Disasters like tsunami, cyclone, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or fire, both natural and manmade often cause serious injury or death and seriously damage the infrastructure like the buildings, transportation systems and utility careers which may cause the daily necessities unavailable to the community. So a communicatoin network should be available and accessible immediately after the disaster to support the post disaster rescue and recovery activities. This rescue operation is emergency for the disaster survivors to help alleviate their sufferings. The infrastructured communication networks such as WiMAX, cellular and PSTN network can be very much useful for post disaster communication.

But some disasters like cyclone, tsunami or earthquake often seriously damage or destroy the traditional infrastructured communication networks. In this situation, some wireless communication technologies such as Satellite communications, MANET, TETRA, Communication Radio and Citizen Band Radio can be a range of good choices to deploy. when no infrastructure is available, DUMBO is a complete solution for emergency communication, available in the website providing multimedia services.

So if any disaster hits your area, you can choose the appropriate communication technology from the lists below to help the victims depending on the availability of existing communication network, resources (Time and Money) and required services (voice or multimedia).

 If the infrastructured network like PSTN, cellular network or WiMAX is available, you can use the existing one for rescue and recovery.

If the existing infrastructure is partially damaged, it can be re stored. The fix up time and cost depends on the scale of damages.

If the existing infrastructure is not available or seriously damaged, then the user can choose other alternative technologies based on few criteria such as the required services (Voice or Multimedia), the set up time and cost.

Set Up Time:
High= Couple of Weeks
Medium= (1 Day –few Days) <= 1 Week
Short= (5 Minutes –few Hours) <= 1 Day
*Set up Time and Cost Depend on the scale of implementation.

Case Studies

Here few case studies have been shown where different kinds of emergency communication technologies have been used for post disaster rescue and recovery operations in different countries of the world in this decade.