With the commoditization of voice, mobile operators need to think about supplying info services over the mobile that people will pay for. Is better, more accurate weather info marketable? In our disaster early warning work we found that while scientists were qualitatively improving detection and monitoring systems (based on buoys too), the weakness was in the last mile of getting the information to the citizen/end user in useful actionable form. Is there a parallel here?
Scientists said Monday they had reached the halfway point in a project to set up buoys across the Indian Ocean, helping farmers predict the monsoon in some of the world’s poorest areas.
The buoys measure wind, rainfall, temperature and other figures around the Indian Ocean, which has lagged behind the Pacific…
Impressive science is being produced as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The focus now must be on creating systems within national governments that will allow the best use of science. Modeling data on projected tsunami arrival times (if any) were available to all on September 12, 2007. There is no evidence that the government’s hasty evacuation order took into account any of this information.
A new mathematical formula that could be used to give advance warning of where a tsunami is likely to hit and how destructive it will be has been worked out by scientists at Newcastle University.
The research, led by Newcastle University’s Professor Robin Johnson, was prompted by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami disaster which devastated coastal communities in Indonesia, Sri…
In addition to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawai’i and the center in Japan, it appears that Australia will also be able to provide early detection data.
While Australia will be the main beneficiary of the new centre, upgraded and expanded seismic monitoring will now extend to Indian Ocean countries including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius and Kenya.
“We can be confident now that nearly all these countries have either had their telecommunications upgraded, they’ve had assessment parties go through their countries, (or) their governments because of their loss of life have treated it very seriously.”
One and a half years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the government of Sri Lanka stated that it had obtained funds for three warning towers and was on track to build 25 more by the second anniversary:
The Ministry has already received funds from UNESCAP to build three tsunami warning towers in the Eastern, Northern and Southern Provinces and hopes to build another 25 towers by December 26 [2006] to mark the second anniversary of the disaster, according to the Times.
We were skeptical and we were right. By September 12th, 2007, the day of the last false warning and erroneous government evacuation order, one tower was up. The one tower did not work.
So now, one and a half years after that false announcement about…
Few weeks back, I was in Davos, with Peter Anderson and Natasha Udu-gama. Nuwan Waidyanatha, the man who carried the HazInfo Last Mile Project on his broad shoulders was there in spirit too. We were there to tell the world about the project and learn about how early warning fits into the big picture of disaster risk reduction.
And we did. Strangely enough, I learned more from one off-print lying on a table than the entire whole conference on the subject that brought me to Davos. The second author happens to be a friend of mine teaching at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, but that was not why.
It was just a very good review of the massive scientific literature coming out of the analysis of the aftermath of the…
The special issue on “Community-based last-mile early warning system” carried on its back page the following contribution from Rohan Samarajiva (despite the title of the publication, it’s not possible to find this piece on the web, so what is pasted below is the pre-pub version:
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 12th 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,…
“Scientists have long believed tsunamis form from vertical deformation of seafloor during undersea earthquakes. However, seismograph and GPS data show such deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake was too small to generate the powerful tsunami that ensued. Song’s team found horizontal forces were responsible for two-thirds of the tsunami’s height, as observed by three satellites (NASA’s Jason, the U.S. Navy’s Geosat Follow-on and the European Space Agency’s Environmental Satellite), and generated five times more energy than the earthquake’s vertical displacements. The horizontal forces also best explain the way the tsunami spread out across the Indian Ocean. The same mechanism was also found to explain the data observed from the 2005 Nias earthquake and tsunami. ”
NASA TSUNAMI RESEARCH MAKES WAVES IN SCIENCE COMMUNITY
Status quo of the tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean
The fastest warning is useless as long as the gap to the so called “last mile to the beach” is not closed. The population in the threatened area needs to be informed in time, but they also need to be trained how to react properly. The people need to be informed about evacuation plans and how to behave in the case of emergency. Japan carries out this kind of training in schools, plants and companies on a regular basis. The establishment of such an education programme in the areas bordering the Indian Ocean has only just started.
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Two publications, with chapters by LIRNEasia researcher Chanuka Wattegama, were launched during the GK3, third global Knowledge conferences held in Kuala Lumpur in December, 2007.
The biennial Digital Review of Asia Pacific is a comprehensive guide to the state-of-practice and trends in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Asia Pacific. The third edition (2007/2008) covers 31 countries and economies, including North Korea for the first time. Each country chapter presents key ICT policies, applications and initiatives for national development. In addition, five thematic chapters provide a synthesis of some of the key issues in ICT4D in the region, including mobile and wireless technologies, risk communication, intellectual property regimes and localization.
Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book, co-published by TVE Asia Pacific and the UNDP, brings together 21…
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Asia, Asia-Pacific, Chanuka Wattegama, communication technologies, communications disasters, Frederick Noronha, Indian Ocean, Kuala Lumpur, Nalaka Gunawardene, North Korea, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami of De, wireless technologies.
Indonesia has learnt lessons from dealing with a string of earthquakes, but still can do more to reduce the impact of such disasters by quake proofing buildings and deploying more tsunami buoys, officials said on Wednesday.
An official at Indonesia’s National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management said there had been progress in educating people since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that followed a huge quake off Aceh province and killed nearly 170,000 Indonesians.
Read more Reuters Alertnet | Indonesia disaster preparedness a work in progress
Cities and natural disasters | Some hard talk about towns | Economist.com
Intelligent planning and regulation make a huge difference to the number of people who die when disaster strikes, says Anna Tibaijuka, UN-Habitat’s executive director. In 1995 an earthquake in the Japanese city of Kobe killed 6,400 people; in 1999 a quake of similar magnitude in Turkey claimed over 17,000 lives. Corrupt local bureaucracies and slapdash building pushed up the Turkish toll.
The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed at least 230,000 people, would have been a tragedy whatever the level of preparedness; but even when disaster strikes on a titanic scale, there are many factors within human control—a knowledgeable population, a good early-warning system and settlements built with disasters in mind—that can help to…
Chanuka Wattegama who authored the primer on the use of ICTs in disaster mitigation for the UNDP looks at the responses of littoral nations from South Africa to Thailand to the Bengkulu event.
Nation special
If the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a disaster marked by inaction, what happened on September 12, 2007 was marked by plenty of action, but a dearth of right action. It was certainly not an exemplary implementation of pre-determined and meticulously planned disaster avoidance activities. Did it make the vulnerable communities feel more secure? Or did it merely add to the confusion and chaos? Wasn’t what happened on that crucial evening another good lesson on how not to react to a disaster? Does this mean we still have lot to learn?Risk mitigation through…
Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, Leader of the Coastal Oceanography Group at the School of Environmental Systems Engineering of the Australian National Facility for Ocean Gliders carried out a real-time analysis of the tsunami alerts and warnings around the Indian Ocean basin following the massive Bengkulu earthquakes off the coast of southern Sumatra, Indonesia on 12 September, 2007. In his paper, Pattiarachi discusses background for tsunami generation, the present status of the tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean, and the role of deep-water tsunameters in the detection of tsunamis on 12 September.
For more details, see Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System: Example from the 12th September 2007 Tsunami.
It has been a practice at LIRNEasia to write an assessment of the responses to potentially tsunamigenic events in the region. We commented on Nias and Pangandaran. Now that the discussion on the response is starting, here is our take:
Lessons from the Sri Lanka tsunami warnings and evacuation of September 12-13, 2007
The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The September 12th Bengkulu earthquake shows that this is unlikely to be the case in the future. We have seen that the new institutions created since the 2004 tsunami have the will and the capacity to act. What we must guard against now is indifference to warning; of populations that refuse to evacuate in the face of real danger.
…
Tags: addressable satellite radio sets, Arugam Bay-Panama coast, Bangladesh, Bengkulu, Colombo, communication systems, Disaster Management Center, earthquake, GSM/CDMA, India Ocean, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Last Mile, Matara, Met Department, Mile HazInfo, Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, mobile phones, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Panama, Rohan Samarajiva, Sarvodaya, SMS, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Meteorological Department, taped telephone voice message, Thailand, tsunami.
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