Disaster Management: What are we doing?

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October 8 brings back terrifying memories of the horrifying earthquake that shook the greater part of northern Pakistan from its roots. An earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale was followed by over 120 significant aftershocks which showed up between 5 and 6.2 in magnitude. The quake destroyed towns and villages across a 30,000 sq km area, impacting a population of 3.5 million people and destroying some 26 hospitals and 600 health units. There were an estimated 73,000 dead and 3.5 million homeless. The 1 million survivors were in desperate need of medical attention and rescue.
Though the entire country contributed to the relief efforts by donating food, clothing or setting up websites and sharing information about what was needed, it was tragically evident how unprepared Pakistan was to manage this situation. Not only was information lacking, the brutal winter was setting in and the non-existing infrastructure made immediate rescue and relief almost impossible.

To illustrate the environment and situation that rescue workers were dealing with, here’s an excerpt from an article entitled, “Responding to shelter needs in post-earthquake Pakistan: a self-help approach”,  Alexandra Causton and Graham Saunders of CSRoutline the challenges involved in sending help to where it was needed:

The first challenge was the pace at which shelter needed to be delivered. The disaster struck only two months before the onset of winter in the northern villages. Located at the foothills of the Himalayas, higher-elevation villages can be cut off for days by several feet of snow. The previous year, CRS had responded to a ‘winter emergency’ in these areas, providing food and blankets to remote villages that had been snowbound for over three weeks. In addition, the loosening of soil and rock on the mountainside after the earthquake raised the risk of further landslides.

The scale of the disaster was also unprecedented: 3.5 million Pakistanis were left homeless, exposed to freezing temperatures and rain. Moving to tented camps in accordance with initial government policy meant losing the October harvest, abandoning animals, leaving assets buried in the rubble and even losing land. Solutions were required in people’s communities of origin, especially at altitudes where tents would not provide adequate shelter against the winter weather.

Finally, the terrain presented significant challenges to the delivery of relief. The most vulnerable people lived in dispersed villages often accessible only by foot on narrow trails going up steep mountainsides. Road access was possible along the valleys and to some higher locations with smaller 4×4 vehicles. Large-scale transportation of bulky shelter materials was problematic, and access was further disrupted by localised landslides. Attempting to coordinate distributions to scattered and difficult-to-reach villages required significant investment in logistical resources. In some cases, helicopters seemed the only option – creative solutions were required to effectively reach higher elevations, solutions that could only be found by individual families themselves.

While there might not be a way to stop the natural disaster from happening or being able to accurately predict the exact time of when the earthquake is going to hit, with so much technology available to us, it can certainly be possible to be prepared for the worst.

In addition to the poor terrain, lack of information was one of the biggest hurdles that relief coordinating agencies faced. If they didn’t know what kind of injuries had been sustained, they couldn’t arrange for the best doctors to match the medical needs; what kind of clothing needs were required or what specific foods would be most relevant. When you reach out to the urban population, all of whom contributed in every which way possible, the clothing that may have been donated from Karachi might not be the best for the weather in the northern region. Stronger communication may have helped to better align the quality of the relief efforts.

A central reservoir of data might have helped at the time. Soon after the earthquake, a large tech savvy community began to put up blogs and websites to try and coordinate some of the ongoing efforts. Turns out, there was just too much of the same information being replicated. If there was a huge lack of something, it was veracity. Most of the information that was being shared through the websites was passed on by word of mouth, which meant that if one website published something misleading, a bunch of other sites would also publish the same incorrect information.

Community Radio, something a lot of technology activists have been harping about for as far as the email archives will go, would have been critical in getting information out from areas that were blocked. Low frequency radio channels, if activated every few “blocks” of homes, may have been a saving grace in patching a lot of these gaps.

Extraordinary circumstances often call for extraordinary measures. A lot of the technology that should have already been in place has been held back in its implementation largely because of the lack of policy, foresight or red tape. Imagine how much quicker relief workers could move in if you had the northern areas mapped out and available with GPS coordinates.

Satellite and imaging technology was deployed almost immediately with the guidance and support of a lot of IT professionals.

Salman Ansari, a telecom consultant and someone who was active in planning and executing some of the technology for the relief effort recalls, “As a bunch of volunteers, we set up the support structure for the massive helicopter airlift from Chaklala and Islamabad airport and also the acquisition of data from the edge of the disaster area within a day or so of the earthquake. These volunteers were integrated into the C4I team and the FRC at the PM’s secretariat.” The C4I airdropped young officers on the edge of the disaster areas and their link back to the support hierarchy was based on Inmarsat terminals which had been donated to the PTA by ITU and mobilized for the relief effort by Salman and Dr Asif Zafar of the RMC (Rawalpindi Medical College), one of Pakistan’s leading proponents of Telemedicine.

He continues “I had got Burraq to set up a thin client phone on the laptops linked via these Inmarsat terminals so that each one of the officers airdropped had an Islamabad number which could be dialed into and critical data and information could be dynamically fed back to all locations which needed this. This was one of the many contributors to making one of the biggest helicopter airdrops for disasters and rescue.  The exercise was accident-free, despite having a helicopter leave every 15 minutes in a single narrow air corridor being traversed by non-interconnected entities such as NATO, German army, Pak Army and other agencies.”

Jehan Ara, President of PASHA writes, “When the earthquake hit we were so ill-prepared. There were a number of initiatives that civil society and business got involved in. Intel donated the servers, laptops and webcams.. Rawalpindi Medical College and other hospitals were brought together so that a mini-telemedicine facility was set up quickly in the earthquake area which managed to not only address the less-serious injuries onsite immediately but also relieved the intake at hospitals so they could save lives. This one initiative alone managed to save a lot of lives and limbs.”

SUPARCO provided the real-time 2.5m imagery which was overlaid on the ESRI server in order to see the roads and locations that had been destroyed and where direct efforts were needed. “We set up an ArcGIS database on free software provided by Engineering Consultants for integrating all the data on large plasma screens at the Command and Control center at the PM secretariat,” continues Salman.

It seems an amazing amount of work that got done in a very short span of time. “This included collecting donated computers, gathering funds for the Control room and putting all this together while ramping up operations!”

He continues, “After this effort, I was asked by the Disaster Preparedness Cell at Davos to write a document which I did. I also sent to the MoIT for a future plan of action in Pakistan.” And then the frightening commentary that follows all this flurry of excitement:  “Nothing has been heard of this since.”

The complete picture of Disaster preparedness including the backend databases, networks, procedures, volunteer lists, all of which can be activated, explains Salman, the response activation processes are a must for Pakistan. “The issue always has been the lack of ownership and where to park this whole ‘Project’.” And it hardly seems like the project has been forced on any ministry or country. If the blueprint for the technology integration and implementation exists, the placard protesters really need to be holding up is, “Why isn’t this being done?!”

Chanuka Wattegama writes the following on the Asia_ICT Policy mailing group,
Government officials are happy to assure that ‘every possible step’ has been taken to avoid disasters, but repetition of the same calamity proves we still have long way to go. No third world government can assure its population is protected from natural disasters unless the issues of ‘connectivity’ and ‘education’ are addressed. In the 21st century, ‘empowering people’ means not just making them rich but making them ‘connected’ and ‘informed’ as well. Unfortunate incidents like these will be repeated till we realize that simple point.

One may argue Bangladesh already has the ICT infrastructure, but it still fails the acid test. Thousands of kilometers of dark fiber means nothing unless it works for the people. How many knew this hazard in advance? Was the time of warning adequate for them to take precautionary actions? Were they educated/informed about these actions? Did all the links in the disaster management chain work well? Does this not repeatedly remind us that no matter what we assume there are still weaker links in the chain?

Search for Disaster Management in Pakistan on Google and you get a shallow report entitled ‘Disaster Management Policies and Systems in Pakistan’ created for WCDR 2005 in January of 2005 that defines Disasters in Pakistan as nothing but floods and takes the reader through 9 different versions of disaster policies. You may also come across a really sad looking National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Web Portal that was launched in an effort to centralized relief efforts and information, seems to have had one update a month and doesn’t seem to have had any updates since June of 2008.

Forget the natural disasters. What about any disaster that occurs? A year ago the Norhtern Bypass collapsed and the city struggled to find a crane large enough to move some of the boulders. The two fires that burned through the PNSC building in Karachi couldn’t be put out in time because the local Fire Department didn’t have snorkels powerful enough resulting in unnecessary damage. Up until the time the City Nazim took control over the situation, rains caused massive floods around Karachi due to lack of planning or strategy.

We have so much access to technology to create the necessary content and to access it, but why we are not using it to mobilize and network efforts on an ongoing basis is a whole different story. IT doesn’t deter a critical situation from happening – it makes it easier to survive it. If the only time we are going to think about a master plan for disaster management is after a disaster, then where is the strategy and planning in that?

Feel free to leave a comment, note or send us an email about what you think can and still needs to be done. We’d like to include the details in our Inbox section of the upcoming issue. Your thoughts and expertise matter… to a lot of people.

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