There are 3 phases to a disaster
- The Preparatory Phase
- The Rescue Phase
- The Relief Phase
We aim to create an end to end solution for both the people handling the rescue operations and also the victims primarily for managing floods and cyclones.
- Following a natural disaster the government mantains data about the adversities and effects of the disaster on specific areas.
- This data could help citizens prepare for a forecasted disaster. The problem is that this data is not easily accessible to the people and they might not have the expertise to comprehend the data in its current form.
- We propose to solve this issue by creating an intuitive map based interface that will inform potential victims whether they are in a danger zone, what are the nearest safe areas and what measures they should adopt to stay safe.
- This data can be further refined by crowd sourcing information about previous floods. This can be of the form of a flood level sign put up by the local administration or any other such records maintained by local bodies.
- Currently rescue operations are planned based on media reports, satellite images and word of mouth. Satellite images may not be reliable in cases where a victim is trapped indoors. Media cannot possibly reach every single disaster struck area. Word of mouth is too slow.
- In recent times, a more effective approach has been to harness the power of social media, to find affected areas and what resources the victims require. We propose to provide a unified dashboard which can crowdsource information from social media and present it in a form that is easy for rescue agencies to use for their operations.
- In specific, tweets such as these (example taken from kerala floods) can be mined from social media and aggregated to give rescue operations an overview of where victims are stuck and what resources they require.
- The immediate need of a victim of a disaster is to find shelter and food. For this purpose, government and relief agencies set up relief camps at safe locations throughout the affected area.
- We aim to provide an interfacec that will route the victim to the nearest relief camp which has sufficient capacity and resources to shelter them.
- On the flip side, the rescue agencies will constantly update the status of the camp's resources and capacity on our platform so that relief efforts can be coordinated evenly between the camps.
- Currently our solution is centred around floods and cyclones, however this can be extended to other disasters such as earthquakes.
- We also hope to be able to integrate HAM radio (Amateur Radio), which is currently the standard for rescue operations, into our application so that in the case of lack of connectivity, the victim can stay informed about rescue operations in his area.