The Zig Zag

We have the technology

Interesting article about how trying to use telephone to warn of the tsunami was the wrong strategy:-

Then there's the other half of the problem: critical information getting stuck in bureaucratic, 20th-century back channels. With plenty of time to save thousands of lives, seismologists working in Hawaii, Harvard University, Australia and Thailand had some inkling about the destructive tsunamis moving across the Indian Ocean. Those scientists wanted to get warnings out. They tried calling officials in affected countries but didn't have the right phone numbers, or no one picked up.

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.
The Net has brought one-to-many communication to everyday life: blogs, Web pages, bulletin boards like Slashdot, even e-mail lists. Any Net user can post so millions of others can see it.
Other Net users who see the post might e-mail it around to people who, in turn, post it other places. In that viral way, a piece of vital information can reach millions in the time it takes to hard-boil an egg.
If seismologists had flung their warnings to the Web when the phone calls failed, some kind of alert might have reached the beaches of Phuket or Tangara — or perhaps the CNN newsroom, where a reporter might have put the story on a channel that was probably being watched in a number of resort hotel rooms.
The downside of such open communication is the possibility of fraud. Someone clever could, perhaps, send panic up and down a coastline. But the upside of using 21st-century communication for emergencies is too great to ignore.

The possibility of fraud is obvious but the net has proven, in cases like Rathergate and the early election polls, relatively adept at quickly rooting out a fraud. Dispersed early warnings through the net are certainly something that needs to be considered next time.

Posted by wardx107 at January 7, 2005 03:30 PM