Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka : performance of the ICT first responder training regime

Meeting: Second Communication Policy Research South (CPRsouth2) Conference, 15-17 December, 2007, Chennai, India

M=9+ earthquake in Sumatara, Indonesia, on December 26, 2004 00:59 GMT, triggered destructive tsunami waves, which greatly affected Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, and Thailand. People were caught unawares as there was no warning system in place for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Overall it is estimated that more than 225,000 people, in the region, perished (Samarajiva, 2007 - [9]). Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) is introducing Alerting and Notification to improve the “situational awareness” of all-hazards in 15,000 Sarvodaya embedded Communities in Sri Lanka. The Pilot phase established Last-Mile networking capability for 30 tsunami-affected communities with a heterogeneous deployment 5 ICTs: Addressable Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerting, GSM based Remote Alarm Devices, Mobile Phones, CDMA Nomadic Phones and Very Small Aperture Terminals. Lessons to-date suggests the basic internetworking arrangement at lower technical layers has proven to be reasonably robust and reliable but a key challenge remains in the upper layers of human capacity, application software, terminal devices and content provision (Waidyanatha et al, 2007 - [11], [12] and [13]). The Sri Lankan experience shows that the LM-HWS is neither efficient nor effective without competent human-capacity at the message-relays: Hazard-Information-Hub and Last-Mile Communities; a necessary condition to supplement the deficit of an end-to-end automated alerting system. Despite the training that was offered to the Hazard-Information-Hub Monitors and Community ICT Guardians; their performance was well bellow the 95% benchmark (see Fig 4). The project identifies that the Common Alerting Protocol intensive ICT based last-Mile alerting and notification system requires periodically repeated training and certification to improve the reliability and effectiveness of the human resources who are entrusted with mission critical LM-HWS processes.