Software to the rescue

Accidents and natural disasters are facts of life. We never want them to happen but we know they will happen. There isn’t much we can do to stop them. But when they do happen we can take actions that can mitigate the harm. How fast we respond after a disaster man made or nature made is extremely important. It can be the difference between life and death of many.

Software is increasingly playing a significant role in such disaster response. Over the past few years the use of innovative approaches on software on such disasters is proving to be a big factor in reducing the harm and mitigating the effects of such disasters. The use of concepts in technology such as AI, social network, push notification, GPS, crowdsourcing, peer to peer networks, etc. are all being put to use in disaster mitigation solutions. Today’s post is to highlight some that we may have heard of and some that aren’t that famous. But all of them are examples of how human innovations in one space can save lives and improve things in other spaces.

Social Network

The 2015 earthquake in Nepal was one of the deadliest in recent history. As the death toll increased over few days after the 7.8 scale earthquake help in finding and identifying missing people became the biggest challenge. This is where the social network driven platforms came in to the rescue. Google and Facebook deployed network driven, cellphone-based tools to help track victims. Facebook’s Safety Check let users affected by the earthquake to log onto the site and mark themselves as “safe.” At the same time users around the world could use FB to check if their family and friends are in the impacted area. Google’s person finder was deployed to connect people in Nepal with their friends and family around the world. The platform basically provides a massive, open platform to collaboratively track missing persons’ reports. It has been used in the past to help victims of Typhoon Haiyan and after the Boston bombing.

There are other social network driven disaster response/rescue software and apps coming out based on networks like Whatsapp, Snapchat and even Skype. The existing network helps quickly identify the contact network in such situations and makes it possible for the emergency services to jump ahead in the tracking and recording process during a disaster.

Crowdsourced Alert

Disaster response is also taking the advantage of the concept of crowdsourced information. When a disaster can be wholly averted or at least the damage contained by early detection this is an essential concept. Why rely on limited equipment and personnel when the entire population can be utilized for early disaster detection.

The classic example is forest fires. The earlier they are detected the faster they can be contained or at least the damage can be mitigated. Even a few years ago forest fire detection was solely dependent on equipment laid out on possible locations and also on hope of 911 calls. This changed after the major 2019 forest fire in California, which was the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, burning the entire town of Paradise and killing 86 people. A new platform utilizing the concepts of crowdsourcing was put together called the ALERTWildfire. It is a platform that users use to send and receive real-time images and information. It also leverages instruments, cameras and sensors in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. This information then published on the ALERTWildfire website. With a platform such as this anyone can be monitoring the wildfire situation by selecting a certain area in any of those five states, and monitoring what’s happening. Hence it essentially magnifies the network of monitoring to potentially millions of individuals instead of a few dozen that were usually doing this job. Crowdsourcing at it’s best.

Information Aggregators and AI

With the huge amount of information available on millions of data sources public and private the possibility of using aggregators to bring the data together and AI to make sense of the data to create alerts and other response actions is huge. A leader in this space is Pacific Disaster Center (PDC). Their publicly available disaster monitoring tool shows in one page everything from floods to droughts, wildfire to pandemic outbreaks and everything in between. This and other tools by PDC has supported the governments and nonprofits worldwide, helping save lives and reduce disaster risk. Built and run out of a research center at the University of Hawaii, they are making new technologies and tools for disaster alert and rescue based on data analytics and AI.