Use of social media in natural disaster #NepalQuake2015

Social media especially Facebook and Twitter are very important and useful open source tools before, during, and after the natural disaster to assess the vulnerability before the event, to map preliminary damage, locate victims and critical services especially hospitals during the event, and coordinate response and recovery activities after the disaster occurs. These tools are very useful in an area where long-term data are not available, and critical infrastructure and resources are not mapped. In general, maps and disaster-related information are based on complex methodologies such as geospatial techniques which are not easily readable for the general public because of many associated jargons. These complex information should be processed into simple language first and then communicate to the wider public to be better prepared for any disaster events. Facebook and Twitter could be a useful and efficient tool to communicate such message to the public as nowadays virtually everyone possess hand-held devices with them.

During Nepal earthquake 2015, Facebook and Twitter were widely used for many purposes: first, it was the most important tool to get updates of their beloved ones and immediate family members. Second, it was efficiently used to gather damage information from the distant villages and needy communities for the relief distribution. Third, it was best utilized to gather volunteers to coordinate response and recovery in Kathmandu and most importantly to the rural villages. Facebook groups and twitter hashtags were used to mobilize youth in different activities. Fourth, public were asked to provide, if they have any related to earthquake damages such as damage location, photos, and further information which were later processed by the team of experts to prepare situation maps assisting relief distribution and other response activities. Based on open data voluntarily contributed by the public, satellite images and GIS data, such maps were extremely useful for the government and international aid agencies to coordinate their efforts.

Induced seismicity

Induced seismicity due to deep well injection is a very new topic for me as I had learned only about environmental risks in newspapers. Induced seismicity can create a wide range of problems for engineers, designers, scientists, and the community such as the requirement of new building codes, construction practices, regular monitoring of the seismic activities, and changes in policy at concerned levels. This can result in extra spending of federal monies which otherwise could have been spent on other development projects.

One of the strong argument to back enhanced oil recovery is, it is a huge job driver in some of the states in the US. It is quite true, but we need to carefully think about the effects such as induced seismicity in the vicinities. Such effects, for example, may generate fear in the market and result in an increment of the premium of house insurance which is an extra burden to the homeowners. Also, people prefer stronger buildings to lessen the risks from natural hazards. It is easy to implement new building codes for the newer building, but it would be tough for the existing ones. Then the primary question is who is going to pay for that? If all the profits are taken by the companies it is unfair for the homeowners to pay such external costs. If we can internalize external costs into the system, we can allow enhanced oil recovery.   

DRRM Group 1 Update

Julia:

This week I have been reading up on the background and history of Nepal's seismicity. I did this because it seemed to fit in really well with the guest lecture from last week, which was all about earthquakes and seismology. I have been learning about the geology in Nepal and why it is so prone to earthquakes. Apparently Nepal is not only located right on top of a very seismically active fault, but it was also built on top of the extremely soft earth. The land consists mainly of sand, clay and gravel. Researchers dug down into the earth and found that the soil in the central part of Katmandu is very soft up to a depth of about 20 meters.

Laura and Sanam:

This past week we met to discuss our group partnership. Given the time constraints, we had to cut our portion down a bit and get more focus. For our portion, we'll be examining geospatial techniques (GIS, remote sensing and GPS) in disaster response. Laura will be coming at it from the perspective of an emergency manager, rather than an economist; while Sanam will put his expertise in geography and local perceptions reflected by his community members during and after the event. We'll look into the ways in which GIS can be used in emergency management, then look at how it was actually used in Nepal by a disaster response agency. Then, we can see if there are any potential holes that GIS could help fill.

Modeling sustainability

The quantitative modeling of sustainability using an interdisciplinary approach enables us to understand and connect top-down and bottom-up approaches to measure sustainability. The Interdisciplinary approach is very useful to address social problems but is generally limited by the poor understanding of the concepts across the disciplines. For instance, the term ‘disaster resilience’ is understood in different ways in different disciplines. Another challenge of such work is scaling issues. Some models are quite useful to describe community characteristics at the local level but are not helpful while up scaling to regional and national level. The same is true while scaling down global models to understand the intricacies of the systems.

From the evolutionary resilience perspective as put by Dr. Davoudi in her last lecture, the main challenge remains in modeling or quantitatively assessing the intentionality of human actions. In general, quantitative models are overly deterministic which does not allow for human interventions into the systems. In addition, power and politics in the society are so prevailing that a quantitative model cannot accurately predict the relationships. Although, Dr. Little describes about the orientors and indicators to assess and enhance sustainability, the right representation of qualitative social indicators in a social context is always debatable. 

Saffir-Simpson Scale

Saffir-Simpson Scale is a useful index in a sense that it can help people, researcher, emergency managers, and policy makers to understand the severity of the hurricane wind and prepare accordingly. Based on the scale, one can perceive the strength of the wind and its associated damage in the infrastructure. But this has a couple of problems associated with it. Firstly, the scale is totally dependent in the wind speed and does not include other characteristics of hurricanes such as flood range, storm surge, and rainfall. Also, it does not tell about the size of the wind field. A lower category hurricane with larger wind field could have significant damage. In addition, it is not quite useful about the impacts on rural vs urban area, and developing vs developed nations as the quality of buildings are hugely differed accordingly. In summary, it can be used but need to communicate the meaning of the category to the people so that they can well understand and not confused and panic during the event.