Tom Corsellis of the ShelterCentre at the University of Cambridge is one of a group working on an all purpose, all terrain tent to get quickly to the disaster zones. But, he told the Cambridge Science Festival last night (I happened to be chairing it and my fellow blogger Tony Juniper was there too) there were other urgent problems. One was to bring the information revolution to the scene of a natural disaster.
"Every one talks about co-ordination, but they don't understand what it really means. I am in my jeep in Pakistan. I can't get a hold of the relevant guy in the Pakistan military or the guy in the ministries dealing with reconstruction. There's another aid agency operating on the next hill, five kilometres away doing exactly the same thing, who I would like to learn from," Corsellis says.
It would also help to talk to someone about where the land mines are, get a look at contour maps, have reliable information about roads and be aware of local regulations and international advice on everything from pit latrines to local food storage practices. "I can't contact them, I just don't know where they are, I don't know what they are producing in terms of information and I cannot contribute my information back into that process."
The disaster community and the UN have websites for just such emergencies. But landslides, hurricanes, floods and volcanic blasts have a way of sweeping away not just broadband and cellphone masts as well as telephone lines. His centre has already devised software that will put vast quantities of important information - and a Google search tool as well - onto things that can be loaded into local laptops. The next step is to find some way of automatically updating information.
"We can cache websites onto your hard drive. We have already done that bit: it has a library on it with all the different UN guidelines. You just load that on to your hard disc and go. The difficulty is if I'm in Pakistan and I have a new map, I can't update that system. It will be a year out of date. What you need is a memory stick and a way of updating it, so that o when you do connect to the Internet, when you reach broadband land again, you will get a message saying: Hi, do you want to download this guideline, and this and this?"
