The horrible experience with Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast is rife with lessons in Open Source Emergency Response. Here are some links with notes as to how they apply:
In Tale of Two Families, a Chasm Between Haves and Have-Nots
In a story that focuses how two families– one middle-class and the other under the poverty line– deal with the crises, we see people in an official network (police, courts, etc.) can leverage knowledge and connections to get things done in an emergency:
Mrs. Porretto, a court clerk, and her husband, Joel, a retired police officer, are hardly rich. But as they embark on life in exile, they look like royalty compared with Mr. Brown, Ms. Jackson and their children, wandering to a destination unknown with little more than the clothes they have worn for a week.
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Mrs. Porretto, 51, has an American Express card that covered her $564.26 bill at the Hilton in Lafayette, La., where a cousin who works for AT&T secured a low corporate rate when she booked a block of rooms days before of the storm.
For Victims, News About Home Can Come From Strangers Online
Story about how a group of people come together in a loosely coupled way to provide valuable information that people in the emergency can use to make decisions.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of displaced residents and their relatives – along with people like Mr. Sprague – have turned to the Internet for information about a home feared damaged or destroyed. Many are using Google Earth, a program available at the Google Web site that lets users zoom in on any address for an aerial view drawn from a database of satellite photos.
By the end of last week, a grass-roots effort had identified scores of posthurricane images, determined the geographical coordinates and visual landmarks to enable their integration into the Google Earth program, and posted them to a Google Earth bulletin board – the place ZuluOne turned for help.
A ‘Weather Nerd’ in Indiana Sent a Warning to the Mayor
Shows how a motivated and attentive non-professional can provide useful insights and make them available on the internet using cheap tools (weblogs).
One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina’s potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.
The Prologue, and Maybe the Coda
Mayoral staff taking from a retail store to establish communications. Not looting, just good sense.
Once the levee gave way things deteriorated instantly. Communications between rescue personnel, between government officials became almost impossible. Things soon became so bad a senior aide to the mayor broke into an Office Depot to commandeer communication and computer equipment to rebuild a command post when water knocked out the original one.
Rescuers, Going Door to Door, Find Stubbornness and Silence
Have boat, will rescue. But what if the dispatcher at the school bus yard gave the greenlight to bus drivers to evacuate friends & neighbors?