Folks,
After the Katrina landfall a diverse group of wireless people started organizing a relief effort, culminating in work around Waveland. There was also a group from the NPGS in Monterey, who worked on the Boxing Day Tsunami aftermath.
Does anyone have a similar contact set?
Eric
After the Katrina landfall a diverse group of wireless people started organizing a relief effort, culminating in work around Waveland. There was also a group from the NPGS in Monterey, who worked on the Boxing Day Tsunami aftermath.
Does anyone have a similar contact set?
hello eric
i rec'd email yesterday from a colleague at inveneo.org that they and nethope.org are putting together a team to travel to haiti and work on an emergency comms wireless network for the numerous NGOs/relief workers so they can communicate more efficiently. they were part of the katrina relief effort team.
contact Kristin Peterson <kristin@inveneo.org> for more info on how to help.
steve
There are quite a lot of us working on it, is there something specific
you're volunteering to do?
-Bill
Guys
The buggest issues in the 2 coming days will be energy. And I can't assure
that we will be able to get fuel for the generator. Equipment with Solar
energy will be our best shot.
Reynold Guerrier
AHTIC
Treasurer
Network Engineer
Haiti Earthquake Survivor
At around noon, Eastern, the State Department was provided with information on the fuel situation at the Port au Prince NAP, which has used 2/3rds of the available diesel (8gal/hour run rate, 160 gal remaining) keeping the microwave backhaul to the DR up, and all remaining governmental and NGO network access.
Eric
As of this hour Reynold Guerrier has managed to obtain 56 gallons of diesel, moving the NAP's dry tank fail point some 8 hours, into the morning of the 18th.
No other fuel has been delivered to the NAP. The SitRep of the 16th to the State Department has just been updated with information current as of this hour.
Eric
Isn't there a US destroyer taskforce off the coast now? One would think they'd have a supply of diesel available.
Best Regards,
Nathan Eisenberg
There are significant US naval and land assets in place.
However, resupply to the NAP/microwave backhaul out of the FERA (Front Edge Rescue Area, to delta off the usual FEBA acronym) and local government data communications continuity apparently aren't on the first day task order, nor any subsequent day's task order.
Drill. Drill Now. Drill Baby Drill. Palin may be insane, but skipping on emergency procedures and drills, which at least one government has done, is not sane. (Doing something twice, e.g., failure to prepare for Katrina class events, and expecting a different outcome measure of sanity.)
Eric
Yesterday the US provided 270 gallons of diesel, and the Dominican Republic provided 100 gallons of diesel. Including battery, the Xchange Boutilliers is fuel secure through Friday.
Eric
Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
Yesterday the US provided 270 gallons of diesel, and the Dominican
Republic provided 100 gallons of diesel. Including battery, the Xchange
Boutilliers is fuel secure through Friday.
If I may ask, what's the long term plan? How long is utility power
expected to be unavailable?
~Seth
I've no idea. I've just been focused on moving the "dry tank" moment to the right, along with several others. Mind, this was the first resupply, its not a stable replenishment schedule yet.
The engineers on site had (as of yesterday) personal food and water through Thursday, and dependents in need.
Eric
Is there anything that any of us cab do to help, exert influence, etc (short of donating which many of us are already doing).
Yes there is Rodney. The visa problem isn't solved yet, and fundamentally it is a call-your-congress-critter problem. I'll have more on that this evening (EST).
TiA,
Eric
I'm sure other people involved in the relief work can suggest other things, but a few comments from my point of view:
- Communications capability underpins the ability of other relief workers to do their jobs effectively, so although we, as a community, aren't feeding people or tending to their medical needs, we are helping those who are doing those crucial jobs by allowing them to focus on their work.
- In the short-term, the equipment that's been requested by people on the ground has either already been delivered, is onboard a ship that left Jacksonville about twelve hours ago, or is being containerized to load on a ship that's leaving from Port Everglades tomorrow.
- Also in the short-term, keep an eye out for con-artists who are trying to lure people in to fake aid-donation web sites with spam. Law enforcement is coordinating internationally to take those offline as promptly as possible. If you get fake aid-donation spam, please forward it to Tom Grasso <thomas.x.grasso@ugov.gov> or Randy Vickers <randal.vickers@dhs.gov>. Either of them or I can pass things along to the international coordination group that's addressing this.
- In the mid-term, what our community needs to do is to make sure that backhaul infrastructure gets into place to move traffic in the 1Gbps-10Gbps range from Port au Prince to Miami. There are several cable systems which land in Santo Domingo, and Columbus has a branching unit off Guantanamo, so our main efforts have been focused on getting a festoon cable run around from the Santo Domingo landing (the University of Puerto Rico Marine Research labs have committed their cable-laying ship, crew, and divers, but we're still looking for an appropriate spool of armored singlemode in the 12-24 core range (more certainly wouldn't hurt, as this would be unrepeatered), and on finding funding to get Columbus to run the spur in from their BU. BTC apparently has fiber already existing or in process of turn-up between Port au Prince and the Bahamas, but nobody's been able to get a response from them yet about its status.
- More generally, as a community, we do good when we make sure that places like this, places that may not have large or lucrative markets, are still served by diverse fiber, rather than by a single fragile monopoly, or not at all, as in Haiti's case. There are many countries as vulnerable as Haiti, and many of them have no fiber. Most humanitarian disasters happen in poor countries and these are generally the countries our community currently has the least capacity to serve. We can think a little more broadly than that, looking to a future when people in poor countries have more smartphones, and students and small businesses are getting online. We don't need to wait for markets to develop... we can invest in those markets, and _cause_ them to develop. Then they won't be as vulnerable to disasters like this.
- Thinking to the longer term... The majority of people who die in humanitarian disasters die of second-order effects like starvation and disease that come in the wake of an earthquake or flood or whatever. That's just beginning now in Haiti, and will continue for some time. The people who died in the earthquake itself will be far outnumbered by those who will die as a result of insufficiently prepared emergency response. PCH and Cisco have been trying for _years_ to get donors to support a ready-to-go emergency communications team for disaster response, but it's been impossible to get donors to fund _preparedness_ rather than after-the-fact response. But immediately after an emergency is the _most expensive_ time to acquire generators and fuel and solar panels and wind generators and batteries and satphones and fiber and space-segments and so forth. All of that can be _much more cheaply_ purchased or contracted for beforehand, and delivered on-site weeks earlier. And those weeks are the weeks of effective response that reduce second-order deaths in the wake of an emergency. People who think they're being helpful with a donation now should understand that the donation would have saved ten times as many lives if it had been made a year ago, than if it's made now. If your companies have charitable foundations, please get them to think about that.
-Bill
Bill Woodcock wrote:
- Thinking to the longer term... The majority of people who die in humanitarian disasters die of second-order effects like starvation and disease that come in the wake of an earthquake or flood or whatever. That's just beginning now in Haiti, and will continue for some time. The people who died in the earthquake itself will be far outnumbered by those who will die as a result of insufficiently prepared emergency response. PCH and Cisco have been trying for _years_ to get donors to support a ready-to-go emergency communications team for disaster response, but it's been impossible to get donors to fund _preparedness_ rather than after-the-fact response. But immediately after an emergency is the _most expensive_ time to acquire generators and fuel and solar panels and wind generators and batteries and satphones and fiber and space-segments and so forth. All of that can be _much more cheaply_ purchased or contracted for beforehand, and delivered on-site weeks earlier. And those weeks are the weeks of effective response that reduce second-order deaths in the wake of an emergency. People who think they're being helpful with a donation now should understand that the donation would have saved ten times as many lives if it had been made a year ago, than if it's made now. If your companies have charitable foundations, please get them to think about that.
Well said Bill.
In addition, make sure everyone in your company has taken a CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) course. Aside from cash donations, the most important thing you can do is get CERT training so you can be effective in an emergency situation.
http://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/
The biggest problem in Haiti is a lack of an incident command structure. Because of the lack of organization, resources are not effectively used and people die - the tools needed to rescue them aren't found in time, water isn't distributed in time, food and shelter isn't made available in time, etc. Yes, all of these things are in desperately short supply, but the problem is greatly magnified when there's a lack of organization. If they had better organization, then their scarce supplies would be used more effectively to benefit more people.
If every US tourist visiting Haiti or US citizen working in Haiti who survived the quake unharmed had CERT training, they could have helped organize and mobilize uninjured Haitian survivors to band together and be more effective. This means being more effective at rescuing people, at triage, at providing emergency medical care, at communicating with municipal services (hospitals, doctors, police, fire departments), at determining what resources you have at hand (food, water, fuel, materials to build shelters) and how to best protect it, to ration it, to share and distribute it. It will be a long time before we can get CERT training in-place in third-world countries to ensure that their citizens can have this training, but we have it here in the US - just about every fire department offers the courses, often for free. Most offer the course to anyone who lives or works in their area.
I don't know what CERT-like programs exist outside the US, but I'm pretty sure that other developed countries have similar programs.
Brent Chapman has a presentation he gave at the USENIX/SAGE LISA Conference in San Diego on Thursday, 8 December 2005, and at the BayLISA meeting on Thursday, 20 October 2005:
http://www.greatcircle.com/blog/author/brent_chapman/2005/10/
The presentation is about how CERT training applies to IT disasters. So not only will you be better positioned to provide personal help if you ever find yourself in a disaster situation like Haiti, you will also be able to apply the training to your day job in network operations. 
You can also read about Brent's experience helping setup network communications in New Orleans after Katrina.
jc
To any of you who wants to help:
We would like to provide to the haitian government a UC systems with several
branches:
- President office: 10
Endpoints
- PM office: 10
endpoints
- 12 mayor city hall offices: 3 for each : 36 endpoints
- Ministries (9 differents locations 3 for each) 27
- Communications Center 20
- emergency Clusters 14
Total
117 endpoints
Redundant communications.
So if someone can provide recommendations, equipment, skilled technician for
that it would be fine.
Reynold
*Not speaking for BTC/AS8014*
"Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC), the service provider that runs
the Bahamas Domestic Submarine Network (BDSNi) submarine cable system
linking to Haiti, reported that service has been disrupted as a result of
the earthquake that struck the Port-au-Prince area."
I forwarded the DHS contacts to them.
Also, re your plan to potentially run a cable from SD to PaP. Interesting.
Looks like 300nm to me. I think you're going to need op amp and power. On
the Columbus run, they're going to need a landing station. I'm going to
speculate that this is part of BTC's problem; no landing station of the
subsea route was disrupted by the quake and depending upon the route that
UPR is going to take I'd think harder about the effectiveness of this plan.
I'd be thinking microwave and towers. Faster. Cheaper.
Best,
-M<
Folks,
I'm trying to keep the competent engineer count at the Boutilliers NAP from decrementing to zero in the very proximal future. One of several problems being worked by several groups of people.
Specifically, I want to get the paperwork done so that Dominique Theodore Guerrier, wife of Reynold Guerrier, Karl Nikolas Guerrier, age 3 and Hann Aurelie Guerrier, age 1, may exit Haiti and travel to Deerfield Beach, Florida, where Reynold's sister lives. If the wife and kids are safe, Reynold will stay on site until relieved.
Dominique holds a valid passport, the young children do not.
I want some of the NANOG list to do something -- a "write your congress critter" exercise. See below for instructions.
Eric
"Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC), the service provider that runs
the Bahamas Domestic Submarine Network (BDSNi) submarine cable system
linking to Haiti, reported that service has been disrupted as a result of
the earthquake that struck the Port-au-Prince area."
- The Teleco Facility that receive the fiber is completely broken (dust) but
must of the Technicians are alive and in Port au Prince
-M
There's an article on the subject in today's Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703657604575005453223257096.html -- not sure if it's behind the paywall or not.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb