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

"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. During the Great East Japan Earthquake, the massive tsunami caused municipal buildings in many coastal areas to collapse, communications were severed, and the people responsible for disaster response, including mayors, were also affected. As a result, information on the local damage 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 fled to evacuation centers 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 survival, as it concerned the distribution of food and water—determining how much they could eat today and tomorrow.

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

Once the period known as the "acute phase of a disaster" passes and issues directly threatening life—such as water, food, a place to sleep, and emergency medical care—are resolved, many responders 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 evacuation centers 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 struggling 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 play 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 responders.

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 took on the role of "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 those we use today were not widespread, and individuals used services called "PC communications" to communicate via electronic bulletin boards and chats. "InterVnet" was an attempt to create an electronic bulletin board where information about the earthquake could be shared across all PC communication services by relaying these 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.

InterVnet was a pioneering initiative and had a certain effect as a new means of disseminating information during a disaster, but the population using PC communications or the internet on a daily basis at the time was by no means large, and its direct effect must be described as limited. However, looking back now, it can be said that this initiative was a precursor to 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 areas, deploying 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, conducted crowdsourced support where photos of safety confirmation posters posted at evacuation centers were collected and entered into Person Finder by online volunteers across the country. ITS Japan, which works on improving transportation society using IT, aggregated traffic record information transmitted 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, offering a mechanism to support the receipt of internet-based aid. Additionally, JEITA (Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association), an industry group for electronic equipment and IT companies, provided PCs and printers to evacuation centers 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 utilized 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 where IT was utilized for personnel scheduling, supply management, and understanding victim needs were limited to a very small number. This became a major issue during the Great East Japan Earthquake, contributing to the duplication of support activities, bias in supplies, and delays in support in the affected areas.

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 rear-guard information support to organizations that provide direct support in affected areas. The author has been involved in IT DART since its inception 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 various regions. In the response to the July 2020 heavy rains 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 regarding the next day's recruitment on Twitter the night before, providing 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 to conduct activities, but the preparation 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, assisting 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. During the July 2018 heavy rains centered on Western Japan, IT DART collaborated with internal 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 have been established at the national and prefectural levels. IT DART cooperates with these intermediary support NPOs to develop and provide systems that allow support organizations to share their respective activity statuses and enable teams that entered the affected areas early as advance parties to easily share photos they have taken with other supporters. Photos and videos are provided mapped onto electronic maps, allowing the situation to be surveyed at a glance. In addition, IT is beginning to be utilized for supply management and volunteer registration, but overall, the use of IT by disaster relief organizations, primarily NPOs, is still developing, and future strengthening of this field, which carries the burden of "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 "toxic rain falling in the Tokyo metropolitan area" or "wild animals escaping from the zoo due to the earthquake," has also become an issue. Regarding communication infrastructure, while the development of the free Wi-Fi service 00000JAPAN is progressing in evacuation centers, the response during the recovery and reconstruction phase after the acute phase of the disaster cannot yet be said to be sufficient. Consultations are often received about the lack of an internet connection environment in temporary housing after leaving evacuation centers, making it impossible to obtain information necessary for rebuilding lives.

Disaster risk varies for each individual depending on age, family composition, and living environment. For people to remain healthy even after a disaster, it is important for each individual to know their own disaster risk throughout the reconstruction phase and the quiet phase, not just at the time of the disaster, and not to neglect preparations for 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 challenges. However, we must also 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 general technology that provides information to reduce uncertainty in a timely manner when a decision is needed—in other words, technology that "streamlines the flow of information." The author believes that the "silver bullet" of digital tools only becomes effective when "analog information and communication technologies" are in place, such as 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 cooperative systems between organizations to realize smooth collaboration.