A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

The festivities for the New Year became somber as images from the tsunami disaster kept flooding the media. The most poignant was the one on TV earlier today when a helicopter was swarmed by people scrambling for a few boxes of food. I’ve seen this way too many times in the Philippines but it still gets to you seeing the helplessness in the faces of the victims.

Even as $2billion in aid has been promised, more help is needed. If you want to help, you can do so by clicking here, here, here, here, and here. But the problem may not even be the amount of aid:

biggest problem in many regions was not the volume of support but the coordination and the most limited resource was airspace, airstrips, and coordination. -Joi Ito

They’ve already called this one the most publicly documented disaster with today’s technology.

And yet despite the available technology, a major oversight emerges that could’ve saved thousands of lives: lack of phone lines and people to monitor them.

Even as help arrives in the affected areas, early warning systems are being bandied about (you still can’t predict earthquakes though…unless you keep watching the animals). No surprise that text messaging helped in getting messages across as phone lines became jammed in the wake of the tsunami.

PGMA and the NDCC should look into setting up a distributed network of cellphones to monitor impending disasters instead of just “praying hard to ward off disaster.” (Gawa muna bago dasal diba?) It’s not even a high-tech solution. A Nokia 5110 can do the job nicely. Just collect these from private individuals, seek the help of techies and tech enthusiasts(bloggers?), appeal to the conscience of the telcos for free accounts, hobbled account (perhaps SMS only and no voice calls) distribute it to identified high-risk areas.

When I was still involved in the telco-content biz, we had this small program running on servers. It sends out an hourly alert via SMS which lets us know if the servers are up. It’s not fool proof sure but at least we managed to head-off potential revenue losses due to downtime. A similar set-up could be done. Have a server request a response from these distributed phones to answer at regular intervals to check in. (Parang sa mga roving guards diba?) Kakayanin naman ng mga Nokia 9210 sa gobyerno yung hourly alerts eh.

Bottomline is, early warning doesn’t have to be expensive. The locals are more attuned to their surroundings and they can tell if something is amiss. But any early warning will fail if you don’t have these people on board. Just give them the tools to do it. Not so high tech, but definitely in touch.

I once went around the south of Cebu and saw these parapets dating back from 1600s overlooking the sea. I found out that these were used as watchtowers. These were lit up at night if they see moro raiders and pirates approaching. It’s crude technology true, but it worked. The best early warning is still a pair of eyes looking for something amiss.