Friday, July 15, 2016

Emergency numbers terror attack in Nice / France

For citizens of:

The Netherlands:

Belgium:


USA:


Poland:

Spain:
France:
India:
Switzerland:
All:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Belgian mobile phone networks were close to collapse

Dear reader,

in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on two different locations in the Belgian capital a near collapse of the Belgian mobile networks happened.

Situation was getting difficult and many people were not able to make a phone call during that crisis situation, but the telecom authorities acted rather quickly and published some advice via radio & television to use land lines and internet based communication if available.

Only a short time later two of the affected GSM operators announced that they also 'opened' their WIFI hotspots to the broad public, free of charge, in order to relieve their suggested GSM networks.

All in all their strategy worked and the Belgian mobile phone network was congested, but didn't collapse completely.

The ministry in charge of telecom affairs ordered an investigation into what exactly went wrong that morning, but first details are already emerging. So it becomes clear that at least the operator BASE did ignore the radiation norms for their transmitter towers, which gave them some 30% more capacity of their network.
It also worth noting that telecom operators in other countries opened free of charge communication channels to Belgium.
Considering the amount of chaos/confusion/shock in the immediate aftermath of the attacks the response time by the minister in charge and the telecom operators in Belgium weren't that bad, considering that they have not practiced such an event before (AFAIK). It would be helpful however to find out what exactly contributed to the shortage of bandwidth/capacity and after finding that  out to start improvement of the networks immediately afterwards. It couldn't harm to create some routine by practicing such emergency events and to develop more efficient and resilient (power outage!) ways for internal (between Telcos and ministry/government) and external (to the public) communication.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Earthquake guidance (Spanish)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Saturday, February 13, 2016

VOA:App Shakes Up Earthquake Science by Turning Users into Sensors

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Often human negligence kills when a natural disaster strikes

Dear reader,

we can't prevent nor predict earthquakes which can have devastating effect on buildings and infrastructure built by humans, but at least we can reduce the risk of losing human lives by e.g. improving the quality of such structures. This blog entry will collect positive and negative examples from around the globe of how construction influenced the number of causalities during such an event.
(currently under construction)

Nepal
How Impoverished Nepal Can Rebuild for the Next Earthquake [National Geographic, Apr 30 2015]
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, January 22, 2016

Blackout event in the USA

In case of a large outage of power here are some useful contacts & tips:
(currently under construction)


Maryland Power Companies​​ [Maryland governor]
Maryland power outages (map) [MEMA Maryland]
Power outage - what you need to know  [CDC]

Twitter List members => https://twitter.com/EZR_news/lists/us-electricity/members
LIVE ! =>
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)