Mr. P.D. Amarasinghe, Secretary of the MDMHR, opened the session by discussing the particular disaster role of each of the government agencies asked to attend. He acknowledged the government’s important role in disaster warning. The role of the Disaster Management Center (DMC) will be to disseminate warnings to first responders through various means – RANet, SMS, fax. First responders will be media, police and armed forces, district coordinators of DMC, and other organizations (NGOs, community). Currently, the MDMHR is in the process of developing a proposal for a network of dissemination towers at Hikkaduwa, Kalmunai and Point Pedro. There will be a total of 50 by the end of this year (latest, Jan/Feb 2008). With further funding, the MDMHR will establish 10 EOCs, 4 EMC, in addition to 4 managed by police & armed forces. Thus, he declared that the basic warning system is in place and asked how might the telecom operators contribute to a public warning notification system.

Major General Gamini Hettiarachchi, Director General of the DMC gave a presentation on the Disaster Early Warning and Dissemination Strategy of Sri Lanka. He reviewed the progress of disaster management since the tsunami, through the Disaster Management Act No. 13 of 2005, and the establishment of the National Council on Disaster Management in the same year. He stated that there are currently 3 early warning towers, but by the end of next year there should be a total of 150. Emergency response committees have been formed including SLT, municipalities, 25 district secretaries and 9 province secretaries.

Mr. Anjula Godakumbara from Dialog Telekom made a presentation on Dialog’s involvement in early warning dissemination. Dialog and the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights have signed an MoU. Dialog along with MicroImage and the University of Moratuwa Research Lab looked into using GSM communication in disaster early warning dissemination by setting up the Disaster and Early Warning Network (DEWN). This has SMS and cell broadcast capabilities. The benefits of the DEWN system is that it is low-cost and uses existing communication infrastructure. Dialog reiterated the fact that only the DMC has the authority to send disaster warnings. For more information on this initiative see www.dialog.lk/dewn.

Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director – LIRNEasia, gave a presentation on “Effective use of telecom & electronic media in disaster risk reduction”. He asked how will the DMC communicate with the media and the phone companies. The government must have internal protocols which must be double-checked with government officials. There must a technically sound system in place to get to all media and must be capable of showing if people got the message and in the right language. LIRNEasia recommends the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) system with additional software which is single input, multi-output, multi-language. This can be developed by LIRNEasia within a few months. Essentially this means that once a button is pressed, the software will translate the message accordingly and send the message by SMS, cell broadcast, fax, etc. The government is clearly interested in standard procedures and templates. Therefore, it would be in its best interest to approve a standard template in the language and simply insert the proper word as necessary. Prof. Samarajiva posed yet another question: How might the government ensure that the person issuing the warning is reliable and not someone who plans to sabotage the process? There must be some sort of encryption or verification method so that receivers know that the warning is official.

In discussing the use of ICTs in public warning (an area not covered by the Last-Mile HazInfo Project), Samarajiva suggested that two of the most difficult cases be addressed: a passenger in a moving train and a tourist at the Yala National Park. If public warning can reach these two individuals, all the other less difficult problems can be solved. In both cases, he suggested that cell broadcasting would be the most important technology, though there may be areas within Yala that would be out of signal coverage, in which case no public warning was possible.

The discussion that followed the presentations. Mr. Hettiarachchi called for a link with service providers to develop automated procedures. Secretary Amarasinghe suggested that there be a technical committee set up for hearing recommendations on early warning from telecom providers and broadcasters. It was decided that there would be two separate technical committees – one for telecom providers and the other for broadcasters. Dates and agendas for the first technical committee meetings of telecom providers and broadcasters were not discussed.

Mr. U.W.L. Chandradasa, Director – DMC, wrapped up the session by reiterating that the DMC is responsible for disseminating warning messages. Regarding first responders, he agreed that other agencies could be involved. He acknowledged that government alone cannot take charge of “Last Mile” warning without the contributions of telecom providers, broadcasters and the private sector.

The presentation is at ministry-of-dmhr-7sep07final.ppt.

Addressable satellite radio sets were found to be the best alerting technology of the community disaster warning pilot project conducted by LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya. Java enabled mobile phones which has a wake up siren came next. The GSM based remote alarm device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa followed closely. It has both light and siren.Findings of this project on learning how information-communication technologies and community based training can help in tsunami and other disaster situations had been discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning with a Focus on Community-Based Last-Mile Warning Systems” at the Sarvodaya Headquarters in Moratuwa recently. Difficulties had been experienced in communicating disaster warning to villages when mobile and fixed CDMA telecom networks were not functioning in conflict conditions. Also, the importance of not leaving newspapers on top of sensitive electronic equipment which can overheat and shutdown had been noted. The VSAT based warning system had not run well in the tests.

“This is proto-type technology, using chosen groups to alert particular communities in particular villages,” explained Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director, LIRNEasia, at the press conference held on Friday at the Institute for Construction Training and Development (ICTAD).
“We are not into the mass market. This is a community leader’s programme and not a home product.” The cost consideration differed from that of a home-based product, he said. “When the cost factor is considered, java-enabled mobile phones are the best,” he said. The emphasis of the project had been on community involvement with an accent on contingency planning including evacuation preparedness. This could avoid panicking, stampedes, heart-attacks and pre-mature child births likely in such a situation, Prof. Samarajiva said.

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The findings of a pilot project on learning how information-communication technologies and community-based training can help in responding to disasters such as tsunamis were discussed by community leaders and international experts at a workshop on “SHARING KNOWLEDGE ON DISASTER WARNING, WITH A FOCUS ON COMMUNITY-BASED LAST–MILE WARNING SYSTEMS” held on March 28^th and 29^th, 2007 at the Sarvodaya headquarters in Moratuwa.

These finding ranged from the difficulties experienced in communicating disaster warnings to villages when mobile GSM and fixed CDMA telecom networks were not functional due to conflict conditions to the importance of not leaving newspapers on top of sensitive electronic equipment which can overheat and shut down as a result. In terms of the five communication technologies that were evaluated across multiple criteria, the addressable satellite radio sets and the java-enabled mobile phones performed the best, with the GSM-based community warning device developed locally by Dialog Telekom, MicroImage and University of Moratuwa following closely. The VSAT based warning system did not perform too well in the tests.

The objective was not to declare a winner among the technologies, but to find out how they could be improved to perform reliably in the difficult conditions of Sri Lankan villages. In disaster warning, great emphasis is placed on redundancy and multiple pathways, so more than one of the technologies will be used when the project moves to the implementation stage. In any case, the findings of the field trials are now in the hands of the developers who are already making improvements to the equipment so that they will perform better not only in Sri Lanka, but in the other countries that are interested in these applications.

Among the significant institutional shortcomings that were identified were the inability of the project to retain all the trainers who were trained last March and the delays in establishing a 24/7 helpdesk function at the Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center. As the purpose of a pilot project is to find out what works, what does not work and how things can be made to work better, even the “negative” findings are considered extremely valuable.

The fact that simulations were conducted in all the project districts, except one, was in itself a great success in light of the conflict conditions in the East. A great surprise was how an advanced Sarvodaya village, Mirissa, which was designated as a control village (and therefore not given any equipment) managed to respond extremely quickly to the simulated warning by coordinating with an adjacent village. This was an example of organization and determination trumping technology.

The workshop was attended by experts from South Asia and North America, Last Mile pilot project participants from various villages, Sarvodaya district offices and LIRNEasia; representatives from the telecommunications, satellite and software industries, media professionals, and many people representing groups interested in early warning systems.

Conceptualized in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of one out of 500 citizens of Sri Lanka, the Project was generated through the partnership of LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya with their shared objective of evaluating the suitability of information communication technology (ICT) in the last mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and with its possible extension to other developing countries. It is funded by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) and launched in January 2006.

The pilot project included outfitting and field-testing an initial 32 villages with various kinds of communications equipment which could provide features such as: early warning wake-up, addressability and provision of information in three languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil). The field-testing actively engaged the 32 villages in assessing and reporting on the effectiveness of the system and equipment being employed. A number of the key hardware and software components were designed and developed in Sri Lanka or specifically for the project.

While effective, economical and appropriate methods of communication and their corresponding ICTs were investigated and employed, the emphasis of the Project was on community involvement with an accent on contingency planning including evacuation preparedness. Part of this process has included training young people from Sarvodaya Shantisena as trainers.

Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia intend to work with their multiple partners to further analyze the finding of the pilot project research and implement them in a broad program to make 1,000 Grama Swarajya villages of the Sarvodaya Movement exemplars of disaster resilience. It is of course hoped that these lessons will be of benefit beyond Sarvodaya villages and indeed beyond the shores of Sri Lanka.

- Implementing CAP in Sri Lanka

- Evaluation of Last-Mile Hazard Warning Information and Communication Technology Hardware and Software System

- Content Standard for Last-Mile Alert and Notification

Our warm congratulations.

Tamil and Sinhala SMS are offered in Sri Lanka by Dialog Telekom and Celltel Lanka.

The service is based on a key-entry system enabling a customer to type the SMS as fast as in English and “a one touch function guiding them using the key pad to type Tamil letters”, according to Airtel. “The subscriber needs to download the application free of charge from ‘Airtel Live’ on to their handsets. Those receiving the Tamil SMS also need to download the application in order to read it in Tamil. In the event of the recipient not downloading it, the message is automatically transliterated and the Tamil words can be read using English letters.”

This news may be of interest to our readers who have been engaging in lively debate on standardizing Sinhala for IT applications.