How an Android Phone and Facebook Helped Route Haiti Rescuers

One intrepid Android fan is extolling the virtues of the open smartphone platform that helped him to route SOS messages in the recent Haiti disaster. "Well, when you are in such a situation, you don't really think about going to Facebook, but it happens that I have a Facebook widget on my Android home screen that regularly displays status updates from my friends. All of a sudden, an SOS message appeared on my home screen as a status update of a friend on my network. Not all smartphones allow you to customize your home screen, let alone letting you put widgets on it. So, I texted Steven about it. As Steven had already been working with the US State Department on Internet development activities in Haiti, he quickly called a senior staff member at the State Department and asked how to get help to the people requesting it from Haiti. State Department personnel requested a short description and a physical street address or GPS coordinates. Via email and text messaging, I was able to relay this information from Port-au-Prince to Steven in Oregon, who relayed it to the State Department in Washington DC, and it was quickly forwarded to the US military at the Port-au-Prince airport and dispatched to the search-and-rescue (SAR) teams being assembled. So the data went from my Android phone to Oregon to Washington DC and then back to the US military command center at the Port-au-Prince airport. I was at first a little skeptical about their reaction: there was so much destruction; they probably already had their hands full. Unexpectedly, they replied back saying: 'We found them, and they are alive! Keep it coming.'"

There is a blog organizing to save the Haitian

[Presto Vivace]

Internet. Project Title: Adopt an Haitian Internet technician or facility [wabanaki.net]

Re:Internet saves

[F34nor]

Technically Haiti is referred to as the "fourth-world" in political science because it is so bad that they think it will never get better. Read Collapse by Jared Diamond about what deforestation does to a civilization.

Tech disaster relieft

[enaso1970]

There's a lot of great disaster relief open-source stuff going on in Haiti. Check out Sahana for Haiti. Or the work done on the open street maps project for Port-au-Prince. The map was filled in with routing, street, building state, health facility etc. by some good developers who extracted satellite & other data in a few days; to the point where the marines could use it move trucks around the rubble. Like the 2008 Year of Edits for OSM but for one city in days.

Re:Please, not this SHIT again

[Brian Gordon]

email would have worked just as well.

Re:Please, not this SHIT again

[Anonymous Coward]

I typically agree with that statement, but I don't think it applies here. There are several problems with in email in this case. The person would have to load the email application, select who to send it to (or a group), type the message, and hope that one of the recipients would know how to help.

A Facebook update has many of the same properties, except it is broadcast to all friends of the person automatically. That is a much larger pool of people who would know what to do or who to contact.

I suppose, in networking terms, it is a broadcast message instead of unicast or multicast. And an SOS should really be a broadcast message. So, I think it is an correct use of the medium.

Re:Internet saves

[iamhassi]

"First time,Facebook was proved useful...."

Wrong [abc.net.au]

But just like that story, if they have access to facebook why not just call the police?

Re:A more general solution

[TubeSteak]

Could we even deploy our own mobile cellular base stations for this purpose, if the local cell network is too badly damaged?

Portable cell towers are regularly brought in wherever large crowds are expected to gather.
It's basically a trailer/truck with a generator, cell antenna, and microwave/satellite/wired link to the telco.
The problem of course, is prepositioning such hardware in locations where it is within reach of the disaster area.
Then you have to get it where it's needed, which isn't so simple in the aftermath of a quake.

Re:Internet saves

[TheInsaneSicilian]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/07/2678945.htm [abc.net.au]

Not a joke

[steveha]

if they have access to facebook why not just call the police?

It's perfectly understandable that you would ask such a question. To find the answer you would have to do something incredibly difficult and unusual, such as RTFA [blogspot.com].

But I'll help you out. Here's the relevant part of TFA:

In the first few hours that followed the earthquake, mobile service was completely disrupted. It was almost impossible to place a call, due to the combination of the damages on the cellular networks and the spike in phone calls. However, on some networks, SMS service was still available. People stuck under rubbles started texting to their friends and family (in Haiti and abroad) to tell them they were still alive and needed help. In Haiti, on a population of 8 million, there were about 4 million mobile phone subscribers. Those friends and family, not knowing what to do, started posting these SOS messages on their social networks, mainly on Facebook.

In a disaster, the phone system can be overwhelmed. The bandwidth and resources the phone system needs to make a voice call are huge compared with the bandwidth and resources needed for a simple SMS text message. A 160-character text message, plus its envelope, should be under 2 kilobits for the whole message. A GSM voice connection uses at least 6.5 kilobits per second, every second.

Also, there are a limited number of conversations [privateline.com] possible at one time for each cell tower. In terms of how many people can use a tower at a time, SMS messages are a huge win: an SMS message doesn't tie up a chunk of the tower for seconds.

At my job, we had a Red Cross disaster training session, and the person from the Red Cross told us to expect that cell phone voice service is very likely to not be available in a disaster, but text messages are likely to still work. That was the first time I actually got interested in text messages.

I think, very seriously, that emergency services (police, fire department, etc.) should be set up to receive text messages, precisely to handle the mass-disaster scenario.

Also, in the USA, mobile phones are now required to send GPS location data when the user calls an emergency number (911). I'd like to see a similar feature for texts: when you text to 911, the phone attaches GPS location data to the text message.

steveha

Re:Not a joke

[brainiac ghost1991]

In the UK, they now accept SMSs to the emergency services, it's mainly marketed at people with disabilities and you have to register your phone here [emergencysms.org.uk], I have my phone registered, but luckily haven't had to use it yet!