The Sumatra Trench Tsunami: Politics, Technologies and Opportunities
Community Action: Relief
One of the more unnerving characteristics of the aftermath of the Tsunami was the apparent silence from disaster areas. Apart from the coastal cyber cafes of Thailand there seems to have been little data flowing from disaster centres to points of relief. This is sadly unsurprising at the level of the village based on subsistance fishing but it seems odd that there were not local radio or satellite phone points able to alert the authorities to the need for relief. If stricken areas were sending out messages, these clearly were not being picked up; There were some more isolated villages which were not reached for more than a week after the initial impact. Before the civil authorities use international development assistance, not least from private individuals, governments must be honest about the degree to which their intelligence communities could have contributed to warning and relief through their media monitoring services. It is difficult to conceive that Indian military intelligence resources in the Andaman’s could not have relayed sooner to the authorities in New Delhi and Chennai the extent of the problem.
Another area which raises questions which are, of course, partly linked to military security, is that of the use of satellites for remote air traffic control. There is no technological reason why ATC cannot be handled for isolated airports at a distance; in many natural disasters damage to ATC towers severely hampers relief but this is surely unnecessary.
The area where the internet came into its own was global citizen data aggregation, transmission, lobbying and fund raising. It may well turn out to be the case that the critical under-pinning of the unprecedented philanthropic response to the crisis - by no means the worst in living memory - was the density of internet traffic and data rendering.
Without wishing to retard any positive action covering the first six Sections of this Paper, it is important that research is carried out to analyse data traffic associated with the initial warning, calls for assistance and the building up of strategies for relief. There is much that can be learned from what has happened and much that can be done to fill some of the gaps already identified.