Thursday, January 06, 2005
Indian Ocean Info-disaster
Kevin Maney points out in USA Today that the Indian Ocean Tsunami surely would have been less deadly if the information had jumped the old hierarchical, official channels. He writes
Meanwhile, in dictatorial Myanmar, aka Burma, (where it is illegal to own an unregistered modem) the official attitude is, "No disaster here, nothing to look at, move along folks." Ethan Zuckerman documents this info-travesty.
With plenty of time to save thousands of lives, seismologists working in Hawaii, Harvard University, Australia and Thailand . . . tried calling officials in affected countries but didn't have the right phone numbers, or no one picked up.Finland -- a couple days late -- found one way to spread the word. Maney writes:
Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu, told Reuters: "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."
Phone calls! Address books! How sad is that? Even if somebody answers, telephones are one-to-one communication — a terrible waste of time in an emergency.
Days after the tsunami, Finnish mobile phone providers agreed to broadcast a text message that hit every Finland-registered cell phone in Thailand (about 6,000). The message contained information about two evacuation centers for Finnish citizens. Finland then did the same in Sri Lanka.Kevin adds his voice to a growing chorus of calls (a few of which are aggregated here) for alternate warning plans.
"As a result of these improvisations, we now have a system in place that enables us to issue a warning to customers of Finnish mobile operators in any region of the world with 30 minutes' notice," [a Finnish official] says.
Meanwhile, in dictatorial Myanmar, aka Burma, (where it is illegal to own an unregistered modem) the official attitude is, "No disaster here, nothing to look at, move along folks." Ethan Zuckerman documents this info-travesty.
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