For the next series of personal blog posts I am attempting to complete I have decided to use a website called Relief Web because I am out of ideas for personal blogs. Relief Web is a website that the instructor told us about one random day in class and I am going to take this to my advantage. Basically what this site does is keeps the users up to date with the latest natural disasters and terrorist attack all over the globe. It is updated on a daily basis so if you follow the site every day you will know what exactly is going on in the word. The topic that I decided to write this blog post on is the Himalayan Earthquake on September 19, 2011. After this 6.9 earthquake had concluded, 63 people were killed as well as 100,000 homes destroyed in Tibet, Nepal, and India. The biggest problem that was causing all of the excess damage after the earthquake was pouring rain causing huge mudslides. Due to the mudslides, rescue teams had to work much harder pulling people out of rubble and mud. This also caused problems with keeping the roadways open and making it hard to bring in help and supplies for relief efforts.
More than 6,000 troops were drafting in order to move concrete slabs and save people from the devastation. Within the first night after the deadly earthquake, 400 people were saved. Another strong factor that came into play was the fact that the clouds were so thick, that they stopped the use of helicopters to be used for the incident. After the first day the earthquake hot the was a lot of things wrong with the land in general. All the pipes had burst so there was no drinking or cleaning water, the earthquake took out all electricity in the area, and many of the roads were still collapsing after everything had subsided. There really wasn’t as much technology used during the aftermath of this earthquake like we have seen in this class in places such as Haiti and the 9/11 attacks. /I think this was because this was more of a remote location and they were clearly working with limited resources at that point. Overall, they still did a great job with the relief efforts, despite their lack of technology that was available to them at that point in time.
After reading about this deadly earthquake, I was actually quite interesting to see how disaster relief worked in places that had limited technology at their disposal at that point in time. We have been looking at huge events all semester that have involved a lot of different types of technologies. I really enjoyed learning about all that this semester especially how social networking can be used during disaster relief; however it was almost nice to see a disaster where only people were there to help one another, not so much computers. At the following link you can find a video on this particular earthquake:
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