What is even more worrisome is the lack of knowledge among all the parties about the available modes of communicating early warnings. No mention of cell broadcasting that is capable of delivering location-specific tailored information to all mobile handsets within the range of a base transceiver station. The journalist has done a good job except for repeating misinformation about poor communication infrastructure and access in rural areas.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS

The government’s own nationally and provincially representative Household Income and Expenditure Survey shows that more than 75 percent of households in the Southern Province (affected by the most recent early warning fiasco) have a telephone in the house (almost all being GSM and CDMA handsets capable of receiving cell broadcasts), clearly contradicting the claim of poor infrastructure in rural areas.

LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP4 research (representative of those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; but not at the level of Province) showed that urban households has slightly higher (7%) ownership of phones, but that when it came to access to a phone within the household there was no difference between urban and rural households.

There are two paradigms to implementing speech-to-text software: 1) speaker-dependent and 2) speaker-independent. In 1) the users have to first train the system (also know as a voice recognition system), typically by training an artificial neural network software that learns to react to known patterns of words and pronunciations for a particular human voice. Then in 2) the software does not require any training and anyone can speak. It may be restricted to a domain with limited words to remove any uncertainties that may arise relative a fully open system.

Figure 1

To emulate the speaker-dependent and speaker-independent scenarios the research devised two methods incorporating the difficult percentage as the underlying measure.

Figure 1 shows results from a formal survey. The survey required the Freedom Fone users (n=51) to record the answer to a question from a list of possible answers (multiple choice type questionnaire). In this case, the voice quality Evaluators (m=3) had a sense of the answers and could predict even if there was some distortion. Thus, it mimics a trained system. For example, a question that asked “what was the hazard event type”. The possible answers would be: cyclone, tsunami, floods, landslide.

The results in Figure 2 were obtained with Freedom Fone users (n=41) submitting field observation reports pertaining to any incident of their choice. In this exercise, there were no predetermined answers to select from and were free to supply any pertinent information. The Evaluators (m=7) did not have a prior knowledge of the possible answers; thus, it mimics an untrained that may arise. For example, if the voice recording was heavily and only the first letter of the word could be heard, then “[ts]unami” could be mistaken for a “[c]yclone”.

Figure 2

The results show that with a speaker dependent system 95% of the information could be clearly deciphered opposed a speaker independent system that was only 70% clear (blue areas in Figure 1 and Figure 2). It is not surprising, the outcomes are intuitive. In our study reliability had two components, one was efficiency and the other was voice quality. The voice quality also took in to consideration the Mean Opinion Score and the Comparison Categorical Rating. The researchers wish to acknowledge that their may be disagreements in the  sample sizes and number of Evaluators. These results are not ideal for drawing a ‘for-all” kind of conclusion. However, at this realize stage of the research it provides a quick and easy method to draw initial conclusions.

Mongolia looking like WinXP

Does this picture remind you of the default Windows XP desktop background? That’s what most of Mongolia looks like. Roughly 40% of the Mongolians live in Ulaanbaartar (UB). The rest are sparsely scattered in thinly populated communities in the vast open terrain. The cultures vary across the desert, meadows, and hills. The human to animal ratio is 1:12. The seasonal dwelling is decided on the animals’ needs (Mongolia).

Mr. Terbish and I wandered in Bogd National Park, when he explained some of the characteristics of Mongolian nomadic people. Terbish is a member of the the National Disaster Management Committee representing his mobile company: Unitel. His father in-law is a Herder living 300Km west of UB. Father in-law has to search for a cellular signal, like ride the horse to a coverage area to speak with Terbish; then schedule a reconnecting time if a reply is to follow. In the country-side they don’t have FM Radio either. To give you an idea of the coverage, mobile operators had setup temporary base stations to give connectivity to the crowds at the Naadam horse races. The horse races took place in the plains about a 2 hour bus ride from UB with a strait race track spanning 25 kilometers.

3-6 yr old kids racing 3yr old horses, Naadam 2011

RIMES project had pilot tested a community-based warning system with motorcycles and horse-messengers to carry the hazard information to the last-mile communities. In the “hazInfo project” simulations we conducted in Sri Lanka, several communities mounted public addressing systems on the hood of three-wheelers (Tuk-Tuks) to relay the message to the village households. It seemed to work well during the simulations but the efficiencies are questionable during a real event as to whether the communities can organize a three-wheeler and a PA system in short notice. Besides earthquakes, all other hazards in Mongolia are hydro-meteorological that are slow onset giving enough time to respond.

I was thinking addressable satellite radios but they are not two-way communication devices. HF radios for data transmission may be another way to bridge the last-mile?

These observations were made during the “ITU Asia-Pacific Regional Multi-stakeholder Forum on Emergency Telecommunications“, which was held at Chinggis Kaan Hotel, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 08-11 July, 2011. I presented on our experiences with the Common Alerting Protocol and also submitted a supplement brief that recommends member states to register alerting authorities.

READ MY CONFERENCE REPORT

There was no causal connection. And the rest of the machinery for making cell broadcasting an effective public warning mechanism is not in place, yet. But we are confident the seed that we planted will bear fruit.

The slideset is here.

A documentary on Kantale, 19 years later, made in 2005 by Divakar Goswami, serves as a virtual memorial.

But do we remember? Have we done what needs to be done to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of our people living in the shadow of the dams? We have 12,000 small dams and 350 medium and large dams dotting our country. Of these, more than 200 small dams breached in the successive floods of 2011 and greater tragedies were avoided by emergency action on larger dams. Countless livelihoods were damaged.

But has there been any impact on perceptions in Colombo among decision makers and the media, with the honorable and significant exceptions of the Minister of Irrigation and officials of the World Bank funded Dam Safety and Water Resource Planning Project?

We are trying to change that with the 2nd LIRNEasia Annual Disaster Risk Reduction Lecture and Response Session at the BCIS Auditorium (BMICH premises), at 1600 hrs on the Wednesday, the 27th of April. An expert on dam safety policies in the Netherlands, Dr Aad Correlje, will lead off. The people of the wev bendi rajje affected by poor dam safety policies will be represented by a community leader and a documentary about Kantale. There will also be responses from government and the dam professionals.

In Sri Lanka, authority over dams is highly diffuse with multiple ministries and entities having responsibility for dams in the same river system. In the Netherlands, the Directorate for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) or the water boards that raises revenue from all the landholders who receive protection have responsibility. To have separate governance systems for water appears consistent with our history and the Velvidane system. LIRNEasia proposed that maintenance be funded from user charges (Velvidane Panguva); are there alternatives? Sustainability of the repairs done under the Dam Safety Project is a critical issue.

In his writing Dr Correlje talks about a shift of emphasis to anchoring policy on the probability of flooding. Is it possible to make the information such as inundation maps publicly available so that probability of flooding can be calculated in Sri Lanka, and then insurance used as a mechanism for managing that risk?

It appears that climate change is being factored into Dutch policy thinking on water management. Two repeated periods of heavy rainfall caused major damage in Sri Lanka in the early part of 2011. One may argue that this is what climate change looks like and that we must rethink the design of reservoirs to accommodate these kinds of events that will occur more frequently if climate change takes hold. What can economists and policy scientists say about this?

LIRNEasia staff contributions, matched 50% by the organization, amounting to LKR 174,750 will be used for the medical assistance that is being provided to the flood-affected. This is a drop in the bucket, but we are confident it will be used well to help those in distress.

A note to friends and colleagues: The floods are far away from Colombo where LIRNEasia staff live. Chanuka Wattegama went to the East as a volunteer for Sarvodaya and almost got stranded, but even he is back home now.

I am skeptic how they would take my presentation – all Asian experiences to an almost hundred percent European audience except for two gentlemen from Botswana. Developed vs. Developing world. Connected vs. Unconnected. Are the issues similar? Or is it a different scenario?

I am glad we find some common ground. Bridging last mile isn’t an issue as serious as in Asia, but ‘Cell Broadcasting’ generates an interest. A DRR professional from audience talks about their efforts to introduce the same in France, with some success. One gentleman from Botswana asks why not in Africa. He is also interested in SMS based solutions. I introduce the Sahana SMS module to him.

Other than that, the discussion focuses more on the issues technology creates, rather than ones it solves. They talk about ‘over dependence’ on technology and the problems old find using technology. “Technology is fine, but KISS” (Keep It Simple and Stupid) says one speaker.

One pleasant surprise was to find the Director General, Civil Protection, Netherlands highlighting the benefits of Cell Broadcasting in the closing session. I am not sure whether he attended Seminar F.

Download my presentation slides from here.

The conference, “The Civil Protection Forum – Towards a more resilient society” aims to explore the concept of resilience. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and impact of disasters, and Europe has to be prepared for this challenge. The Forum will start a debate on a comprehensive European disaster management strategy to enhance resilience. The organizers plan to bring together around 500 delegates, speakers and exhibitors from politics, academia, the civil protection services and international organisations.

Chanuka Wattegama, Senior Research Manager, LIRNEasia will be one of the speakers in the six practice-oriented seminars will look more closely at how European civil protection works in the field – how does it integrate with other international actors, three major phases of an emergency (prevention, preparedness, and response) and the roles of different stakeholders (institutions, civil protection professionals and civil society).

The agenda can be downloaded here.

The technology and organizational structure of the HazInfo last-mile hazard warning system proved to work as designed and drew valuable lessons for a full scale implementation. However, the major dilemma was in finding resources to sustain the system. The Hoteliers’ Association of Sri Lanka agreed to obtain services from Sarvodaya for a fee to train and certify the hotel staff in disaster response. This fee would go towards the OPEX of the HazInfo emergency response planning component and operationalize a 24/7/365 Hazard Information Hub for issuing alerts; but to kick start the endeavor a nominal CAPEX is required.

The paper titled – Mobile Phones and the challenges of sustainable early warning systems: reflection on Hazinfo Sri Lanka and opportunities for future research coauthored by Gordon Gow (University of Alberta) and myself (Nuwan Waidyanatha) addressing the correlation between investment and preparedness in relation to the HazInfo as well as the possibility of leveraging mobile telephony for building socially sustainable and community driven last mile warning systems was presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Policy Conference hosted by the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. Event took place in New Brunswick, USA 9 – 11 October 2009.

CAP surfaced as a standard in 2005 fairly new and unheard of by most in the disaster communication arena in the developing world. Sri Lanka was the first to field test a CAP profile accommodating three different languages. The field testing has also paved the road for several related research problems such as developing a CAP Broker for a single input multiple output software application with semiautomatic natural language translation, transportation with routing, control flow, rules, store-n-forward warehousing, and plug-in technology adapters; all elements that are challenging and require state of the art technology know how to build. It is my quest to secure funding to support the development of a free and open source software CAP Broker embedded in to the Sahana Messaging Module.

My presentation on CAP highlighted the Sahana CAP template developer and SMS/Email multicasting engine, initial elements that are already built in to Sahana for use. CAP was designed for exchanging complete all hazard information in multiple languages target over geographic locations for public warnings or closed user group alerts. The Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination research, coined as the HazInfo project in short, field tested 5 end user terminal devices for their capability of receiving complete  CAP messaged with a method for scoring the effectiveness of the terminal devices. The technical report explains the methodology and results of the the pilot project. Some of the identified shortcomings were due to capacity constraints of the hand held mobile device displays, confining the language to English only, not carrying all the important elements of a CAP message defined by the Sri Lanka CAP profile, or audio only multicasts had no method of carrying other CAP elements such as the qualifier tags.

ITU Asia-Pacific centers of excellence training/workshop on effective use of telecommunications/ICTs in response to Disasters: saving lives was held at the Universiti of Utara Malaysia (UUM), in the flat lands of Alor Seta, Kedah, the northwestern state of Malaysia, bordering Thailand, home of the historic Gunun Jerai (Gunun Mountain) which Sailors used as a navigation aid, now the pinnacle of all communication antennas ranging from HF radio, TV, FM radio, CDMA, to GSM. Given the routing complexities of air transport, some of the participants from the pacific islands: Nauru, Marshal Islands, Tonga, Kiribati, and Vanuatu and tucked away, land locked, Bhutan had to travel for more than 3 – 4 days to attend the 5 day workshop, 24 – 28, Nov 2008. Other participants were from South and Southeast Asia; the attendees were predominantly members of their state’s telecom regulatory authority.

While the first two days of the workshop were indoor on theory the 3rd and 4th days engaged the participants in hands on training with the use of IPSTAR VSATs, Iridium sat phones, Inmarsat BGAN terminals for data and voice solutions, Motorola HF/VHF/UHF radios . I took the liberty of testing the potential of the 4 varying technologies aKU-band nd their terminal devices for adopting CAP as a standard for sending and receiving emergency information. Both Iridium and Inmarsat marketed their new feature of SMS texting but was strictly restricted to 160 characters and did not give the option of distributing the content over multiple pages as mobile phones would do. IPSTAR was simply a VSAT solution that uses Ku and Ka bands with IP communications and has the same restrictions imposed by the alerting application such as the Internet Public Alerting System (IPAS) Solana Network solution (currently has newer releases) tested in the HazInfo project with personal computers. When IPSTAR was questioned on the reliability of the Ku-band signal in tropical regions with cloud cover such as Sri Lanka (higher frequency Ku bands are known to be unreliable in the tropics), he gave some bogus answer that their hardware was superior to others such as iDirect.

Policy makers, especially the regulators, paving their disaster communication plans in their respective countries must field test the solutions that the vendors provide before hand because most of the time technologies do not promise what the “sales talk” highlights. For example, I tried sending an SMS from my GSM mobile phone to an Iridium phone and the other way around, both attempts failed. The explanation given by the representative was that it was most likely that Iridium did not have a contract with my GSM gateway provider or the one in Malaysia. When we sent a message from the representative’s Blackberry the message was received but on the first 160 characters comprising the header information such as the word “Blackberry” followed by the sender email but not the substance of the message and some other garbage, usually text added on by Blackberry. The voice call using Iridium phone was successful over fixed land lines to Sri Lanka and China but failed me calling mobile phones in both China and Sri Lanka.

Malaysia Amateur Radio Transmitters’ Society (MARTS) members (a.k.a Hams) were in full force with their personal radios clad in blue, almost felt like Special Forces giving guard to the ITU delegates. MARTS Hams were a very friendly and enthusiastic bunch, persuading all to take up the hobby. I am convinced myself now to become a Ham. MARTS demonstrated quite a few home brewed hardware and software that extends the functionality of the radio sets beyond the capacity to communicate voice only. Some of solutions were coupling Laptops for exchanging graphic files (or images), text based chatting, etc.

Informal discussions with the Malaysian Amatuear Radio Transmitters’ Society MARTS members on the benefits Sahana and CAP lead to a partnership project of collaboratively extending the text and voice solutions for communicating emergency information using the CAP standards over the suite of HF radio frequencies. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) showcased a Malaysia Bole (a.k.a Malaysia Home brewed) chat text messaging solution using Pactor I & II HF radio modems. Thiswas  a solution developed with a grant they received from the Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (i.e. Malaysia Telecom Regulator) for adoptive radio technologies. They are eager to port this particular solution for exchanging text of HF radio in to the Sahana framework. Hence, we shall formulate a collaboration between Lanka Software Foundation of the University fo Colombo School of Computing and UTM. UTM Prof. Ahmad Zuri Sha’ameri was fast in making a ‘s decision and has already agreed to provide the initial funding and resource persons, for phase one, to get started on delivering the first cuts of the software solutions. The long term plans are to conduct case studies in the Pacific Islands, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, but not restricting to this list, on the use of HF radio for disaster early warning, response, and recovery through data and voice as mediums of communication.

The last day had country representatives present their disaster management plans. My conclusion is that most of them were talking in future tens; meaning they still have to implement their plans or even get started on generating a propoer plan. The ones that did have plans in place had not tested them (simulated drills) to ensure the plans are worthy. The Philippines presentation was the one and only most attractive presentation which touched on the need for planning, simulation, and constant re-planning. Moreover, Philippines stressed on the need for community participation in all aspects, which none of the other countries touched on; i.e. they were all talking of a “top down” approach and bottom up or a hybrid. Many a times the local community members halp them sleves in response efforts unitl the emergency response teams can arrive on site; as in the Sichuan earth quake it took soldiers just about 2 days to reach some of the villages due to rough terrains and mechanical imobility. The Pacific Island countries need to understand that their land mass is too small to house backup or emergency response hardware or resources, in the event of a major catastrophe such as the case in the Sichuan earthquake when all of the government officials were killed or injured and were unable to initiate response plans. They should have a agreements with neighbors or external parties to provide them necessary resources on time. Except for India, Thailand, Philippines and Sri Lanka, the other members were focusing on saving lives after disasters (i.e. response) and had not thought of saving lives through early warnings. There is a proportionality between early warning (mitigation) and response; thus investments in early warnings can drastically reduce the investments or resources needed for response; i.e. few lives to save after disaster and can immediately proceed in to recovery phase.

The Interview – Rohan Samarajiva from CPA on Vimeo.