Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project

The Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project aims to explore strategies to effectively and credibly disseminate emergency warning to largest number of people in Sri Lanka in the shortest possible time. As an action research initiative, this project aims to study, experiment and understand which information and communications technologies (ICTs) and community mobilisation methods will work most effectively in disseminating information on hazards faced by Sri Lanka coastal communities, i.e tsunamis, coastal erosion, cyclones, drought and floods.

The first phase will focus on disseminations strategies. This will include testing different ICTs to deliver timely warnings to local people immediately at risk; and building community capacity to respond to such warnings rapidly and systematically. Different combinations of ICTs and community mobilisation will be tested out in 32 participating villages from eastern, western, northern and southern coastal areas of Sri Lanka. Based on the project’s findings, the partners will identify the optimum combinations of technology, training and community mobilization that could help Sri Lankan communities to receive hazard warnings and disseminate them locally.

The project has identified a number of warning strategies to include in the scope of its research and experimentation.

• Training and community mobilisation - The project will initially train 30 youth leaders of Sarvodaya Shanti Sena (Peace Brigade) - a youth force of over 100,000 dedicated to peace building and community development. The training, customised by TVE Asia Pacific, aims to sensitise the youth leaders on disaster education and preparedness, covering topics such as: understanding vulnerability and hazards; community-based hazard identification using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques; ·communicating risks and hazards; understanding and responding to early warnings; and community response planning. This training is delivered through multi-media presentations, group activities, field work and simulations, and will draw from material produced by TVE Asia Pacific, Open University of Sri Lanka, the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC) and others. The youth leaders thus trained will return to their areas to mobilise one or more coastal villages. Each community will determine, through a participatory process, the most appropriate methods to communicate disaster warnings they receive.
• Hazard Information Hub - being set up at the Sarvodaya headquarters in Moratuwa, just south of Colombo, it will maintain close links with official disaster warning agencies of the government. Warning received through these channels will be disseminated to the villages through.
• ICTs - The project will evaluate the role played by several factors that contribute to the design of an effective last mile hazard information dissemination system. This will include the reliability and effectiveness of various ICTs as warning technologies. It will assess how community training influences effective warning responses and the contribution of the level of organizational development of a village to an effective warning response. It will also examine gender-specific response to hazard mitigating action. The participating villages are being provided with different configurations of training and information and communication technologies. The ICTs being investigated in this project are: Very Small Aperture Satellites (VSATs); Disaster Warning Response & Recovery (DWRR) units based on addressable satellite radio; fixed telephones; mobile telephones; and GSM-based disaster communication devices.
• The Disaster Warning Response and Recovery (DWRR) - launched in January 2006 by Raytheon and WorldSpace, the Last Mile Project is one of the first field applications. Under normal circumstances, the DWRR units work as radio sets, receiving digital radio transmissions from WorldSpace satellites. But they are capable of much more. For one thing, they can be switched on remotely from a central location, whether or not the user has turned it on at that moment. This converts them instantly to a hazard alert system. Moreover, focused warnings can be addressed directly to those communities immediately at risk from hazards like tsunamis, cyclones, floods, dam breaches, etc. Each radio has an in-built Global Positioning System (GPS) and a unique code. This enables hazard warnings to be issued to those units that are known to be within a vulnerable area - or just to those units with specific assigned codes. It is also possible to personalise and design the message for the vulnerable communities.

Emergencies, Technology

ccording to the project outline, an analysis of the Asian Tsunami of December 2004 showed that thousands of lives could have been saved if Sri Lanka and other affected countries had effective warning systems in place at national and local levels. Institutional, technological and societal failures combined to prevent timely sharing of information even within countries. The lack of a national disaster warning system compounded by a non-existent local warning communication system and public training makes it unlikely to this day that hazard information will reach individual households at the “last mile” even if an ocean-based tsunami detection system is deployed. This project aims to address this need.