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Live Feed: Common Alerting Protocol Workshop of the Last Mile HazInfo Project in Sri Lanka

Nuwan Waidyanatha — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 04:25:10 +0000

Nandan Jayasinghe –

We will start the event by lighting the traditional oil lamp. Next is a 2 minute meditation.

Nuwan Waidyanatha –

Welcome all partners including, Dr. Gordon Gow (University of Alberta), Dr. Dileeka Dias (Director Dialog Communication Research Lab), Prof Rohan Samarajiva (Director LIRNEasia), Mr. Nanadana Jayasinghe (Director Sarvodaya Disaster Management center), most importantly the Sarvodaya Participants (ICT Guardians).

Rohan Samarajiva –

We started the lat Mile HazInfo Program on January 23, 2006. The objective of my talk is to introduce you to the framework used in this project. The attendees are people who have faced the great tragedy that happened in December 26, 2004. Since then, 20 months later, we still have no solution in our nation.

3 Tsunamis have occurred in the Indian Ocean within the last 20 months. The last tsunami killed over 500 in Indonesia.

We can excuse ourselves for not having a warning system for the 2004 tsunami. But what about the next one? We cannot give excuses any further.

Before we go in to the details I will present the evidence and how is our preparedness– (Associated Press)

- message reads … affective coutries Indonesia and Australia

According to the Associated Press, Indonesia promises to roll out warning system in 2009. Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie told Associated press “ we are preparing one, but is not finished”. “After earthquake occurred people ran up hill”, V. President of Indonesia

Warning system links

Link 1 – Issue message to from the detection centers

Link 2 – Warn the Government Officials of threats

Link 3 – Warn first-Responders such as police and local government agents

Link 4 – Warn the last mile

Can we talk in past tense instead of future tense. Two other Nations ARE QUIPED with early warning system. Thailand has built a warning towers on beaches across its southern coast. Malaysia HAS positioned two buoys off its coast and have tested the system.

Now countries that speak in future tense; Sri Lanka has a plan to install a national warning system and information will be passed to villages by phones or national media

Rohan asks questions from the audience …

Do you get warnings through the gov now – audience NO

Do you have sirens in Churches, Mosques, and Temples as the Government has promised – audience NO

“Physical world of hazards, symbolic worlds, link technologies & institutions that work imperfectly.”

The Last-Mile HazInfo project is not a public warning system, it is a closed network alerting system. The Last-Mile project envisions on overcoming the lessons learned from the 2004 tsunami — keep ahead of congestions, address point-to-multiple media

We will provides the knowledge for the last mile to make their own response plans and when they are provided with them risk information. The last-Mile First-Responders will react based on the training and the severity of the hazard information.

We do not tell people to evacuate or take action but we only provide the know how and the information for the last mile to make their own decisions

10 deaths and 5 premature births as a result of inappropriate warning by the government in after the great Nyas earthquake in March. The incident happened at night where a people were sleeping.
Disaster Management is a village level duty. Therefore, we will only provide risk information; but will not ask people to evacuate. Sarvodaya is not authorized to issue public warnings but can develop a good information communication network to provide the necessary Disaster related information for local awareness and response planning.

The last-Mile system overcomes all these problems where a wakeup feature has been introduced. This is to help the Government by preparing the last mile.

First phase will evaluate how the organizational level of the villages and whether training is necessary for such a system.

Ultimate objective is to use the research findings to develop a model to implement an alerting solution in 226 of the Tsunami affected villages as a phase 2 of this project; phase 3 will implement a early warning solution for the 15000 Sarvodaya villages.

Gordon Gow –

Objective is to make everyone comfortable with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). Presentation will highlight the most relevant aspects that deal with the LM-HWS project. It is a core function of the project

Several Needs:

deliver messages to multiple technologies
Need to ensure accuracy and consistency in the content
- Need future expansion and interoperability

CAP is a mean to deliver information to a diverse set of technology which will be tested on Addressable Satellite Radio (ASR), Fixed Phones, Mobile Phones, Remote Alarm Device (RAD) and VSATs.

CAP Background

standardize content of alerts across all hazards and enable multi-media dissemination
Works started by the Partnership for Public Warning in 2002
PPW submitted a report to OASIS in 2004 – Version 1.0 in the project we are using Version 1.1 approved in 2005
XML-based data interchange format being implemented by government and private sector organizations

Why use CAP

Open source protocol, which means it is free for us to use
systematic Message Composition
Multimedia distribution of single message
Customization and filtering possibility
Growing international recognition and implementation (e.g. WCATWC)
Contribution to the evolution of CAP standard itself

All communication systems can be broken into 3 layers –

Content Layer: warning messages
Applicant Layer: mobile phones (WAP, Java, SMS, CB), telephone, radio (text display, text-to-voice), Internet (pop up display, email, rss)
Physical transportation layer (wireless networks and wired networks)

CAP fits in the Application Layer of the communication hierarchy.

A raw CAP message contains the XML tags and is annoying to read (raw software code). A CAP message viewed through a browser still looks very hard to read (raw information only). After applying a style-sheet to the message it can be converted in to a human readable message (clear message).

It very common to use web links in the message to direct readers to additional information such as a map of the effected areas.

A CAP “profile document defines its implementation for the LM-HWS, which is found in the Hazard-Information-Hub (HIH) guidelines; i.e CAP Profile. First-responders must understand certain features of the CAP profile: Alert, Information, resources, Area segments.

The 3 language problem has been solved by using multiple Information blocks; i.e. An Info block for Tamil, Sinhala, and English per message. The priority of the message is based on 3 pieces of the message: Urgency, Severity, Certainty. Urgent messages means that the community must act immediately; high priority implies that the community must be put on stand by; other a low priority message implies that the community must stay vigilant and keep a look out for hazards.

A government warning will be relayed by the HIH over the Sarvodaya network whenever it is issued. HIH will simply copy the government message and past it in the “description” element of the CAP message and set the “Event” as a “government warning”, which is one of the predefined hazard events in CAP.

Sarvodaya Monitored Tsunami Drill

Indi Samarajiva — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 18:42:30 +0000

By Nuwan Waidyanatha

The Hazard Information Hub (HIH), operated by Sarvodaya as part of the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project (HazInfo) to disseminate Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) risk information to the villages in Sri Lanka, monitored the recent tsunami drills conducted in the Pacific by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in the USA. The HazInfo project initiated by LIRNEasia, is a multipartner initiative aimed at tackling the “last-mile” challenges in developing an all-hazards approach to disaster management and mitigation.

The first region-wide test of the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific, called Exercise Pacific Wave ’06, was carried out on May 16 and 17. The simulation was divided into two stages, beginning with a mock tsunami bulletin from PTWC on May 16. In the second stage, conducted on the following day, government officials disseminated messages in each country to local emergency management and response authorities, simulating what would happen in a real situation.

Although the exercises are targeted for countries in and around the Pacific Ocean the Sarvodaya operated Hazard Information Hub also monitored the test alerts from PTWC. At the same time HIH rehearsed 3 aspects of the CAP alert dissemination process:

HIH observed how well the test alerts were disseminated by PTWC;
the two person CAP authentication and approval signatory procedure was tested, which is key to maintaining an audit trail of the alerts disseminated from HIH;
the language translation component, vital to effectively conveying the CAP message to the last-mile was also evaluated.

These initial HIH exercises will measure the expertise and the timing that is required to operationalize CAP in Sri Lanka. The Department of Meteorology – Sri Lanka, authority entrusted by the government of Sri Lanka to disseminate Tsunami hazard warnings, is also observing the PTWC “Wave 06” exercises.

Although the exercise were targeted for the Countries in and around the Pacific Ocean the Sarvodaya operated Hazard Information Hub also monitored the test alerts from PTWC. This would be the first such drill for the HIH since it began setting up in March 2005.

Registering to receive bulletins is as simple as supplying an email address to the International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC) through the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) web interface. The PTWC web page: “Subscribe to bulletins” , also provides a quick link to ITIC web page for anyone who wants to subscribe to receive PTWC tsunami bulletins.

Exercise Pacific Wave 2006 email bulletins were delivered to hih@sarvodaya.lk with the subject: “[Tsunami Warning - IOC] Pacific Wave 06 Exercise – Scenario 1 – Message 1 of 9”.The first 3 were Regional Warning and Watch (RWW); second 5 were Pacific Wide Warning (PWW), and the last one was a Final Pacific Wide Warning (FPW) message. Similarly Scenario 2 corresponding dummy bulletins were received in following order: 2 x RWW, 2 x PWW, and 1 x FPW. There were a total of 15 messages received 9 in scenario 1 and 6 in scenario 2.

Relative to the message sequence, there were some inconsistencies in the order the email were actually received. For example, the received time indicates that the Pacific Wave 06 exercise – scenario 1 – Message 2 was received prior to Scenario 1 – Message 1. The reader may observe several other occasions where the message receive time and the message sequence number do not tally. It is possible to come up with several theories to explain the technicalities of this phenomena of the system.

HIH also compared the delay between receiving the email and the time the bulletin was issued. HIH used UTC + 530 as the Sri Lankan time to calculate the time difference. Minimum time was 39 minutes and maximum time was 1 hour and 32 minutes with a median of 46 minutes for the difference between the time received by HIH and the time disseminated by PTWC. The assumptions were that PTWC disseminated the email at the time as it is indicated in the bulletins and not anytime earlier or later. The reader may compare the time stamps in Table1 above versus the Timeline in the exercise manual. In the case of an Indian Ocean Tsunami, HIH cannot afford a 46 minutes delay between the time of the incident and time of receiving the email. HIH needs to be able to disseminate an alert to the Sarvodaya villages giving enough time for the last-mile to respond.

As an alternative, HIH also subscribes to the West Coast-Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (WCTWC ) RSS feeds. The “tsunami information map” of the web-product, accessible through the RSS feed, is a very affective page in providing the audience a quick understanding of the epicenter and the level of the danger (i.e. shows the vulnerable areas).

HIH was particularly interested in interpreting the CAP message (i.e. WCTWC CAP Product) also directed to by the WCTWC RSS feed. The first problem encountered was that the message could not be read through the XML style-sheet developed in-house. This is because the WCTWC generated CAP message Universal Resource Name (URN ) was based on CAP version 1.0 and not the newest version CAP 1.1. Therefore both the XML data file and the XSL style-sheet had to be manually adjusted before reading the CAP message through the HIH GUI. The OASIS CAP V 1.1 structure defines four elements – Alert, Info, Resource, and Area. The CAP message generated for the PTWC exercise accompanied only the Alert and Info elements of the CAP message. All the required fields were populated.

The primary objective of the HazInfo Project is to evaluate the suitability of various ICTs as the basis of a last mile hazard warning system in Sri Lanka. The focus of this exercise was on the Information aspect of the acronym ICT. Mainly, testing the risk information receiving and interpretation processes of the Last Mile Hazard Waning System in Sri Lanka.

However, there are many lessons HIH learned from this exercise. Moreover, it helped HIH identify the hidden weaknesses of the current system. Now HIH is better prepared for the next time. Conclusion is that the HIH efficiencies and preparedness can only be increased through rehearsals like this!

FAQs

Ayesha Zainudeen — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:46:24 +0000

How can my organization/I as an individual researcher participate in the activities of LIRNEasia?
LIRNE.NET is made up of research organizations, but we are building up organically, based on actual collaborative work rather than formal agreements. We worked with the LINK Centre in S Africa for years, before it became a member of LIRNE.NET. This is the approach we adopt at LIRNEasia as well. We have a number of projects that we have obtained funds for; using our best judgment, we assemble teams of researchers to work on those projects; when they produce the output, we involve as many people as we can in the discussion so that the product is improved/the knowledge is disseminated. That’s what we were doing in Mt Lavinia last year.
People get involved in our work, primarily through our website, which is open and interactive or through WDR or LIRNE.NET, all of which allow for participation. We cannot individually communicate with people (like I am doing now!) most of the time, not because we don’t want to, but because we don’t have the resources. But we have lots of discussions going on the website, and generally someone responds to a comment of substance. The problems of telecom reform are vast and we are doing only the little part we can handle. My suggestion is that you should do what interests you; we will read it if it’s on the web. If there are commonalties in approach and the findings are of interest and are well supported, we will have reason to work together.
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News Feeds

Indi Samarajiva — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:10:56 +0000

People seem to be biting the New York Times pretty hard this week, so I’ve added a direct feed to Circuits in the sidebar, and one to WiFi News for good measure. These are just temporary since people seem to be talking about these topics. We can get feeds to most big news sources (Harsha). If you can find a RSS or XML button on any sites you like they can be syndicated. This, for example, is a Gizmodo Wireless feed below. In this feed, as it exists at midnight, the WiFlyer link is relevant to Sri Lanka. It’s router that can convert dial-up to WiFi. They also link to a Cell-to-WiFi converter which is useful for getting less-than-perfect connectivity out to remote areas.

Oh, and the WiFi News has links to the Bangla Broadband story and on the Internet thru powerlines, they’re saying that companies are reluctant to invest.