Old-fashioned television telethons can stretch on for hours. But the latest charity appeal is short enough for Twitter: “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief.”

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, many Americans are reaching for their cellphones to make a donation via text message. And plenty of them are then spreading the word to others on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said Thursday that it had raised more than $5 million this way.

Now I wonder would this be permitted in our countries? Haven’t thought about it at length, so I may be wrong, but methinks there will be some barriers. Any views? Solutions?

In addition to Harsha’s many interventions in improving the quality of public discourse in Sri Lanka through his BizFirst program and many activities as part of LIRNEasia, Harsha has engaged in many public-spirited actions, ranging from the personally funding the source collection of agricultural price information used by many government agencies and the media to his key role in the Colombo Regency Rotary Club’s web-based fund raising for the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that led to the construction of a large number of houses in Kalutara. We are happy that his contributions and potential have been recognized by others.

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 and Atlantic Oceans in data collection.

The international project, which began in earnest in 2004, has moored 22 buoys so far, with plans to put down all 46 by 2012, said Michael McPhaden of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

McPhaden, who is based at the NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said the data would provide a major boost to farmers who rely on monsoon rains.

“If you know it’s going to be a year of heavy rain or deficient rain, there are different seeds you can plant, different timings and types of fertilizer,” he told AFP. “There are all types of strategies you can implement.”

Full story.

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 Lanka, India and Thailand.

In this instance, an earthquake in the depths of the ocean triggered a long surface wave which resulted in six massive wave fronts, one after the other.

Of these waves it was the third and largest one that caused the most devastation, hitting the beaches with terrifying speed. Reaching a height of 20m, it is this wave that lifted a train from its tracks as it travelled along the Sri Lankan coastline, killing almost 1,000 people.

The full story.

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.”

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 25 towers (and almost four years after the tsunami), we have a Cabinet decision:

Cabinet approved a memorandum submitted by the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe and the Minister of Local Government and Provincial Councils, Janaka Bandara Tennekoon, to accept the revised proposal to expand the Emergency Response Systems (ERS) currently in place by upgrading and establishing 14 fire and rescue stations, in addition to the 18 stations developed under Phase I of the project.

Accordingly, emergency treatment equipment and basic life support (BLS) ambulances will be provided for 12 hospitals and 50 multi-hazard warning towers with communication facilities will be provided, while 15 district emergency operation centres will be set up, replete with transport and communication facilities.

This phase will be implemented within the framework of the Road Map for a Safer Sri Lanka, and will cost 4.63 Euro, which will be financed by Rabobank International TCE Export Finance.

Now Rabobank International TCE Export Finance does not quite sound like a concessionary lender does it?

So then, let us ask about the value of warning towers. What is the range of a warning tower? Would 50 (or 51 including the one in Hikkaduwa) towers be enough for the vulnerable coasts of Sri Lanka? Does the government have an effective method of activating these 50 towers? Has the government completed the promised review of the alert/evacuation actions of September 12, 2007? Has it got a good answer as to why it could not get the Hikkaduwa tower to work on that day?

Or more fundamentally, has the government assessed the efficacy of warning towers versus cell broadcasting that can effectively reach the vulnerable populations on the coast?

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 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami addressing a central policy question about whether we should pour limited resources into growing mangroves and other “barriers” along the coasts or whether we should allocate them to solve the hard problems of early warning and preparedness.  The answer, like most answers in the policy world, was not unequivocally this or that.  It leaned on the early warning side, much to my satisfaction, but also pointed out that without paying attention to the coastal environments, the people whose lives are saved by early warning and preparedness will have no livelihoods.  I had been kind of skeptical about the mangrove story, so it was gratifying to see meta-analysis of masses of research fully support the gut conclusion.

But still, the main conclusion was dead-on with the holistic approach always impressed upon the team by Dr Vinya Ariyaratne, based on the Sarvodaya philosophy.  We at LIRNEasia have a comparative advantage with early warning and it will truly save lives if properly implemented, but we have to keep the larger context in mind.  Otherwise, the people whose lives are saved will rot in government camps with no livelihoods to go back to.

But anyway, that was not the only thing that happened in Davos.  We conducted a session on the project that attracted a quality audience, even if the quantity left much to be desired.  We got on the ISDR radar screen.  If this results in the broader dissemination of our research, the trip would have been well worth it (apologies to the beautiful mountains of Davos).

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

NASA TSUNAMI RESEARCH MAKES WAVES IN SCIENCE COMMUNITY

Funded by the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the DEWS project will aim to strengthen early warning capacities in the region by building an open and interoperable tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean.

The system to detect tsunamis will be based on an open sensor platform and integrated sensor systems for earthquake (seismic), sea level (tide gauge, buoys) and ground displacement (GPS land stations) monitoring.

These sensor systems will be one of the most important innovations in the project as they will be responsible for sending reliable data from the seafloor to the warning centre.

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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 authors – most of them from Asia – who share their experiences and insights on effective communication before, during and after disasters. Coming out in time for the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it takes stock of communication lessons of the mega-disaster. Its core message: adequate planning can help avoid communications disasters when communicating about disasters. Edited by two leading Asian journalists – Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha – the book carries a foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke.

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

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 minimise the number of casualties.

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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 disaster warning is a serious business. It is not as simple as a politician or a government official calling the national TV station and ordering evacuations or worse, the closure of roads. It is an end-to-end process with the hazard monitors at one end and communities at the other. In between are many intermediaries with defined roles. They are expected to play their assigned roles, not exceed their roles and not to play the role of others. If this balance is broken somewhere, as we have seen, it can lead to adverse consequences.

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