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