Panel Paper:
Monitoring Risk for Coastal Cities: Early Detection of Near-Field Tsunamis in Indonesia
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
While many definitions of resilience have been offered by the research community, we view resilience as a ‘web of practice’ in communities that is supported by sociotechnical systems that adapt and change in interaction with one another and the environment. In this context, decision making in disaster environments can be guided by a sociotechnical system that integrates the science of the natural and physical environments with analysis of the interdependent conditions among geophysical, engineered, technical, computational, organizational, communication and socioeconomic sub-systems in communities at risk. Further, the core strategy to disaster management in coastal communities must rely on a scalable, timely, disaster-tolerant and socially-aware information flow infrastructure, as damage to the infrastructure exacerbates the difficulty in carrying recovery efforts in response to disaster. The challenge is to embed into the infrastructure communication and data dissemination components that can capture the dynamic of the environment and adapt to the interactions among physical, engineered, and socio-technical systems that occur during hazard emergence and response within existing resource and time constraints.
To address the above challenge, we have designed a sociotechnical infrastructure to enhance land based information flow in the current Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS). The main component of the infrastructure is a Central Coordinator to facilitate communication and collaboration among all stakeholders. The second is a hybrid network of Raspberry Pis and Satellite links, which is used to extend communication to communities at risk and increase the resilience of the infrastructure to damage when tsunami occurs. The third component is a GIS-based, socially-aware network of community leaders and residents, who actively monitor environmental risk and help residents self-organize using smartphones for reliable and timely dissemination of disaster and evacuation information. In this paper, we use the threat of near-field tsunamis in the City of Padang (West Sumatra, Indonesia) as a case study and carry out a suite of data-centered experiments to assess performance and interoperability functionalities of the proposed infrastructure, including ease of use, adaptability, timeliness, reliability and impact on enhancing community resilience. We report test findings from field sites to address how the infrastructure can be used to answer a fundamental question, which is what types of socio-technical, interdisciplinary communications systems improve or hinder individual and organizational response to disaster risks, related to community resilience in highly dynamic, disaster prone environments.
