Water, Water Everywhere ... But So Is The Net

Even as drought blankets more than three-fifths of the United States, a number of countries around the world have lately suffered from sudden and devastating overabundances of water.  Last month, what the New York Times termed "catastrophic flooding" led to 172 deaths in southern Russia, and "torrential rains" that deluged southern and western Japan caused the evacuation of 250,000 people and killed at least 27 people.  North Korea has also endured heavy flooding that reportedly caused hundreds of deaths and left 212,000 homeless. Within the past week, China has been hit by three typhoons.  In just the past day or two, the last of those, Typhoon Haikui, prompted the evacuation of nearly 2 million people in China and, thanks to a monsoon enhanced by Haikui, the Philippines endured "widespread flooding", including 20 inches of rain on Manila just yesterday, that forced more than 780,000 people to flee their homes.

While water and electronics don't usually mix, two of these disasters also brought to light what digital technology can do during and after the devastation to help those in need.  In Russia, "opposition leaders and civic activists" drew on online and street social networks to gather food, water, and medical supplies for flood and travel to flood-affected areas to help with cleanup efforts.  In the Philippines, Christine Hauser posted  on the New York Times's The Lede blog that "residents turned to social media to call out for help and to pinpoint with names and addresses the locations of those trapped," and Google set up a "People Finder", in English and Filipino, that allows people to post information whether they are looking for someone or have information about someone.

These types of initiatives are welcome and useful -- so long as there's no massive disruption of power for ISPs and disaster victims alike.  Unfortunately, maintenance of critical communications in major disasters requires not just resilience in the primary power grid but backup or independent power sources for both users and providers, whether battery-, diesel-, solar-, or even hand-powered.  Although Hurricane Katrina showed that (as ULL Professor Robert Henry put it) the Internet can be "less vulnerable to failure than other telecommunications links," Twitter won't tweet and Google won't -- well, google -- if there's no juice.