Lakshaman Bandaranayake of Vanguard Management, who worked with LIRNEasia closely in the post-tsunami period, was kind enough to arrange meetings for Stuart Weinstein of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center who attended the LIRNEasia@5 conference. For those who may not know, Stuart was at the controls on December 26, 2004 when the great earthquake that caused the tsunami occurred. I visited PTWC a few weeks later and met Stuart and his colleague Barry Hirshorn leading to my first piece on early warning, post-tsunami. Despite all the controversies that were swirling around, Stuart and his colleagues were incredibly forthcoming and open, even agreeing to give evidence via a video link for the useless Presidential Commission on the Tsunami. Being the practical man he is, Stuart installed some new software at the Met Department that will help them make better use of ocean level information sent by the World Meteorological Organization and has also drafted some recommendations for the Sri Lanka authorities on how to improve their processes.
The following quote in a recent article by a Sri Lankan disaster management expert in the government newspaper caught my attention: There was a time gap of nearly three hours between the time Indonesia was affected and the time that Sri Lanka was affected and also the coastline was hit by the wave at different times. Even within Sri Lanka, the Eastern shores were hit first, which gradually spread to North, South and finally the West. The country simply did not have an early warning and dissemination system. This was the first I had heard anyone in government admit even indirectly that many lives could have been saved if the government had communicated to the media the information it received from the Navy and STF on the East Coast. I thank the writer for that.
It is asked in one of Sri Lanka’s aphorisms whether the sword that is not ready for war is to be used for cutting kos (jack fruit)? That is the same question we have to ask the Ministry of Disaster Management about its warning towers. When oh when, will the Ministry realize that these towers are a colossal waste of money and put its weight behind DEWN and cell broadcasting? But in Sri Lanka’s southern coastal village of Godawaya, a tsunami warning tower failed to emit a siren. Local fishermen who had stayed home to take part waited for a few hours and decided to go to work.
In developing countries such as Sri Lanka, when government has no resources to deliver the essential public good of early warnings, alternate methods must be advocated – that was the idea of the HazInfo research project, where civil society in villages were given training to respond appropriately to alerts received from the Hazard Information Hub located at the Sarvodaya Head Office in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. 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.
A report on the response to the tsunami that hit Samoa shows that preparedness and evacuation planning saved lives even though they had barely eight minutes after the warning from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Countries like India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have enough distance from the unstable Sunda Trench and therefore are likely to have more time to organize evacuations. For Indonesia and Thailand, unfortunately, the time will be less. The Pacific islands were so close to the epicentre of the earthquake that a wall of water hit Samoa within eight minutes after the Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii sent its first bulletin Tuesday. Several Samoans said they heard no sirens or warnings, but fled as soon as they were woken up by the earthquake.
CB [cell broadcasting] is an intrinsic feature of GSM, UMTS and IS 95 CDMA networks, and is thus available in the two Maldivian networks. But it must be activated. Most handsets are capable of receiving CB messages but the feature must be turned on. However, in the early stages, getting customers to turn on the feature could be an effective way of educating them of mobile-based public warning. Following stakeholder meetings that included sharing of information on the ongoing CB channel-standardization work of Study Group 2 of the Telecommunication Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) and experience in attempting to use CB for public warning in Sri Lanka, the recommendations to TAM are being finalized.
LIRNEasia is a regional think tank based in Sri Lanka. It works in 11 countries. In terms of its research, India occupies its energies more than its home base. However, LIRNEasia cannot be blind to what is going on around it. Several months ago, as the people held as human shields by the LTTE began to filter out, current and former LIRNEasians collected funds that were used by its partner Sarvodaya to purchase nebulizers for children in the camps.
Lots of people talk about predicting earthquakes. Here’s the science. Why should we be in interested in earthquake prediction? Because we live in a bad neighborhood: there has been a tsunamigenic earthquake every year, except 2008, since 2004 in the Sunda Trench. Until the prediction issue is resolved all we can do is focus on warning and preparedness.
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.
On March 27th, 2009, the Lanka Software Foundation committed to handover the Sahana project to the Sahana Software Foundation, upon incorporation. The award winning software, developed in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is now recognized as a leading disaster management software suite and has been deployed from the Philippines to Manhattan. In the course of the handing over ceremony I commented that Sahana exemplified a new kind of public good, that relied on funding and contributions from many sources, EXCEPT the government of the country it was developed in. In his brief comments, Hon Tissa Vitarana, Minister of Science and Technology of the Government of Sri Lanka, graciously conceded that the government has a lot of catching up to do. Now that the open source project is being spun off as a global public good to be maintained and developed by an international committee of disaster and open source professionals, there is not much point in giving Sahana money.
In our work on dam safety, we found there was widespread fear about the big dams of the Mahaveli scheme causing geological instability in the central hills. The following report on the possibility that the weight of water from a Sichuan Province dam caused last year’s earthquake, will fuel those fears. Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line. A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.
Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe says the government will establish a series of Tsunami warning towers throughout the country from next month. Speaking at the main ceremony of the Tsunami tragedy and National Safety day held in Kandy this morning the Minister said three Tsunami warning towers have been established in various areas of the country. The Minister said the government hopes to establish another 25 Tsunami warning towers along the coast around the country by next March and five emergency disaster centers by next January. This is getting to be quite boring. The same story about three towers and 25 to come repeated since July 2006.
The design of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program pilot (termed as the m-Health project) and findings from the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination pilot (termed as the HazInfo projects) involvoing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) were presented, yesterday, at the CAP Implementers Workshop organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). First Talk – The m-Health RTBP will be evaluating CAP or EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language) as means for disseminating health risk information to local health officials and community health care workers. Currently, the National Epidemiology Unit, in Sri Lanka, publishes a “Weekly Epidemiological Report” on the world wide web, a pdf file that can only be viewed on a personal computer. Paper copies of the same are delivered via postal mail to the relevant health officials. The latency in gathering the epidemiological data, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating is delayed as much as up to 3 weeks.
I was invited by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-D) to present and overview of the Common Alerting Protocol and lessons learned in the Sri Lankan experience in relations to the HazInfo project and the work in progress on the RTBP m-Health project. Further demonstrated the use of the Sahana Messaging Moudule CAP Template engine for generating CAP messages and the SMS/Email Multicasting engine for issuing alerts. Dialog Telekom is the only Sri Lankan organization that has adopted CAP and has embedded CAP in to their Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) for communicating disasters. The DEWN solution in being implemented as means for the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka to communicate hazard information to their District level disaster centers and local first responders. CAP surfaced as a standard in 2005 fairly new and unheard of by most in the disaster communication arena in the developing world.
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 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 […]