More Disasters On The Horizon: The Pressing Need For Emergency Codes

The earthquake Sunday along the US-Mexico border is (another) wake up call for preparedness:

Jesse McKinley, In California, Louder Calls to Prepare for Quakes

Seismologists say a major earthquake is almost a certainty in coming decades, given the region’s seismic history. But a recent study by the California Emergency Management Agency found the majority of the state’s households failing to meet recommendations for many basic emergency needs, like stockpiling water (a minimum of three gallons per person), reinforcing their homes and making disaster plans.

Such warnings had increased in urgency even before Sunday’s earthquake, which caused aftershocks on Monday in Mexico as well as in the California counties on the border. In a statement issued with its March 5 report, Mathew Bettenhausen, secretary of the Emergency Management Agency, said the recent deadly quakes in Haiti and Chile were “unwelcome reminders” of what could happen in California.

On Monday, Kelly Huston, a spokesman for the agency, added that the continuing failure of Californians to fully prepare was frustrating, but that Sunday’s quake was “a teachable moment.”

“It’s tough trying to get people to think about something bad,” Mr. Huston said. “The only time we can get them to think about it is when the earth moves. Well, 20 million people felt that quake. So there’s 20 million people who now realize that earthquakes can affect them.”

The moment that disaster strikes is the worst time to try to get prepared. We all have a tendency to put off the boring details: like stockpiling emergency drinking water, batteries, and so on.

The Twitter community is no different, alas.

When the quake hit Haiti there was a mad scramble to try to cobble together some sort of query/alert system in Twitter to help first responders, victims, and victims’ families. All well motivated, but pretty chaotic.

The result were various hashtags that could be used to indicate various sorts of messages and to demark different bit of information, like materiél needed, names of victims, and so on.

I pointed out after the Clilean earthquake that this was an inadequate solution for a wide range of reasons:

Yet Another Earthquake: The Pressing Need For Emergency Codes

[…] we should develop a better way to transmit messages related to emergencies, and it should not be based on natural language keywords, which is what hashtag-based approaches do. A better microsyntax should be developed, using only common special characters, as we do with commas, apostrophes, and question marks in written language.

People have been using hashtags because 1/ they are fairly well understood, and 2/ they are supported in an obvious way by Twitter search and other search tools.

However, we should push ahead with a better approach and build tools to support it. That support might include adopt by Twitter and other tool vendors to support the use of these emergency codes in a direct fashion.

Therefore, I making the following proposition: A working group of interested parties should be formed, including representatives of various emergency and charitable groups involved in disaster recovery, to collectively develop a workable approach to messaging during emergencies.

I admit that I have not moved mountains to push ahead on this project, but I have been quite busy and personally running at 50% because of the recent death of my mother.

But it is evident that we need to push ahead on this: there are innumerable potential disasters, and many that are predictable, like the pending earthquake in the Jakarta region of Indonesia that could kill 10-20 million people, and could lead to 50-100 million refugees. The scale of these disasters is inconceivable, so the least that we can do — web culture — is to devise some tools to handle this better.

My proposal?

I believe that such an approach [one that is designed for universal service] has to have several characteristics:

• A workable approach cannot be based on keywords that are derived from natural language, like hashtags.
• The microsyntax should be distinctive, and unique: it should conflict as little as possible with other uses of punctuation, for example.
• Various scenarios of use should be developed based on the experiences of those involved in disaster response and recovery to make certain that the broadest collection of use cases are covered.
• Open source software to support this system should be designed and developed. This could include the development of an emergency codes server, which could be collecting emergency codes messages from Twitter and other services, in collaboration with Twitter and those services. This would potentially offload demand from the everyday services during emergencies, and allow for integration with other emergency-oriented applications. (This would also allow for blocking individuals or applications who might seek to exploit the service for spamming or outright disruption of messaging.)
• In such a model, victims, families, press, and responders could use everyday communication channels — cell phones and PCs with Twitter clients or via SMS — while those involved in mobilizing relief, coordinating materials and personnel, or tracking the status of people and places could be provided with specialized applications that could aggregate emergency encoded messages into a better big picture.

I have proposed the outlines of a microsyntax for emergency codes (see Disaster Microsyntax: Project EPIC, Tweak The Tweet, And Emergency Codes). It is very provisional, but has some of the characteristics needed.

I plan to run an Emergency Codes project under the Microsyntax.org non-profit I launched last year. I am looking for active support — funds, open source developers, and other organizations — to start an effort this year.

I will approach others — like Twitter — to try to gain their support as well.

We have to do something before the next disaster strikes. 

—-

Update 30 March 2011 — See Bang: A Microsyntax For Emergency Messaging