The importance of Communicating disasters on time

By Nalaka Gunawardene

In a country where mobile phone subscriptions outnumber people, and practically every adult has a mobile, how can a whole community not receive a warning that they were in imminent danger of being hit by a major landslide

And why are community donations for disaster displaced not optimally distributed, with some places receiving too much and others, too little

On May 18, the New York Times quoted Red Cross officials as saying that they had heard complaints from residents in affected villages that the country’s disaster management agencies had “failed to issue any alerts or evacuation warnings”.

Mahieash Johnney, a communications manager at the Sri Lanka Red Cross, told NYT: “The Disaster Management Center does not have the resources and manpower to go door to door in endangered areas. It relies on getting these messages across to residents at risk from landslides, by using loudspeakers and megaphones. These warnings don’t always get transmitted in time.”

Public Trust vital

To be sure, technology is not a panacea in such situations, yet it vastly enhances and accelerates public outreach. For early warnings to be credible and effective, however, there is a more important factor: public trust.

Some individuals and even whole communities receiving warnings might choose to ignore them. Maybe they had had several false alarms that reduced their trust in systems. Or they just don’t trust the authorities to safeguard their property after evacuation.

That maybe why, in the Kelani river delta area north of Colombo city, many residents hesitated to evacuate as river levels were rising. Some did not move even when the Prime Minister himself assured them that armed forces and police would protect their houses.

People are not sheep to be herded on command in times of distress, albeit in their own interest. Official agencies need to gradually build public trust – in good times and bad – for their words to be widely heeded.

Resilient communities

Bureaucratic or technocratic approaches are necessary, but not sufficient, to build disaster resilient communities. We need technological and engineering solutions to be accompanied by sociologically sound consultations. In other words, government officials and experts must listen to the people exposed to hazards that can become disasters.

My colleague Dr Buddhi Weerasinghe, with many years of experience in promoting disaster risk reduction across Asia, recalls working with several landslide prone communities in the Ratnapura district in the 1990s.

The residents owned small-scale tea holdings and their income was good. When their lands were deemed vulnerable to landslides and families were asked to move out, they opted “to stay on and risk death in the event of a landslide” rather than relocate and lose their income.

As Buddhi later wrote: “Clearly, the people had chosen to live with the risk. The only option was to mitigate the risk through proper drainage of the land and establishing vigilance for early warning. This is not an easy task. In these mountainous areas, rain and mist combine to reduce visibility drastically. The slope formations will also prevent a single alarm signal from reaching out to all members of the communities at risk. All this makes it essential to cascade any warning signal.”

According to him, beyond relaying warnings, it was necessary to identify escape routes. People’s regular paths get flooded after a few hours of heavy rain. Some households may well be surrounded by flood waters when a landslide warning arrives. Structural interventions have to be made to ensure safe passage.

Avoiding communication disasters

Living with disasters by developing resilience is fast becoming a necessary strategy of day-to-day survival in our climate stressed world. Good communications – at macro and micro levels -- play a key role in this process.

We cannot entirely prevent disasters but can certainly anticipate and mitigate them. Communicating about disasters before, during and after should be an integral part of that response. But unless such communication is done carefully, it can become a communications disaster.

Digitally empowered

Increasingly, we are seeing disaster-affected people themselves use new information and communications technologies (ICTs), especially mobile phones, to communicate with family, friends, aid officials and others from the scenes of disaster.

The typical hapless, uninformed affected person is being replaced by a digitally empowered one. Some are even taking ‘selfies’ showing them half immersed in water and sharing them on Facebook!

Historically, governments have been the sole decider, provider and protector – and governments continue to have a responsibility in all these. But in today’s world, the role of government has to be reviewed and redefined. The smart option is to allow, encourage and empower individuals and communities to do part of it on their own.

Governments, researchers, aid agencies and charities still have to be part of this – but first they have to break free from the ‘Let’s-Do-It-All-Ourselves’ mentality.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene co-edited Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book in 2007, and has written extensively on the subject.