9/26 Post Class Blog- No McDonalds or Wendy's

First, I would like to remind everyone that we are not to bring any food to the presentation this coming Monday.  No Wendy’s, McDonalds, Subway, or anything like that. 

On a more serious note, I would like to touch on multiple things were my interests lie, I feel that they all have a relation to one another which seems to be a trend with disaster responses.  The most interesting part about the Haitian Earthquake, is that the Haitian people had tremendous determination to survive from this disaster.  They did whatever they could to keep cell phones charged up by doing one of two things, 1) running vehicles to charge cell phones through the cars battery, 2) just used charged up car batteries to charge cell phones.  However, of course this process has some things it could run into like running out of gasoline to power the cars to keep the cell phones charged which would then start to limit the amount of people getting help. 
In Haiti, they used Crowd Sourcing, using a texting code, 4636 they were able to use this code to locate people with GPS and put it on a map.  However, this process was not fast.  This took a while to get done, it started with needing people to translate Creol the local language spoken in Haiti.  This needed hundreds of people to translate all the incoming messages.  Then the information was categorized once the message came in, then the information was plotted.  This was not some software program that could have done this in about a minute or less, it was all humans that got this process down to about 10 minutes.   A program called CrowdFlower was used and “after the 2010 Haiti earthquake CrowdFlower's technology made it possible to route thousands of text messages to the proper aid workers, to get them translated quickly, and to ensure that the people sending the texts had the best chance of getting what they needed. Once CrowdFlower's technology was implemented, the average time to translate, map, geocode, and categorize a text fell to less than two minutes. Though beneficial, many users who have taken surveys for earnings generated by CrowdFlower have voiced extreme displeasure at the length, complexity, and vagueness of the surveys” (Huffington Post).
It seems that multiple organizations had the ability to be flexible and work together instead of separately to reach everyone they possibly could to administer aid.  The video we watched in class at the beginning was a good look into the conditions for the teams arriving in Haiti and what they had to do to set up shop to start the aid process.  But, most of the people helping out with the aid process were in the United States in their living rooms.  If someone in their living room has the time and power to help I believe these NGO’s or even governments have the ability to do the same thing by using these mapping technologies and texting technologies to reach people. 
There was a Reporting Wheel that we found in class last night that I found to be awesome.  You spin the wheel for the type of help you need or for your condition, then it gives you a number to text.  Check out the link below:

http://instedd.org/technologies/reporting-wheel/

I feel like this Reporting Wheel is good but you would have to distribute this wheel before any disaster so I am not sure how effective it is. 

Post 19 Sept 2011 Class Blog Post

If you ask yourself did we learn anything with 9/11 after what happened with Hurricane Katrina?  We can also ask ourselves many other questions about the learning lessons from a natural disaster. 

There were a lot of great technologies invented around the time of 9/11, especially after 9/11 because of the terrible events of that terrible day and how there was a lot of chaos.  There were many questions raised about our responses to 9/11 that spawned a rise of new technologies to be used to search for people and help in the aftermath.  Technologies like a voice internet protocol that allowed people to talk on phones through the internet.  The biggest thing about this technology is that if one node would fail, the whole system would still be fully operational. 

Another cool technology that was invented was a robot that could traverse terrain like that of 9/11 debris at ‘Ground Zero’ and the Pentagon to give the survivors water and food until rescuers could pull them from the rubble.  Another great technology that I like the most probably because I have a huge interest in aviation is the helicopter and planes that could fly over debris looking for survivors.  These small helicopters can be used with video cameras that can survey the scene from above and send wireless video back to the team in the field for a better direction of where survivors and victims are located. 

Night-vision sensor systems that are using heat imagery that can see where individuals are amongst debris.  The individuals would appear to be a black shape amongst the debris or land being a gray scale.  These cameras and sensor systems are highly effective and are not just used in disaster relief. 

I believe these types of technologies should be used in disaster relief and those companies and organizations that respond to disasters either natural or human-made shall be using these inventions to help locate survivors. 

I don’t believe that there is a price tag to saving a life; human beings are driven to save all those that can be saved.  They will go to extraordinary ends to save a life, whether it is a family member, friend, or total stranger that is in need of help or rescuing. 

My idea is that within these organizations there should be a department that creates and develops new technologies for better and effective search and rescue if you will in finding survivors and victims of a disaster of any kind.  The following link talks more about the technologies used and developed. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9131498/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/how-high-tech-coming-rescue/

12 September 2011- Post 9/11 10 years later

Ten years later, we remember the events of 9/11 all over the country.  In SRA 397A, at Penn State, we were looking at the response to those events and how certain parts of our emergency response system failed or didn’t work as they were intended to in a crisis situation.  Many of us gave presentations about crisis response relating to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA.  My article is the one I believe that opened my eyes the most because it talked about the coordination between all types of agencies in response to extreme events, focusing on the response to the World Trade Center Attacks. 

First responders (police and fire rescue) to the attacks in NYC were going into something they have never been trained to respond to with the Twin Towers.  Once inside the towers, fire rescuers were going into what I like to call a “dark” situation where there is no communicating with their leaders on the growing situation.  Communications throughout the city went down for multiple reasons.  First, Verizon had many lines in the bottom of the North Tower and when it collapsed it destroyed all of the communication within those wires.  People all around the city were using their phone lines to try to make calls, but this ended up overloading the telephone system.  Switching to cell phones caused a 1000% spike in activity over all mobile networks causing the networks to crash.  This limited all communications within the city.  This disabled communication between the fire rescue crews in the towers making it impossible for headquarters to tell the men in the towers the situation of the instability of the buildings. 

The security people in the towers who told the people who worked in the towers to go back to their offices after the first tower fell did the opposite of trying to save lives.  This was counter intuitive to the process of trying to save as many lives as possible.  I really wondered why security would send people back to their desks after one building collapsed after it was hit by a commercial airliner just as the building they are in was hit by another airliner. 

The auto-adaptation needs to happen in all emergency responses no matter what the level of catastrophe.  This allows for a better and more effective response to emergencies allowing responders to change their efforts as the situation changes at the scene.  The most important part to auto-adaptation is the Information Search and Information Exchange.  These two parts to the auto-adaptation are the most important because this needs to happen over and over again during the response and recovery to get updates.  This allows the rescue and response crews to change their efforts in a respect to conditions.  I believe that city, state, and federal agencies should ensure that for the future emergencies there should be communication systems that can back up any crash of the communication networks (mobile, phone lines, internet).  I feel that if the communication systems did not crash more people could have been saved on 9/11. 

The video above talks about how Fairfax County, VA updated its emergency communication systems after September 11, 2001.  It is a very interesting video how it talked about the different changes that were made for the county.  It helps them communication between different agencies across different jurisdictions.  It allows fire, police, and helicopters and more agents to communicate effectively to help keep people safer or help reduce the risk of any more harm.