the tohoku situation
TRANSCRIPT
The Tohoku Situation
What Happened
• A force 9 earthquake caused relatively minor damage
• The subsequent tsunami damaged around 500km of coastline and killed over 27,000 people
• Around 100,000 people are living in shelters, many more are homeless
The Reaction
• Over 100,000 Self Defense Force personnel were deployed
• Emergency services from around Japan responded
• Non-governmental agencies started supplying aid and other support
My Specific Case
• I travelled to Miyagi prefecture to bring medical and other supplies from my prefecture
• Our local NGO also needed an on-the-ground report about the current situation and requirements
• The focus was on Ishinomaki city, Onagawa town and Ogatsu town
Ishinomaki
Onagawa
Ogatsu
Challenge
• Travel into an unknown situation
• Record data around key areas of interest
• Provide a way for several NGOs to access the data as quickly as possible
Requirements
• Record the situation
• Visualize and share records
• Keep it very, very simple
Rationale
• There was extremely limited time but a lot of data to process
• Most people involved in disaster management were non-technical and needed to work across language barriers
• Everything would have to be managed on-the-ground
Known Infrastructure
• The Internet and landlines were working across Japan
• Cellphone connections were spotty across Japan due to overload
• The Internet and cell towers more or less worked at the edges of the disaster zone
Solution
• iPhone 3GS for geotagged photos
• Flickr and Google Maps for the mashup
• The result was a URL with a map, photos and notes everyone could access
Lessons Learned
• Current technology has the required features
• Their implementation is hard to use in emergencies
• The biggest problems are configuration and complex interfaces
Let Me Put It This Way
• Try driving 1,250km over 14 hours, sleep 2 hours and then...
• Get an SUV overloaded with supplies over gravel roads and collapsed highways
• And manage to take, annotate and upload geotagged photos with one hand
The Bigger Question
• What role does technology play in disaster zones?
Today
• We mostly use analogue technology
• Time is wasted
• Uncertainty is high
• Coordination is difficult
Shelter Phone System
Satellite Uplink
Shelter Data
Location Maps
Multi-Agency Meeting
Fool’s Gold
• Complex disaster management systems
• Specialist tools
• Anything else that requires training or special equipment
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Be Realistic
• Technology is useful for data processing and communication, and this is useful in a disaster
• However, technology is only useful if it works on available infrastructure
• And it is only useful if the people on-the-ground can deploy it
What We Can Do
• Improve automatic recoverability of systems
• Improve configuration through automation
• Improve interfaces by dramatically reducing complexity
In Short
• When it goes down, it comes back
• A world without settings
• No need to wonder what button to press
Over To Clever People
• Chris, Ted, Fernando and Rafael