordinator were in attendance from AIDMI’s Ahmedabad, Gujarat headquarters.

New Delhi HazInfo Workshop Report

New Delhi HazInfo Workshop Brochure

Inauguration | Rohan Samarajiva
Session I: Methodology, Preparedness, Training & Community Organization
Session I | P. Prasad
Session I | Menake Wijesinghe
Session II: Transmission of Warning to Local Levels
Session II | Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya
Session II | Natasha Udu-gama
Session III: First Responder Action
Session III | Suresh Mariaselvam
Session III | Natasha Udu-gama
Session IV: Determination of Hazard from National Level
Session IV | Nuwan Waidyanatha
Session V: Next Steps
Session V | Rohan Samarajiva

LIRNEasia advocated Community-based Last-Mile Hazard Warning System pilot research (HazInfo project) field tested two GSM Terminal Devices: J2ME applet embedded Trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil, & English) mobile phone and GSM module/microcontroller based Remote Alarm Device (RAD). These two devices were developed as part of the Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) under the umbrella of Dialog Telekom in collaboration with the University of Moratuwa located Dialog Mobile Communications Research Laboratory and the Microimage Mobile Communication Software Company. The paper discusses the potential and the shortcomings of CAP messaging with the use of SMS in a GSM environment as well as makes recommendations for future research and development.

The WWRF WG1 was made aware of the pragmatic issues of adopting CAP for Public Warning; whether it is with SMS or Cell Broadcasting the message must be unambiguous and in all local languages. Presented proposed that Mobile operators and handset manufacturers investigate the options of building onboard software for decoding CAP messages to reduce the message pay load, adopt globally accepted or intuitive symbolic/graphical schemes to communicate the alert messages independent of language, and embed natural language processors in handsets for users to select language of choice. The paper further proposes an optimal set of CAP elements to transport the message and a enumeration based strategy to encode and decode the CAP messages.

WWRF Presentation – Optimizing CAP on SMS based GSM devices

Paper — Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol for SMS based GSM Devices in LM-HWS in Sri Lanka

WWRF IITM Report

Dhaka HazInfo Dissemination Workshop Report

Presentations:
Inauguration:
Elements of a Community-Based Warning System | Rohan Samarajiva

Session I: Determination of Hazard at National Level
Determination of Hazard at the National Level: Sri Lanka Experience | Natasha Udu-gama
Determination of Hazard from National Level | Aftab Alam Khan
Simulation of Tsunami inundation by ComMIT Model | Sujit Kumar Debsarma
3D-Perspective Visualization of Storm Surge | Sujit Kumar Debsarma

Session II: Transmission of Warning to Local Levels
Transmission of Warning to Local Level: Bangladesh Experience | Md. Nasir Ullah
Transmission of Warning to Local Level | Nuwan Waidyanatha

Session III: First Responder Action
First Responder Action | Nuwan Waidyanatha
First Responder Action (Bangladesh Experience) | Ashutosh Sutra Dhar

Session IV: Methodology, Preparedness, Training and Community Organization
Early Warning Challenges: Options & Solutions | S. Rangarajan
Methodology, Preparedness, Training & Community Organization | Natasha Udu-gama

Session V: Next Steps
Roles of policymakers, regulators, private sector and civil society | Rohan Samarajiva

Dhaka HazInfo Workshop Agenda
Dhaka HazInfo Workshop Brochure
Dhaka HazInfo Workshop News Release

The Dhaka HazInfo workshop is the first in a series of HazInfo dissemination events in the region. The next workshop will be held in partnership with the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, India on November 19, 2007. The third, and final, regional workshop is proposed to be held in Indonesia in January. More details on these upcoming workshops will be available in the months ahead.

One of Gordon Gow’s key contributions to the HazInfo project was the Common Alerting Protocol Profile for Sri Lanka, which was a hard case as far as integrating the multi-language scenario as it is the case in Sri Lanka. The CAP Profile for Sri Lanka was designed for disseminations in Sinhala, Tamil, and English languages. Such a complex profile of CAP was field tested in Sri Lanka’s HazInfo project. This was the first time a Multilanguage profile was field tested in the World. The same problem appears in the European Union, for example, where they have a plan to use CAP for internetworking between emergency communicators of the member states in their “command control and coordination system”.

Gordon Gow is an Assistant Professor, Graduate Program in Communications and Technology (MACT), Faculty of Extension, University of Alberta, Canada Currently, his research interests include development of WLL voice and data systems, especially with respect to regulatory concerns such as spectrum policy and management, telecom reform, technical standardization, public safety, and location based services.

Report on WRECOM Conference by G. Gow

Power Point Presentation used by G. Gow in his talk at WRECOM

Paper on Wireless ICTs for Community-based Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka

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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The HazInfo project realized that early warnings via Information Communication Technology (ICT) must be a point-to-multi-point application and is best accommodate by Wireless ICTs. The HazInfo pilot included outfitting and field-testing an initial 32 villages with various combinations of wireless communication equipment, which could provide features such as: early warning wake-up, addressability and provision of information in three languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil).

In December 2005, LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and reform research organization, initiated a research project to evaluate the “last-of-the-mile” communication component of an all-hazards warning system for Sri Lanka. The project entitled, “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination”, or the “HazInfo Project”, was funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada. Its research design was based on recommendations of a “participatory concept paper” for a national early warning system (NEWS:SL) completed in the months following the 2004 tsunami.