Transforming Disaster Relief

With the state the world is in today, many people forget the powerful forces of nature, thinking instead of only human caused problems. As it is with most major problems in our day and age, the only thing that makes the populous take notice of our unpreparedness is visible results, in this case, a major catastrophe. Two of the worst possible disasters in recent memory occurred in within only a year of one another, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in 2005, and makes one wonder why the former disaster didn't bring attention to New Orleans glaring weaknesses in the face of storm conditions. Luckily, these disasters did bring certain problems into the light, and allowed people to work on fixing them. These new technologies at combating the issues of disaster relief efforts make up the brunt of the article, and help to give hope for more successful relief efforts in the future. Some recent advances, such as the Groove network, deal with logistical problems, such as getting information to all of the people who need it. The Groove network deals with this by setting up a peer to peer file sharing network, much like what is used by the program "Limewire", between all those who need to be kept in the loop, preventing the need for a central server. Other advances deal with infrastructure problems, since not every nation has access to wi-fi for an extremely advanced rescue team to connect to. To deal with a the destruction of or lack of infrastructure, the Netrelief Kit serves as a central hub for communications technology between relief workers. Other advances along these lines allow aid workers to stay in communication with each other and get help to those who really need it. Hopefully, once the next disaster comes along (and it's never a question of "if" but "when"), those afflicted can find some solace in the fact that disaster relief has finally mad the leap into the 21st century, and has learned from past mistakes to become faster and more effective than ever before.

- Eric