[Special Feature: 10 Years Since 3.11] Disaster Relief and Information Technology for "Mutual Aid"

2021/03/05

"There is no information."

When a major disaster occurs, such voices are heard from both the people in the affected areas and those engaged in disaster response. In the Great East Japan Earthquake, the giant tsunami caused government buildings in many coastal municipalities to collapse, communications were cut off, and the people responsible for disaster response, including mayors, were also affected. As a result, information on the local damage situation did not reach the outside world, creating an "information vacuum," and much time was spent trying to grasp the overall picture of the damage. People who escaped the tsunami and evacuated to shelters or high ground were also desperate for information on the safety of their families, whether their homes were safe, and when rescue and support would arrive. Information on when and how much relief supplies would arrive was directly linked to life itself, as it concerned the distribution of food and water—how much they could eat today and tomorrow.

On the other hand, supporters such as local governments, the Self-Defense Forces, medical support teams, and private support organizations wanted to know where people in need were and how much supplies they needed to bring to meet those needs. If only 50 people's worth of food is delivered to a shelter with 1,000 people, conflicts over food distribution will occur, threatening the order and safety of the shelter where people live. Conversely, if a large amount of unnecessary supplies is delivered, it occupies warehouse space and places an excessive burden on the person in charge of managing supplies at the shelter. In fact, during the Great East Japan Earthquake, an imbalance and mismatch of support occurred: large amounts of relief supplies reached places where the media reported the extent of the damage, while almost no supplies reached areas that were damaged but not reported.

Once the period known as the "acute phase of a disaster" has passed and issues directly threatening life—such as water, food, a place to sleep, and emergency medical care—have been resolved, many supporters tend to think, "Now we can breathe a sigh of relief," but that is not actually the case. When people who have lost their homes move from shelters to temporary housing, various issues of a different quality from the acute phase emerge, such as isolation, anxiety about rebuilding their lives, continuation of work or studies, and the worsening of chronic illnesses. These issues are often perceived as trivial compared to life-threatening issues in the acute phase, making them difficult to voice or discover. As a result, there are many cases where people cannot connect to necessary social support and end up dealing with problems alone. To prevent this, it is necessary to discover in a timely manner what each affected individual is struggling with and connect them to support that can solve those problems. There is a need for "information supporters" who have the role of discovering needs while staying close to the affected people in their daily lives, aggregating that as information, and connecting it to the decision-making and actions of supporters.

In this way, it is important for information support during disasters to collect and provide necessary information in a timely manner according to each stage of the disaster cycle.

The use of information technology (IT) for disaster relief in Japan is said to have begun with the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. This year is also called the "First Year of Volunteering." Witnessing unprecedented disasters such as highways collapsed by the earthquake and subsequent fires that burned down entire neighborhoods, a wide range of people from all over Japan, including medical professionals, office workers, and students, went to the site as volunteers to engage in relief activities such as cleaning up houses and distributing supplies. These earthquake volunteers, who were responsible for "mutual aid," turned their attention to computer networks—which were not yet widely used at the time—as a means of disseminating information. In 1995, when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred, commercial internet connection services like the ones we use today were not widespread, and individuals used services called "PC communications" to communicate via electronic bulletin boards and chat. "Inter-Vnet" was an attempt to create an electronic bulletin board where information about the earthquake could be shared across all PC communication services by relaying independent closed networks through a mechanism called NetNews on the internet. It was launched by Professor Ikuyo Kaneko (at the time) of Keio University and others. The author, who was a graduate student at the time, was one of the participants in this initiative and was involved in managing the server computers that ran this system.

Inter-Vnet was an advanced initiative and had a certain effect as a new means of disseminating information during a disaster, but it must be said that its direct effect was limited because the population using PC communications or the internet daily was not large at the time. However, looking back now, it can be said that this initiative was a pioneer for the use of ICT in subsequent disasters.

When looking at the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake from the perspective of IT support, the biggest differences are the matching of information through the participation of many users and the use of map information. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, Amazon customized its "Wish List" service, which it had operated as a gift purchase support service, for the disaster-affected areas, and launched a matching service where people around the world could purchase and deliver supplies needed by people in the affected areas through Amazon. Google, in parallel with its online safety confirmation service Person Finder, collected photos of safety confirmation posters posted at shelters, and conducted crowdsourced support where online volunteers across the country entered that information into Person Finder. ITS Japan, which works on improving transportation society using IT, aggregated traffic record information sent from car navigation systems in the affected areas and provided information on "roads where cars can pass even after the earthquake." On a website called sinsai.info, online volunteers continued activities to map collected information related to victim needs and support onto an open electronic map with no usage restrictions called OpenStreetMap. Compared to the time of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, when information exchange was mainly text-based on electronic bulletin boards, it is clear that both the quality and quantity of support activities have improved significantly due to the expansion of various services on the internet, including maps.

Support was also provided for communication infrastructure damage caused by the tsunami in the Great East Japan Earthquake. The WIDE Project, a research group on internet technology established by Professor Jun Murai of Keio University and others, provided and installed internet connection equipment in the affected areas, providing a mechanism to support the receipt of aid utilizing the internet. Additionally, JEITA (Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association), an industry organization for electronic equipment and IT companies, provided PCs and printers to shelters and support organizations to assist with information access.

NPOs and other organizations acting as supporters during disasters also utilized such equipment and services, and devised ways to disseminate information using Facebook and websites. However, it seems that IT was not used much for the management of disaster relief, which is the core operation. In a survey of disaster relief organizations conducted by the author in 2012, while SNS and cloud services were utilized for information collection, dissemination, and storage of photo data, cases of utilizing IT for personnel scheduling, supply management, and understanding victim needs were limited to a very small number. This became a major issue in the Great East Japan Earthquake, contributing to the duplication of support activities in affected areas, bias in supplies, and delays in support.

IT DART (Information Support Rescue Corps) is a private support organization established in 2015 with the aim of supporting smoother relief activities from an information perspective, learning from the challenges of the Great East Japan Earthquake. IT DART is an organization that supports information collection, utilization, and dissemination during disasters, primarily playing the role of providing back-end information support to organizations that provide direct support in affected areas. The author has been involved in IT DART since its launch and currently serves as the Representative Director. IT DART's activities are diverse, and some representative ones are introduced below.

(1) Providing information for disaster volunteers

When a major disaster occurs, disaster volunteer centers are opened in each region. In the response to the July 2020 Heavy Rain centered on Kumamoto Prefecture, many disaster volunteer centers did not accept volunteers from far away due to COVID-19, limiting recruitment to neighboring municipalities or within the prefecture. In addition to such recruitment status, there is a wide range of information that volunteers participating in support should know in advance, such as necessary belongings and traffic information. IT DART summarizes the volunteer recruitment status of disaster volunteer centers in various locations and posts information about the next day's recruitment on Twitter the night before to provide information to volunteers participating in support activities.

(2) Providing IT equipment and support to disaster relief organizations

Disaster relief organizations such as NPOs entering from outside the affected areas set up bases locally to conduct activities, but the development of an IT environment for summarizing and disseminating information at the base tends to be secondary. IT DART provides equipment such as PCs, multifunction printers, and mobile routers to support organizations to assist with information collection and dissemination. Furthermore, in affected areas, due to a lack of IT resources, applications for support requests from victims are often managed with paper documents, and data entry must be performed at some point for smooth processing. In the July 2018 Heavy Rain centered on Western Japan, IT DART collaborated with in-house volunteers from Yahoo Japan Corporation to implement data entry and mapping support at disaster volunteer centers in Kurashiki City and other locations. Through this activity, it became clear that establishing rules for the proper handling of victims' personal information is a major challenge for the future.

(3) Providing information to facilitate smooth support

In the Great East Japan Earthquake, insufficient mutual cooperation among support organizations led to biased support and the creation of information vacuums, which became a major issue. In response to this challenge, intermediary support NPOs that specialize in coordinating collaborative support activities at the national or prefectural level have been established in various locations. IT DART cooperates with these intermediary support NPOs to develop and provide systems that allow support organizations to share their respective activity statuses and easily share photos taken by teams that entered the affected areas early as advance parties with other supporters. Photos and videos are provided mapped on electronic maps, allowing the situation to be surveyed at a glance. In addition, IT is beginning to be used for supply management and volunteer registration, but overall, the use of IT by disaster relief organizations, centered on NPOs, is still developing, and future strengthening of this field, which is responsible for "mutual aid," is desired.

Ten years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the social IT environment and people's literacy have changed significantly. Through social media such as Twitter and LINE, it has become possible to quickly grasp real-time information when a disaster occurs. On the other hand, the spread of false information, such as "rain containing poison is falling in the Tokyo metropolitan area" or "wild animals have escaped from the zoo due to the earthquake," has also become an issue. Regarding communication infrastructure, while the development of the 00000JAPAN Wi-Fi service, which can be used for free at shelters, is progressing, the response during the recovery and reconstruction phase after the acute phase of the disaster is not yet sufficient. We frequently receive consultations about people who have moved out of shelters into temporary housing and lack an internet connection environment, making them unable to obtain information necessary for rebuilding their lives.

Disaster risk varies for each individual depending on age, family composition, and living environment. For people to remain healthy even if they encounter a disaster, it is important for each individual to know their own disaster risk not only at the time of the disaster but also through the reconstruction and quiet periods, and not to neglect preparation in terms of both supplies and information appropriate to the risk. The development of technology that realizes information provision tailored to the disaster cycle and individual risks is expected.

It goes without saying that introducing advanced technologies such as AI, IoT, and drones into disaster relief will help solve many information distribution issues. However, at the same time, we must not forget that digital tools are not the entirety of information technology. Information is essentially an input to reduce uncertainty (not knowing whether to escape to the right or left) when a person is trying to make a decision (the route to high ground is displayed with an arrow), and information technology is the technology to provide information to reduce uncertainty in a timely manner when a decision is needed—that is, the general technology for "organizing the flow of information." The author believes that "analog information and communication technologies"—for example, data formats that are easy to fill out and hard to make mistakes in, color-coding and sticky notes for easy-to-understand classification, designs that allow one to intuitively know what to do next, and inter-organizational cooperation systems to achieve smooth collaboration—must be in place before the "silver bullet" of digital tools can be effective.