Nearly six months ago, on December 26, 2004, a massive earthquake off of Indonesia resulted in a tsunami which killed upwards of 160,000 people in South and South-East Asia. In the days and weeks following, questions of how best to identify, communicate and report on the possibility of disaster consumed many weblogs and media outlets. What tools could be used to make sure that a tragedy of this magnitude could not happen again?
While attention to the aftermath of the tsunami has faded in many (but not all) areas, the continued likelihood of other disasters -- natural, such as earthquakes or asteroid strikes, or human-related, such as terrorist attacks or disease pandemics -- has kept numerous researchers focused on improving our collective responses in emergencies.
The most important tool we have, of course, is information. Knowing what to do before disaster strikes makes smart responses far simpler, as can having access to good information once a crisis is underway. For many people who pay attention to the ways we could all be in trouble, the most likely near-term emergency is the possibility of an Avian flu pandemic. Thanks to Dr. Lucas Gonzalez, we may now be in a much better position to be able to respond effectively to a possible pandemic.
Dr. Gonzalez, noting the incredible utility of Wikipedia as an information resource in the hours and days after the December 26 tsunami, decided on June 1 to start making Wikipedia even more valuable in the case of an Avian flu breakout. He has added sections to the Wikipedia entry on Avian flu covering preparedness plans, strategies for slowing or stopping a pandemic, and (most interestingly) "Stages of a Pandemic," a World Health Organization rating system for where the world stands, disease-wise. On the 1-6 scale (1 being no worries, 6 being full-fledged pandemic), we're now at a 3.
Stephen O'Grady at Tecosystems, in commenting about this development, notes:
...one of the critical problems during the 1918 pandemic was one of communication. Fearing panic, the government cracked down on the media, using official and unofficial channels to suppress and control content they believed to be objectionable or incendiary. The unfortunate result of all of this was that the public completely lost faith in any sort of official media, and like the boy who cried wolf when the time came to get actually truthful information out, no one believed it. When you see reports daily that nobody's really dying, and daily claims that the cure is almost here, then walk down the street and see crepe paper (used to mark houses where a victim had passed away) on every house, you know something's not right. Hopefully we never test the hypothesis, but with Wikipedia - or more decentralized means like blogs - it's difficult to imagine that sort of censorship in today's world (unless the internet itself was shut down).
In short, survival is best ensured by communicating with those around you, no matter what the authorities are telling you. This common-sense notion is underscored by research done by the civil engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, looking at the ways in which people escaped the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001. Their report, Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications, runs nearly 300 pages; it can be downloaded from NIST (PDF). The report focuses primarily upon the mechanics of evacuation, and the challenges faced by those fleeing the buildings, but also addresses the ways in which people received information about what was going on. Far and away, the information received from peers in communication with people outside the towers (via phones or instant messaging devices) was more accurate and useful than information given by authorities such as 911 operators or building management.
Getting good information from others presumes that other people have access to good information. Some types of disasters may preclude that, whether by removing power from transmitters or knocking out radio and television stations. According to Gizmodo, however, XM Radio, one of the two big satellite radio providers, is developing a plan to set aside bandwidth to provide information services in case of major disasters (see graphic). Most satellite radio systems are in cars, which would not be affected by power blackouts. Although satellite radio systems are not yet ubiquitous, they are commonplace enough that they could work well as emergency information services.
From technology in orbit to technology on the ground (or near to it) -- "ultraswarms" of Bluetooth-connected microbot flyers could serve as a distributed search technology in disasters. Swarm systems excel in situations where stand-alone units can only get good sensor or imaging results with multiple passes. Each unit would be small and relatively inexpensive; the dozens of units linked together would be able to share both communication networks (in a traditional ad hoc network fashion) and computational abilities. Such mobile swarm sensors would be ideal for search-and-rescue operations, as they'd be able to carry a variety of sensor types and check otherwise-impassible terrain from multiple perspectives in a single go. (As a side note, the use of wireless flying microbots as sensor swarms was precisely what I suggested as a possibility last August.) A research paper about ultraswarm microflyers can be downloaded here (PDF).
More global-scale disasters are inevitable; we may be able to do little to stop them, but we can mitigate the worst of their effects. Information, communication, and identification are the key puzzle pieces. We may not have all the tools we need yet, but we're definitely getting there.
