New media helped, but radio delivered for earthquake-struck Haiti

When Haiti's devastating earthquake hit last January, the world responded with a wave of humanitarian relief efforts. But unlike previous disasters, they also deployed new communications systems—text messaging, digital crowd sourcing, and social networking, among other platforms.

The Haiti earthquake "marked the beginning of a new culture in disaster relief," notes a report on the phenomenon just released by the Knight Foundation. "Occurring several years into a revolution in communications technology, the event attracted legions of media specialists bearing new digital tools to help."

Yet the electronic medium most successfully deployed was not the newest, but one of the oldest. "Although much of the attention has been paid to new media technologies, radio was the most effective tool for serving the needs of the public," Knight concludes.

One station at first

As Ars readers know, Haiti is an extremely poor country. Even in the best of times, that has always hampered its communications infrastructure. The country possesses 108,000 landline telephones out of a population of 9.6 million, with literacy at about 52 percent.

Once the earthquake struck on January 12, most newspapers quickly lost production capacity for weeks. It took Le Courier International until February 4 to produce a special edition on the crisis. Le Nouvelliste didn't get theirs out for a month.

Knight Foundation

But Haiti has more than 250 community and commercial radio stations. Radio ownership is "virtually universal" according to a Voice of America survey. "These factors made radio the undisputed lifeline for the Haitian public after the earthquake," Knight observes.

Although almost all of Haiti's stations were initially knocked out of service, Signal FM managed to stay on the air and provide 24-hour coverage, alerting families to the whereabouts of missing members and pointing communities to hospitals and sources of water.

Another station, Radio One, gave its airwaves over to popular music performers to calm crowds and prevent disturbances. Radio One host Cedre Paul provided constant tweeting for his followers. And international broadcasters like the BBC, Voice of America, and Radio France International ramped up their own services to Haiti.

As most of Haiti's radio signals went back online, they became the country's central information network. "Collectively, these groups put together a remarkable range of information and communications responses."

Cell phones to the rescue

This is not to say that other media didn't play a crucial role. The capacities of Haiti's 3.6 million cell phones were stretched to the limit during the crisis. The humanitarian organization InSTEDD worked with Digicel, one of Haiti's biggest cell phone services, to develop an SMS short code system for humanitarian aid. Although Digicel lost 70 percent of its towers in the temblor, the company made the short code 4636 available for free.

"At this point, Digicel's service provided the only means through which the Haitian population could make remote contact with aid agencies for no cost," the Knight report observes. The code service began receiving messages like this:

[1/24/10 5:17:47 PM] D. R-- S-----: Two persons are trapped under the rubble at the Caribbean Market. One of them, Regine [M-- -] here is using this number: (+1) 305 --- ---- to call for help. Coordinates: 18.522547, -72.283544.

As more providers offered free short codes to the public, emergency responders took the trend to the next level. They tapped into the crisis-mapping program Ushahidi, which had been developed in Kenya to track election-related violence.

Volunteer teams placed incidents needing assistance on a digital map. "Initially they depended primarily on phone calls and press reports, but as time went on, the SMS short code provided increasing numbers of incident reports from the Haitian population."

They also accessed the Open Street Maps, the open source mapping program—plugging in data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Geo-Eye, Google, Digital Globe, and other sources to fill the blanks in crisis-struck Haitian terrain.

Drawbacks

There were limits to this system. Some accounts suggest that SMS messages only reached their destinations about 60 to 70 percent of the time. The free short codes systems sometimes frustrated Haitians, who understandably hoped for quick responses based on their texts.

And although the US Marines and Coast Guard sometimes responded to emergencies based on the mapping programs aided by short codes, these rescues took place on an "isolated, ad hoc basis, through personal connections." One top US forces commander didn't know of the existence of Ushahidi for over a year.

But when these technologies were combined with Haiti's vibrant radio culture, the results were consistently effective. Radio had always been Haiti's principal means of electronic communication, but once cell phone use was added, it became "something new and interactive."

"Mobile platforms permitted the creation of feedback loops and conversations to give humanitarian responders access to the voices of affected populations," the Knight report concludes. "SMS was a related component of this hybrid, but it was also significant in its own right. The SMS responses in Haiti generated complete data sets of crowdsourcing and mapping incidents and requests, as well as numerous individual accounts of the value of technology in emergency response."

via arstechnica.com