news
Society | DOI: 10.1145/1646353.1646362
Sarah Underwood
improving Disaster
management
Social networking, sophisticated imaging, and dual-use technologies promise
improved disaster management, but they must be adopted by governments
and aid agencies if more lives are to be saved in the wake of crises.
WHEn THE SEpTEMBEr 11, 2001 terrorist attacks ripped through the heart of New York City, the July 7, 2005 suicide
bombings created chaos and mayhem
in central London, and the Boxing Day
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake caused
a tsunami that swept away more than
200,000 lives, information and communication technologies played a part in
disaster response. Communication was
key, but not always possible as infra-structure collapsed and mobile phone
networks became overloaded, prompting renewed efforts to develop effective
disaster management strategies.
Research organizations, relief agencies, and technology providers agree
that technology can save lives in a disaster, but here consensus ends, with
a rift between researchers pursuing the
possibilities of Web 2.0 applications
and field workers largely committed to
their traditional toolkit of mobile and
satellite phones.
“IT systems make it possible to han-
dle large amounts of data to assess the
situation after a disaster has struck,
but we need to move in the direction of
community response, developing me-
dia centers that accommodate citizen
journalists,” says Kathleen Tierney,
professor of sociology and director of
the Natural Hazards Research and Ap-
plications Information Center at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. “Of-
ficial agencies need to interact with
citizen first responders and assess in-
formation being gathered in the field,
rather than depending on information
that is filtered through hierarchical or-
ganizations. The information may not
be 100% accurate, but mobile phone
pictures taken at the scene provide the
most rapid information.”
Tierney is a proponent of Web 2.0 ap-
A man uses his mobile phone’s camera to document the aftermath of the earthquake that
devastated the city of Dujiangyan, in the province of sichuan, china, on may 12, 2008.
plications, such as Twitter, blogs, and
wikis, as a means of improving disaster
response. “People’s use of technology
in crises is expanding rapidly, ahead
of the use of technology by emergency
management agencies,” she says. “We
need people in these agencies who are
disaster and technology savvy. We also
need opinion leaders and foundations
that fund disaster assistance to think
along new lines.”
The concept of community response
plays into the thesis of Ramesh Rao,
director of the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information
Technology (Calit2) at the University of
California, San Diego. Rao believes re-
search into technological, sociological,
and organizational issues is critical to
the improvement of disaster response.
“There is a great opportunity to use
technology to improve disaster man-
agement, but at the moment people
are in the way of that improvement,”
he says. “There is a lack of informa-
tion sharing, which is not a technol-
ogy problem, but a problem stemming
from organizations wanting things this
way.”
One advance Rao suggests is dual
use of technology. During peaceful
times, dual-use technology, such as a
mobile phone, operates as a everyday
personal communications device, but
during an emergency it transforms into
an information sensor and dissemina-
tor. This overcomes aversion to using
different communications equipment
during a crisis and eliminates the time
lag caused by government agencies col-
lecting, processing, and distributing
crisis-related data. Direct, firsthand
reports from a disaster can provide a
realistic picture, helping to avoid the
confusion that can result from wide-
spread, and not always accurate, televi-
sion broadcasts.
