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Make Way for Best technology to deal With Earthquake and Natural Disasters

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Make Way for Best technology to deal With Earthquake and Natural Disasters

go clockwork, the digital era.

It took almost nine hours of delay from 5 pm dusk on the day’s quake before international rescue missions managed to reach Haiti a day after at about noon.

There is no denying the stretch and eternity of days and months and years which it would take to rebuild the city Port-Au-Prince. Lack of preparation hampered by unreliable warning systems would be blamed. Techies should share the blame. While they are offering platform on various networking sites like facebook and twitter, the world will be yearning for a more fundamental approach: more reliable early warning systems, ones used currently fall short horribly sad. How they failed, stories are certainly never going to be sufficient in trading the accusing finger.

A proposition to these fellow techies would be: include seismological sensing feasible into executable software programs. These are possible in very many ways including these, but let us first proceed.

Did technology actually fail or it is the human being’s proclivity of shifting blame?

When the net is cast wide and fishes fail to swim up-stream, technology’s hammer and tong will blame virtually all the surrogates to the profession. From the regulators, to the architecture, designer, and more or less of other abstract personages forming links in the city’s construction system. How they satiate appetite by wanting a quick buck has now paid in a caustic boomerang.

Uptake of Information Technology

Haiti’ telecommunication infrastructure is among the least developed in Latin America and the Caribbean countries but boasts of over 1 million internet users. Its mobile-cellular telephone service was slightly expanding rapidly in part due to the introduction of low cost GSM phone. Clear statistics are yet to come out after the devastation. By then, domestically, majority relied on Coaxial cable and microwave radio relay trunk service. This was greatly completed by internet enabled phones to communicate. Banks had closed due to sporadic looting and security lapses to conduct normal business since much of their services rely heavily on Local Area Networks that were disrupted.

When services are thus disrupted, it is neither a far wide imagination. At times the weather man fails forecasting properly. When Calamities befall us, preparedness and response will matter. Even closer home, the occasional El-nino rains bring devastating floods. They summon us to reassess our warning systems. For instance, global warming will in the next decade cause pronounced climatic effects; erratic rains that often pour to proportions of hedonistic hurricanes, sometimes inviting drought and famine. Business shylocks are likely to exploit coming opportunities when world food prices increased due to demand. Floods and landslides will not be limited to shanty wallops, but equally more to high-rise buildings and marshy regions.

What does technology offer in this front? The USA and China are adopting new technology after their worst experience with disasters: Katrina and Tsunami respectively. In the USA, a project led by a research scientist, Will Laska known as Portable Lightweight Ubiquities Gasket (PLUG) was developed to counteract effects of broken levees. The best they seem to have learnt was to incorporate sophisticated research, using the academia, the US Army Corps, and IT engineers. The systems built combined light weight PLUGs that can be flown by helicopters and easily be deployed along banks. Monitoring would then be conducted from an observation intensive center and any further damage would promptly be relayed to a standby team to deploy some more. The case of Tsunami in ASEAN region has, but got little development. The systems in use are still in place, more of them relying on a commissioned project of the United Nations comprising 26 nations. It involves Earthquake Warning Systems (EWS). These incorporate monitoring of seismological and tidal stations linked to specially programmed computers, accelerometers, and communication that pick delicate tremors from the epicenters. But they proved false and erratic. In Haiti, technological infrastructure penetration challenge is still high but this is no alibi for systems failure. A clearer re-look into the whole EWS beggars query into their reliability, although scientist have yet to have us believe in their effectiveness.

Seismic waves

There basically, are three types of waves. The Primary (P) waves, Secondary(S) waves, and other interspersing but different kind of waves. P waves are longitudinal and travel 1.7 times faster than S waves. Scientists calculate the distance between any point on the surface of the earth and the earthquake’s focus by using the ratio of the speeds of the two waves at the breaking point where the vibration originated. By knowing the time when the vibration arrived at the focus point. They discern this through the seismograph (a graduated graph used in measuring seismological activities).

Computational seismology

This one involves developing and improving of various physical models and computational approaches for modeling earthquake source processes. Remote sensors relay impulses of seismic waves to virtual graphs for further in depth analysis and calculations. More western countries are offering majors in seismological engineering an option adopted through hands on interaction with computing tools.

It combines a study by analytical approach, the boundary elements methods (BIEM) through a fundamental problem solving on planar faults such as dynamic rapture on bi-material faults or episodic slow-slip and non-volcanic tremor.

Spectrum element method is used to solve earthquake dynamics and seismic wave with propagation. These study involve large computation that are performed on a “Beowulf” PC cluster.

Developments

A group of techies led by Cochran and colleagues Jesse Lawrence all of Stanford University are developing a new software linking the public with laptops to monitor earthquakes with possibility of sending warning signals within 10-20 seconds to other regions. This can somehow allow people to prepare and reduce fatalities.

This earthquake warning software dubbed “Quick-Cache Network” uses inexpensive motion sensors-accelerometers-already in place as safety devices in most new laptops. The technology has first been incorporated by Apple Inc. only. It is configured specially to shield the keyboard punches and sound from speakers without necessarily affecting motion sensing ability of seismic waves. It is hoped that this software will be open sourced therefore revolutionalizing the way we perceive tremors and earthquakes, often with awe. This undoubtedly ground breaking innovation of the 21c will at a later date leave a lasting imprint in halls of information technology as more of these technologies evolve into mobile phones, thereby enabling warning systems just to our hands.

Therefore, the meeting of the techies in New York came at a good time though disguised in the apocalypse that nightmarishly snuffed life out in the heart of the Caribbean country. Could the software have been useful and handy that day, when a 6.0 magnitude of aftershock again spread fever in Port-au-Prince?

Today looking into the future, technology will be critical in solving our perennial catastrophes. The emphasis however demands on their reliability and whether information regarding an impending earthquake can be accessible to many and in a form that is swift and immediate.

Earthquakes have previously led to massive Tsunami along major coastal sea boards hampering commercial activity as much as infrastructure. Technology will therefore be critical in this endeavor to dealing with nature.