Yet Another Earthquake: The Pressing Need For Emergency Codes

During the Haitian Earthquakes first frightening days, the web world reacted in nearly instinctive fashion, clamoring for help, money, and technological approaches to mobilizing. The world’s larger response led to emergency crews trying to assist, doctors and nurses working in makeshift hospitals, and people the world over sending money and emergency supplies.

Even so, the devastation was unimaginable. And the Haitian people are in a terrible state, and likely to be facing years of rebuilding and healing. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and millions have been injured or grieving for loved ones.

We cannot predict disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornadoes, but we can do a much better job of coordinating our responses, and the natural communication that accompanies these disasters.

A number of approaches have been developed in recent months for trying to structure messages in Twitter to better relay emergency needs or requests. Many of these are based on the now commonly used hashtag.

My perspective is that hashtags are not really an appropriate way to encode complex information in Twitter or other streams of communication. In everyday use, hashtags are used to indicate the theme or topic of a tweet. They are not used to denote different parts of the tweet, they way that prepositions are used in natural language, for example. And perhaps worst of all, hashtags are based on natural language words or acronyms. So hashtags like ‘#have’ or ‘#need’ are understandable only to those who read English.languages. A disaster in Dagestan (a Russian republic on the Caspian Sea) might involve 15 or more language groups, with Russian being one of the smallest.

I read a piece in the New York Times recently that included a map of the most likely danger spots for catastrophic earthquakes. Here’s a map:

 

Sources: Koeri-Bogazici University, Istanbul (Istanbul analysis); Center for International Earth Science Information Network and Center for Hazards and Risk Research, Earth Institute at Columbia University. Via NY Times.

I studied linguistics in college, and I estimate that at least 50 languages are used in these areas by hundreds of millions of people. Spanish, Creole Friench, and various Native Amercian languages in South America are dwarfed by the Asian and Indonesian languages. Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu, and other widely known major languages are involved, but most Amercians can’t even come up with the name of the national language of Indonesian — Bahasa Indonesia — which is spoken by around 200 million people there. It is the fourth most populous nation on earth, and an earthquake like the one that shook haiti to pieces could kill millions there.

My point is that 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 believe that such an approach 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. Here’s a sample tweet, based on a hypothetical hurricane called Bette that has struck New England:

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !@hassan haque: compound fracture of the lower right leg

Emergency messages (in this proposal) start with the unambiguous ‘!’ as the first character, and then the name of the disaster: naming must be undertaken by some international body. Then there is a location tag (or geoslash) indicating the US post office in Provincetown Massachusetts. Then there is some information about a specific individual, Hassan Haque, indicated by ‘!@’, and followed by a text field, indicated by ‘:’.

The specifics of this proposed microsyntax for emergency codes are less important than the fact that this — and other possible approaches — would work just as well for Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, or Turkish.

And the microsyntax might not be seen by the originator of the message. If I were the person in the USPS building, typing this on my iPhone, I could be using a free application that formats emergency codes, or a feature of a Twitter client to support them.

In that case I might be provided with a simple form interface where I pick the sort of message — information about a person — and I merely key in the data: I type in location, the person’s name, and the text. That app would formulate as a standard emergency code, and out it would go into the Twitter stream. The official emergency codes server would gather that and other emergency codes, and other applications would slice and dice the information to display it, make planning easier, and to serve as a repository for others. Hassan’s family might access that information to find his status and location, for example.

The crisis in Chile is another wake up call. It doesn’t seem to be anything like what we have seen recently in Haiti, or what we can anticipate if we get a serious temblor in Instanbul or Jakarta. The NY Times piece I mentioned above stated that seismologists estimate that a nighttime earthquake of the sort predicted for Instanbul would lead to at least 30,000 deaths in the city, not including the surrounding countryside, and unknown levels of injured and displaced. A similar quake in Indonesia could mean 10-20 million deaths.

We should take steps now to build the system we need, instead of responding instinctively at the time of the next catastrophe.

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