Tonight’s class was specifically focused on the Earthquake in Haiti and the emergency response tactics after the earthquake hit. There were a lot of topics thrown around during the entirety of the class, but there was one fact to point out that was more important than all the rest. This select piece of information stated that with crisis mapping many people that were trapped in the disaster areas were tweeting, which were being read by thousands of translators and responders. At a more in depth look responses came in Haitian Creole; the responders had to translate this into English so that they could translate the tweets, categorize them and plot the areas that needed to be responded to. Following this, the most important information could be sent to the responders who would then use the information to go and save lives in the places they believed needed the most help. Another important thing to remember was that a lot of pressure was put on the translators, not as much on the responders because they had to pick out what the important information was compared to the information that wasn’t so pressing. This is not how it was in the past and makes this a very important first and unique occurrence.
Going into deeper and more exact levels of the technology is the next thing I would like to focus on now that the main point of my blog has been put out there. One example of important technology that was used for the post Haiti response was SMS text messaging. SMS text messaging was the main form of communication after the earthquake in Haiti. Unlike the 9/11 attacks the infrastructure did not fail due to the fact that there were not enough people in Haiti to bring down and flood the network with their cell phones. This was an excellent opportunity for emergency responders because it gave them exact GPS locations on the victims and they were able to help them and send them back information on where they could go and get help. Another important piece of information that happened for the first time after the Haiti earthquake was the collaboration between different agencies and organizations worked very well during this disaster unlike in the past such as 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. This is because they developed a new way to share information that worked very well. This was also the first time the government used social networking sites to help in the disaster relief. Surprisingly this worked very well with the concept of silos working together.
After class tonight, I was in the mood to look up other new technologies specifically designed to help with the Haiti relief efforts. After looking briefly in YouTube I found a very interesting video called New Solar Water Purifier Saves Lives in Haiti. This video can be found at the link:
This video was pretty interesting and was a little bit different from what we covered in class. I advise watching the video if you are interested in different types of physical relief in Haiti. Overall, I would have to say that tonight’s class was very interesting and everyone that spoke did a very good job. I especially enjoyed the puppies on the screen.
After reading your post I realized that mine is very similar. We both brought up the points on how SMS and twitter played huge roles in the disaster relief of the earthquake in Haiti. Because this was really the first time that SMS was used in a large-scale relief, it marked a milestone for disaster relief. However, I do not think that this will be able to be used again if another attack of disaster would happen in a industrialized country just because of the fact that most people have cell phones and they would then get flooded and shut down. In order for us to use SMS again, we would have to come up with a new technology in order to prevent this nuisance from happening again.
ReplyDeleteTwitter was also a milestone for disaster relief. This was the first time that the federal government used twitter and it proved to be a success. The only set back, like you said, was that in order for us to be able to understand, analyze, and interoperate these tweets, we needed to have a translator at all times because of the language barrier. This was a burden because the translators that we had were numbered. Not many people now how to speak Creole and English. So, the once that we did have were over worked and were in a way forced to work long hours with very few hours of sleep. Looking forward, I believe that we will do a better job with using twitter and SMS in the future.
I agree with you that this past Monday’s class was very interesting. We found out our professor does not like McDonalds, I don’t blame her Wendy’s is my favorite after Subway. After reading one of the responses I got from my post from this last class on Haiti, I believe that one point you failed to mention was the Reporting Wheel that was invented. This wheel as one person from our class stated, is very simple and efficient. Again I just paraphrased but it is not making the situation harder by adding a whole bunch of technology to an already existing problem.
ReplyDeleteWhat happened in Haiti was not just a problem with the disaster but no one who responded could really speak Creole. The response teams needed translators and needed them very badly to translate the messages so that they can even reach the people with the correct supplies. The GPS locations helped tremendously with the relief effort because this helped locate people who had cell phones on them from the time the earthquake hit. Thankfully there was a few towers still standing after the earthquake and one was repaired to help keep communications going. This was vital in my opinion before any of the SMS messages were sent asking for help.
Your YouTube video on New Solar Water Purifier Saving lives in Haiti was amazing. This might be expensive by GE but it was using natural sunlight to power a well pump to give the people who needed it water. These water purifiers can produce up to 5,000 gallons of safe drinking water every day for over 10 years for people who are in desperate need of it. This just shows that this is another way you can help the people of an area hit by disaster without using SMS or Tweets.
I would like to say I agree with some of your points and they were some of the main things I took away from the discussion on Monday.
ReplyDeleteThe translators on the SMS system played a critical role in saving the lives of many people. Their contributions cannot be overstated as they were an integral part of the disaster relief equation in this instance. The amount of pressure on them must have been astounding as you have said but they rose to the occasion and did the best they could not only to translate messages but categorize them in terms of priority.
The fact that Haiti did not crash they communication towers also made the response that much easier although as we learned in class it wasn't the most accurate system 4636 did a lot of good and with possible re-tooling of sorts could become a major player in disaster relief.
As for the one of the last point about the government agencies working together outside of their silos but also more efficiently within them. I feel this point is not stressed enough that we have found a way to work slightly more efficiently in disaster relief. It may not be perfect but it is not as broken as what we currently have. It is a quick and efficient way to get all parties talking and working together although the message may become a little convoluted at times. If we can get over the bottom line and sharing information aspects which I know are major hurdles I really feel like we could be much better off in disaster relief.
Hey Jesse,
ReplyDeleteMuch like Evan's post, your entry really reminded me about some of the other projects I have worked on in the past. When you mentioned the importance of the volunteer translators, I completely agreed that they were a pivotal aid in the advancement of help to victims of the Haiti disaster. When I was working with Project EMERSE, which you can find out more about on my blog post, some of the other members on the project and I were tasked to filter through Twitter data that was collected immediately after the disaster struck to find relevant tweets that can give us a chance to categorize information much like Ushahidi's system. One of the biggest roadblocks was that we didn't have anyone available who could translate Haitian Creole to English, so we had a language barrier we couldn't work with to complete some research. On the other hand, French is also a language that many people in Haiti speak, and luckily, Greg was there to help us with some of those tweets that came about in French. Otherwise, a lot of people observing the situation and collecting texts or tweets or blog posts from Haiti didn't originally come to think there would be a language barrier. This is definitely something to consider as we enter into foreign disaster zones.
Using SMS communication was a great thing in Haiti, but as we found in the US, there is only so much communication that can be made at one time before we end up clogging the networks. Sure, Haiti has a smaller population, so the lines weren't as clogged because the capacity was so much higher than the number of people who called or texted. I'd like to know what the ratios are for handling that kind of traffic. Perhaps we can learn from Haiti on how to create a cellular infrastructure that can be as effective in a disaster-like situation. Are there so many thousands of people per cell tower or do they have bigger landlines? It would be interesting to see if a 1st world country can learn something about capacity from a 3rd world country.
Overall, this was a good read. There is a lot of cool tech out there for natural disaster response. I'll include some of those things in an upcoming blog.
Tony
Helllloooooooooo Jesse,
ReplyDeleteThe part where you bring up how people were tweeting after the disaster hit really was an interesting to me. Dr. Tapia also brought up a good point in class; if one person tweets that someone is stuck under the rubble and people come to help, if that person who tweeted tells two more people who do the same, and it keeps growing, when do we say to trust or ignore the tweets? The process that Ushahidi went through to decipher the tweets in Haitian Creole into English and place the tweets onto a map. All of which was done by volunteers in a professor’s living room. I found this to be astoundingly helpful and I didn’t really know that such a process was even capable of being done.
Haiti was definitely a game-changing disaster recovery effort because unlike previous disasters, the telecommunications were still intact after the earthquake rocked the tiny nation. SMS texting was also incredibly useful when helping people recover from the Haitian earthquake. Texting was definitely the main method of communication by the survivors, and this allowed for GPS locations of survivors. Both of these technologies were not capable of being used during the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disaster recoveries, since during those the cellular networks were not operational, which made the Haitian recovery a unique recovery.