Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

13. Designing Resilient Systems Integrating Science, Technology, and Policy in International Risk Reduction

244 13 Designing Resilient Systems Integrating Science, Technology, and Policy in International Risk Reduction Hui Ling, Taieb Znati, and Louise Comfort When a massive earthquake, measuring 9.3 moment magnitude on the Richter scale of earthquake intensity, occurred on December 26, 2004, at 7:58 a.m. (local time) off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, it triggered not only a devastating tsunami wave that struck coastal communities in twelve nations around the Indian Ocean basin but also a wave of concern, interest, and commitment in the global scientific community, focused on discovering new methods of detecting tsunamis and protecting coastal communities from their catastrophic consequences. Geophysicists have long considered earthquakes nearly impossible to predict (Field, Milner , et al. 2007), but tsunamis offer a modest possibility for early detection , depending upon the location of the triggering undersea landslide and its distance from shore. Further, new developments in sensor technologies for monitoring seismic movements and integrating this information with changes in the water column and speed of the advancing wave have enabled scientists to explore new methods for early tsunami detection in order to transmit these data to land-based organizations that could mobilize rapid evacuations for communities at risk. This chapter presents a design for integrating critical technologies with human organizational systems in order to increase resilience in risk-prone communities. Technologies enable human resilience in uncertain physical environments by systematically monitoring risk conditions and transmit- Designing Resilient Systems 245 ting that information to practicing managers. Understanding the role of the instruments and the methods of collecting data in challenging physical environments requires a review of the data-collection instruments and how they contribute to the improved performance of organizational systems (Hutchins 1995). This chapter presents a design for the physical instrumentation of sensors in a network for early detection of near-shore tsunamis. The threat of tsunamis is inherently an international policy problem, one that requires collaboration among nations that border the same ocean basins. It is also a difficult, interdisciplinary problem that has long challenged disaster managers and scientists alike. Significant progress has been made with the development of deep ocean buoys that can detect seismic movement accurately and transmit this information via the Global Seismographic Network to coastal nations in advance of the oncoming wave (Leith, Gee, and Hutt 2009). A more difficult problem is the threat of nearshore tsunamis in which the undersea landslide occurs within fifty miles of shore and the warning time for the advancing wave to coastal communities is less than fifteen minutes (Bernard et al. 2006). A key question for scientists and disaster managers is whether appropriate technologies could be integrated to design a method that would allow both early tsunami detection for near-shore tsunamis and quick and accurate communication of that information to on-shore emergency service organizations in time to protect their communities. This is a problem of risk assessment that was previously considered beyond human intervention, one that can only be addressed by designing appropriate technologies to support detection and informed action for land-based emergency response organizations. Importantly, the difficulty of this problem has attracted the interest and engagement of an interdisciplinary group of geophysicists, engineers, computer scientists, policy analysts, and disaster managers from many nations . It has also won the interest and financial support of research organizations from the United States, the European Union, Japan, and of course nations with coastal communities exposed to near-shore tsunami risk. In its best form, an emerging “epistemic community” is clearly focused on this research problem. Scientific organizations supported by funds from their respective governments have joined this collaborative effort to explore constructive methods to mitigate the global risks of near-shore tsunamis, which disproportionately affect island nations. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States supports a Tsunami Research Program, as do the meteorological agencies of Japan, Australia, Germany, Indonesia, and other nations (U.S. Congress 246 Ling, Znati, and Comfort 2006). The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), established by the United Nations in 1960, focused specifically on the problem of tsunami detection and warning after the 2004 Sumatran earthquake and tsunami (IOC 2005). Global efforts to address this problem do not diminish the scientific and technical difficulties of solving it. This chapter introduces one aspect of an international, interdisciplinary research effort to devise a method of early detection of tsunamis using underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) to detect the generation of a...