Community-Based Hazard Warning in Sri Lanka: Miniaturization Assessment of Terminal Devices in the Last-Mile Link

The M=9 earthquake in Sumatara, Indonesia, on December 26, 2004 at 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 250,000 in the region perished. The aim of the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) was to deploy various alert and notification wireless technologies intended to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to natural and manmade hazards in Sri Lanka. The project adopted an “all-hazards, all-media” approach designed around a set of five wireless communication technologies: Addressable Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerting, Remote Alarm Devices, Mobile Phones, Fixed Phones and Very Small Aperture Terminals. The pilot project entitled, “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination”, or the “HazInfo Project”, involved deployment, training, and field-testing of the technologies, in various combinations, across 32 tsunami-affected villages, using the “Common Alerting Protocol ” (CAP) for data interchange with content provided in three languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil). The ultimate LM-HWS intentions are to introduce Alerting and Notification to improve the “situational awareness” of all-hazards in 15,000 Sarvodaya embedded Communities in the Island of Sri Lanka. While this paper discusses the overall performance of the LM-HWS its main purpose is to report on one aspect of the effectiveness measure - identifying the need for miniaturized terminal devices that not only can be used during hazard alert and notification but also during the response and recovery stages of the disaster management cycle. The measure introduced gives a set of guidelines for equipment manufacturers as well as a mechanism for planners to set a strategy when introducing terminal devices in to a Last-Mile warning system.