Technology to the rescue

There is no question that modern technology saved hundreds of thousands of lives during Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

First there were the early warning systems triggered by seismic activity that resulted in thousands of people being able to flee to higher ground minutes before the big waves struck with such awesome power. Then there was the technology built into skyscrapers that rocked and rolled and swayed and swung but stayed put.

But most of all, it was modern communications technology that not only warned citizens of impending disaster but also let family members know pretty much instantly who was safe and who wasn’t—communications technology that found loved ones, that let people know where shelters were, and where food and water could be obtained.

Interestingly, when the quake struck, CCTV cameras, amateur photographers and webcams showed people hanging on for dear life as their homes and offices looked like aircraft flying through severe turbulence, but at the same time many were on their cell phones texting and tweeting.

And once again, the vast majority of live television and radio coverage of the disaster came from citizen journalists; ordinary people texting their experiences, their emotions and their fears.

Before the earth even stopped shaking in Japan, plenty of people had the presence of mind to pull out video cameras and share the scenes around them with the world. Within hours of the disaster, more than 9000 earthquake-related videos and 7000 tsunami-related videos had been uploaded to YouTube, the video sharing site told ABC News.

My niece, who lives and works in Osaka, said that social media such as Facebook and Twitter were used by her organisation—an English-education network spread throughout Japan—to advise citizens where food and water was available and where accommodation could be provided. This was just one of many networks using social media to advise, direct, support, commiserate and to a large degree, pray, for the victims of the devastating tsunami.

More and more technology is coming to the aid of global citizens in terms of instant warnings of impending disaster. For example, one of the best iPad applications is Disaster Radar from RSOE Emergency & Disaster Information Service in Budapest, Hungary.

This remarkable service is available online and also on Facebook and via Twitter feeds. On a map of the world it shows all earthquake activity, volcano dangers, epidemics, bio-hazards, nuclear events and even major road accidents. It is a quite remarkable feat of early warning communications technology written in plain language and going into quite remarkable detail with events analysed by experts.

Zooming in on the Japanese coast at the time, it showed literally dozens and dozens of earthquakes and aftershocks as well as tsunami warnings and nuclear events.

There is no question that modern scientific technology is becoming increasingly accessible to ordinary people and that ordinary people are now very much the front line in terms of disaster management activation, early warnings and most of all, mass communication.

While TV networks have been extremely quick and quite outstanding in covering events such as the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan crisis and now the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster, they owe much of their initial coverage to ordinary people who, in spite of danger to themselves, feel obligated to tell the world what they are seeing and experiencing.

This worldwide phenomenon first took root in a major way when terrorists blew up buses and underground trains in London in 2005. Instead of the world having to wait for TV news crews to get on site and then only be able to report what had happened by interviewing eye-witnesses, ordinary people at the scenes of these disasters were within minutes able to use their cell phones to take photographs and videos and send them through to news websites and TV news channels.

From that day on the world changed. Instead of just being onlookers, all of us, no matter how far away we were, became part of the story.

All of this phenomenal technology has also helped in terms of galvanising governments into action a lot faster and also speeding up fund-raising for relief efforts.

Technology saved innumerable lives in Japan, of that there is no doubt. Now all that the scientists have to come up with is a way of stopping nuclear power plants from blowing up.