this blog entry is written in the immediate aftermath of the devastating Gorkha earthquake that stroke Nepal on Apr 25th 2015.
After following the most devastating events like several tropical storms , earthquakes floodings and even the 'near miss' catastrophe of the Chelyabinsk meteor there is some knowledge obtained, some valuable insights gathered of how crisis response by local and foreign authorities went and how the public reacted on social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, to that response by the officials.
The latest major disaster was a powerful earthquake in a small mountainous state with many foreign visitors present at the time when the quake hit that country enclosed by big neighboring states China and India. Without any doubt having such big neighbors, in this case particularly India with its large military, helped to prevent the situation in Nepal to become much more dire than it is now. Without the logistical support offered by the Indian Army which deployed two headquarters and a lot of military personnel and assets to Nepal almost immediately after the main quake, the Nepalese Army with their very limited resources wouldn't have any chance to cope with the situation. We must be thankful for their efforts for the Nepali people and foreign visitors in need, but we must also re-examine what went wrong regarding coordination of the search & rescue effort in Nepal and abroad.
Foreigners and their ministries
Nepal was hit by this quake during a time when its holiday peak season was just starting to begin. Many tourists located mostly in those parts of the country which were most severely affected by the quake. And its is important to comprehend that the epicenter is not confining the damage to a small area:
According to geologists' opinions the common use of the word 'epicenter' is correct for describing the place where the quake originated, but is wrong when it is pretended that this is the one location where the jolt has been strongest. In this particular earthquake the zone of highest intensity was not limited to Gorkha, but the 'shake map' published by USGS showed a much wider affected area within the inner circle of maximum strength. It's perhaps a bit primitive, but you can compare it when you carry a plate with wine glasses on it, and your hand holding that plate is shaking. Your hand becomes the 'epicenter' of that wobbling plate, but all the glasses on that plate are affected in the same way as the one positioned near your hand.
So after making clear that the area hit hardest wasn't confined to Gorkha and many different kind of tourists were affected: those who visited cultural heritage sites, those who were interested in trekking and those climbers who were in the Everest region. Altogether there were thousands of foreign tourists, but also some expatriates, present at that critical moment. The problem for all foreign ministries or their local embassies is that nobody, besides perhaps relatives and friends, keeps track of them and there whereabouts. Often it's not exactly known how many foreigners are in the country exactly.
So after such an event where those unknown large quantity of foreign visitors are almost immediately put into a crisis situation there is immediate action required to locate them, organize rescue, perhaps treatment and eventually to arrange their safe return to their motherland.
Since Nepal is just a small country, not all countries where those tourists originated from have an embassy in the nation's capitol Kathmandu, making such efforts of supporting fellow countrymen even harder. Many countries have their embassy for the region located in New Delhi and with the initial breakdown of most telephone lines created additional problems to reach Nepalese authorities and their own citizens in Nepal by phone.
So the suggestion is to keep not only in contact with foreign officials of that disaster stricken area, but also maintain contacts with groups as follows:
Social media
Following the events closely on Twitter since the earthquake happened, there was some frustration expressed by especially Dutch & British tweeps, but also many in Belgium, France and other countries were almost frantic and contacted their authorities quite often on Twitter, other social media and by phone. Many felt their foreign ministries did not enough to ensure the safety of their citizens which were stranded in Kathmandu and especially in some rural areas of Nepal. While accusations of Dutch nationals seemed to be unfounded, there have been some credible reports in UK media, where relatives expressed serious concern about how the FCO handled the search for and rescue of their relatives or friends. Some errors were made by officials, so it seems. Names have not been noted correctly and support given was not sufficient, or people couldn't reach the foreign office by phone.
Some, if not most, accusations however stem from a lack of proper feedback by some of the EU officials, letting enough space for rumors to spread on social media like Twitter or Facebook. How about more openness of the authorities about the data they collect ? By asking relatives' permission to release some vital information of the missing person cases like name, photo and last known location, the relatives, but also the broader public are given a chance to verify the data put in the missing persons database and to correct false information in a timely fashion if needed. By publishing those lists it also becomes clear that there is a staff working and some 'progress reports' ("We contacted Nepal dept XYZ and instructed our embassy to XYZ") from time to time could also help to enhance acceptance by the public and to curb the spreading of rumors. And it could demonstrate to the public that there are lot more people reported missing than just those who are known by social networks and subsequently the efforts to locate and rescue them are much bigger than some members of the public might think.
It would also be a good idea to release guidelines of how to communicate with the proper authorities instead of getting 'bombarded' with repeated pleas either by social media or by telephone saying: "Please do something!", "Don't you know XYZ is missing?", etc.
Those guidelines of how to organize the community of relatives/friends of those who are missing in that foreign holiday destination could help to reduce the number of unnecessary calls/contacts significantly and some frequently updated 'FAQ' could also help to answer most asked questions, too.
According to my own observation, many people took to twitter in order to get some news about about their missing loved ones, after not using their account for many month, or after they just created a new Twitter account for this incident.
Those people often had no idea how to use social media in an efficient way, so some help of optimal use of this powerful tool is recommended.
Some suggestions for amateur tweeps could be found in this little list of what should be done and what should be avoided.
With some proper help & guidance by their national authorities the social media users can actually be formed into an effective crowd for information gathering, filtering & compilation of information, and spreading of correct & vital information.
Authorities in those disaster stricken areas can do more in order to combat the spread of rumors such as that there will follow another, even bigger (talk was about M8-9), quake right after the M7.8 jolt on April 25th, which of course scared many people and withheld them to go back into buildings for longer than necessary, or perhaps they even stopped searching for people trapped under the rubble. Rumors spread in absence of genuine information by the proper authorities ! People in general trust the authorities, but if those authorities don't tweet or engage in Facebook discussions they are forced to seek other sources of information and 'authority' and tend to believe those.
If there aren't enough trained professionals, why not hire volunteers and get the authorized messages out ? If it is done by those, make sure they know exactly how to use Twitter, especially how not to start a public tweet with '@', but with '.@' or any other leading text, otherwise most people will never see such tweets in their timeline.
During the aftermath of the Gorkha earthquake some amateurs took the initiative and compiled a list of missing relatives/friends themselves and supported other groups busy in mapping known locations where foreign visitors of Nepal were known to be stranded. Others provided background as well as official data to those groups and sometimes informed authorities when necessary.
If foreign ministries activate known, very helpful contacts for building such 'private - public social media partnership', better and faster results will be achieved and less mistakes will be made. Just working next to each other will result in the negative developments described above. (thus implementation of 'partnership for rescue' also results in less 'bad press' as a consequence of blunders by foreign ministry staff picked-up by national newspapers)
Ham radio
Nowadays we all use or at least know about the most advanced communication tools to our disposal which are smartphones, tablets and other devices which enable us to use service like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Google and many other useful applications for keeping in contact with other people. The 'only' problem is that often after a major disaster happens, the affected area doesn't offer those neat services anymore, because their communication networks like Internet and/or telephone lines aren't working anymore or at least are not coping anymore. So either there's no communication whatsoever or at least some serious restrictions do apply since a limited remaining capacity meets a sudden increase in communication demand (from domestic customers & from abroad)
This situation leaves only two possible alternatives:
either to use satellite based communication services, available in many places of the planet, but with a very limited number of locally available hardware necessary to use this wireless service and ham radio.
Ham radio often seems to be forgotten, since those modern communication networks dominate our daily lives, but there are still many ham radio operators around the globe who also use still use the lower frequencies with limited bandwidth for their hobby. Many of those OMs (operators) still have their very large antennas and their power amplifiers as well as their Morse gear and modems for using teletype and other coding methods to communicate.
Many of those who still use HF bands with wavelength such as 80m,40m,20m,10m are in daily contact with their counterparts in other countries, some of those located on other continents, to confirm established contacts made over the airwaves.
So depending on various conditions it's possible to establish radio contact over a few hundred kilometers up to several thousand kilometers. Although the bandwidth used is much smaller than for main stream communications, it's possible to transmit, voice, data, photos and even video over the airwaves using ham radio equipment.
In some countries like the USA it's possible for some operators to directly link their transmitting gear with their telephone land line. (not permitted in other countries). All this communication equipment is in daily use by some, if not most, of the ham radio operators and can be used immediately as emergency communication tool. They know it and many countries have some OMs organized in emergency comms groups. They know what is needed and often they establish radio contact with other OMs in the disaster stricken area without any government asking them to do so. It's in their nature not only to help their OM friends in other areas, but to support local search & rescue efforts as well. They have been used in the past as a link between local law enforcement/ disaster response officials and the outside world to enable authorities to get a picture what is needed and to coordinate the rescue & relief effort.
It would be a good idea to establish permanent contacts between national radio amateur emergency operator organizations and departments of foreign ministries in order to have an immediate communication back-up, if all other means of communication with the disaster stricken areas fail. The national amateur radio emergency communication centers will have also a map of OMs known to be in that area, either already transmitting or busy establishing contact with the 'outside world'.
Military/NATO
As described in the blog entry on how to optimize the damage assessment process prior to search & rescue operations, how to 'bundle' operations instead of every nation trying to rescue their own citizens. it's very useful for national foreign offices to stay in constant contact with their MoD & NATO HQ in charge of such a operation during the mass casualty event.
Preliminary assessments can take place immediately after consulting the common multi-national database to determine how many citizens are missing (to get a first picture about the full scale of the event) and what's their likely location. By using the mobile phone numbers of those reported missing in the disaster zone they could ask local Telecoms (or to be more precise: their government) in that area to provide location data of their GSM phones still connected to their network. If the network is down those numbers could be used by IMSI-catchers to locate the phones of the missing during a fly over.
Some recommendations also based on the aftermath of the Gorkha earthquake (& other events)
Open database
As it is often the case, the quake hitting Nepal affected citizens of several EU countries, Canada, USA , Australia, etc. In order to have a complete picture of how many people are reported missing from all countries to determine the scale of the tragedy, it might be a good idea to collect such data in a central database, where relatives can determine what kind of information will be also shared with the public. In order to gather information from other people on vacation in that area it's of course useful to know the names of those reported missing and to have one or more photos. Contact info such as home address, phone numbers or e-mail shouldn't be public , but a instead the contact data of search coordinator/s should be released. When relatives provide passport/ID card numbers authorities should also check the correct spelling of names and verifay other given data as well and enable governments of the disaster zone to gain at access to that database, too. What happened in Nepal is that local police compiled names themselves and there have been some spelling faults and also people were still on the missing persons list who have reportedly returned safely to e.g. the United States.
'private list' compiled by Caroline Heldman, sister of one of those missing in Langtang area, used Google docs to compile and maintain list, which contained more than 400 names: (now offline/protected)
Please enter names of #Langtang missing/found in this document so we can share information about our loved ones. https://t.co/r4XUlQkk5F
— Caroline Heldman (@carolineheldman) April 28, 2015
After initially also using Google docs for their missing persons list, Nepal Police started in May to use a database based system to publish their tables of those still missing:
@NepalPoliceHQ launches #Nepalearthquake missing persons online system at http://t.co/gbEZXsaPA5
— Nepal Police (@NepalPoliceHQ) May 8, 2015
Open phone lines , free Internet access
Just minutes, hours after the quake hit, some journalists in Kathmandu started announcing, that even though they still had at least 3G network connection on their mobile phone, their providers were about to cut them off, because their roaming costs had reached a certain limit.
This is unacceptable during a calamity situation where not only the life of that individual is at risk, and perhaps in need of assistance from 'outside', but where suddenly many foreign visitors have to organize their rescue and risk being cutting off by overspending. Some Indian Telecoms have reacted almost immediately and started to offer free calls from India to landlines and mobile phone numbers located in Nepal, or at least lowered the costs to local Indian call fees.
European, but also Canadian, US governments must make sure that their citizens are being protected from being cut off for billing reasons by their own GSM network companies. Instead, all calls and data traffic in that affected area should be free of charge for the duration of that crisis, enabling those who still have equipment, connection and battery power also to help others who aren't that lucky.
If necessary a compensation for those telecom operators must be found afterwards.
Special apps for vacation
Some apps for smartphones could be offered to those who are about to go on vacation. Useful for providing specific disaster related information provided by their governments, such as address and contact info of nearest embassies and police stations, which could automatically transmit back cell data of the network they are connected to and/or GPS location data. Could also serve for storing voice messages, compressing photos and using burst transmissions in order to save battery power and limited network bandwidth after a major disaster (if those networks aren't completely down) .As todays smartphones often have high resolution cameras those apps could also be used for scanning fingerprints/IDs of people who are in the survivor group. Many smartphones also offer so called tethering which enables other users in the direct vicinity of that 'relay station' use the Internet connection of that phone, so this app could either activate that function or ate least explain how to do it manually.
This 'vacation app' could also have stored maps (for pedestrians) of the area the tourist intended to visit and he/she can consult those offline IE without having a network connection.
More authorities need to join social networks
In the USA and also across Europe there is hardly an authority left which is not on at least Twitter and Facebook.
It's different in other regions of the world, but during calamities such social networks can be either a useful addition to the existing, more 'old fashioned' tools of communication such as e.g. telephone, or in times when the phone network is down it's perhaps the only way of communication left as long as the Internet is still working.
A social network like Twitter or Facebook also enables its users to share links to websites with additional information and it can be used to transfer information back and forth.
In the early hours of the Gorkha earthquake there was for instance a lot of uncertainty regarding whether the central international airport of Nepal was 'open' or 'closed' for approaching aircraft. This country lacked, and to the knowledge of this author still does, a Twitter account for their civil aviation authority. Unlike the Philippines where such a Twitter handle for their aviation authority was working at the time when a devastating Cyclone hit the City of Tacloban and its airport, Nepal wasn't able to provide timely and accurate info on their airfield vital for the influx of international aid & search & rescue personnel immediately after the big M7.8 quake hit that area.
Unlike the Indian Army or the Indian ministry of defense, again to the knowledge of this author, Nepal didn't have a reliable Twitter source regarding their army's disaster response. A task later taken over by the new Twitter account:
Nepalese police and the armed police force had a Twitter account as well as their 'National Society for Earthquake Technology': @NSETNepal1
which also tweeted some decision taken by the government of Nepal.
Twitter lists
One advantage of covering major catastrophes and assisting people during the search , rescue and relief phase is, that by collecting Twitter handles of various important and reliable sources of information, those regional lists can be used again later, immediately the next disaster happened to gather news and instructions about that disaster stricken area.
It's recommended for foreign ministries to also have their list of contacts and update it from time to time, so they are able to use it ideally from the moment another disaster hits that particular area.
Admittedly there was not a single handle from Nepal available (on a list) immediately after the main quake occurred, but there were already many important ones from India and their previous Cyclone emergencies available. It does take some time to figure out additional useful Twitter handles, but it's easier from a 'starting point' of similar agencies in that area.
Some examples of Twitter lists:
Experts information & opinion on a subject:
https://twitter.com/EZR_news/lists/quakeinfo
'Raw' news:, news papers, TV station, journalists, officials, NGOs, military, etc (disaster area specific,but needs 'human filter')
https://twitter.com/EZR_news/lists/current-emergency2
People detected on the Twitter network who needed/provided information on missing persons:
https://twitter.com/EZR_news/lists/disaster-ppl-search
Global calamity warnings:
https://twitter.com/EZR_news/lists/calamity-warnings
A small guide of how to create/use Twitter lists
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