How geeks responded to a catastrophic disaster of a high-tech country: rapid development of counter-disaster systems for the great east Japan earthquake of March 2011

Abstract

A devastating earthquake hit Japan on March 11, 2011. A history of frequent and powerful earthquakes in the region, especially the great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake of 1995, led the country to develop disaster relief methods in preparation for such natural disasters. Nevertheless, the earthquake and following tsunami destroyed much of the coastland, and caused panic, due to the Fukushima-daiichi nuclear power plant accidents. During this situation, some of the crisis-management systems performed as expected. However, the poor performance of the others required system developers to implement new and improved counter-disaster systems on the fly. Such systems include the nationwide refugee locator, relief supply matching system, planning applications for scheduled power outages in the metropolitan area, twitter-mining systems for realtime monitoring of public transportation systems, etc. After the disaster, we conducted a comprehensive survey of such systems, in order to record how geeks in the high-tech country responded to such a national crisis. The analysis of the resulting list of counter-disaster applications gave us useful insight for future disasters: i) authorities are advised to disclose statistical information as quickly as possible, ii) coordination among developers must be provided, and iii) interconnection of databases is essential for efficiency.