Last-Mile Hazard Warnings System : evaluation of a pilot for a national implementation plan

Meeting: APSITT 2008, 7th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Information and Telecommunication Technologies, 22-24 April 2008, Bandos Island, MV

Published in: Information and Telecommunication Technologies, 2008. APSITT. 7th Asia-Pacific Symposium on...

The plan of the Community-based Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) is to complement the efforts at the National and Global levels by preparing the last-mile communication segment of an end-to-end hazard detection and notification chain of systems. While the main focus in the world is on detection and monitoring systems very little or no emphasis is given to ‘last-mile’ segment of a National Early Warning System (NEWS). The LM-HWS pilot phase completed in May 2007 deployed and assessed various alert and notification Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and the relevant processes intended to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to natural and manmade hazards in the last-mile of Sri Lanka. The project adopts an “all-hazards, all-media” approach designed around a set of five wireless communication technologies. The pilot project involved deployment, training, and field-testing of the technologies, in various combinations, across 32 tsunami-affected villages, using Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for data interchange with content provided in three languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil). This paper reports on findings from a series of field tests conducted in Sri Lanka to compare the performance of the centralized message five ‘last-mile’ devices with their relative effectiveness in terms of alert and notification capabilities. One finding indicate that overall performance of the alert and notification system is enhanced when a village is equipped with a technology combination that enhances “complimentary redundancy” in reliability and effectiveness. Second finding indicates that the reliability can be enhanced by introducing a Multilanguage single input multiple output software application (i.e. CAP Broker) at the central message relay. Further implications of these findings for planning and future research are discussed. Third aspects of the findings imply that the first responders require rigorous training and certification in emergency communication to avoid ambiguity and misinformation. The Last-Mile Hazard Warning System takes an all-hazards all-media approach in reacting to global and local hazard warnings The LM-HWS project is pioneering this work providing policy makers in the region with assessment methods and analytics to justify the best practices in deploying a communication system for multi-hazard alerting and notification.