quake/tsunami stuff

[avacon]

I made the obligatory donation to the Red Cross disaster relief fund yesterday. Still, I wish that there was more that I could do to help people. It really is hard to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, and I fear that disease and lack of fresh water and such will kill many more people than the initial tsunami did. There are two things

Comments

More than tsunami...

[rjpb]

I made the obligatory donation to the Red Cross disaster relief fund yesterday. Still, I wish that there was more that I could do to help people.

I am working on organizing the MIT Red Cross club in running a fundraiser during IAP, possibly with some other groups on campus. If you would be interested in helping with publicity or other stuff, you would be welcome.

It really is hard to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster

Much of the problem is that this is not really a single disaster, but a chain of disasters: earthquake causes tsunami causes water supply contamination causes epidemics, etc. Each step kills and injures and reduces the speed of the recovery effort. In addition, the disasters are widely spread over a huge and remote geographic areas.

I doubt it is enough to implement a specialized tsunami warning system, especially if it comes at the expense of neglecting funding for more common disasters. While working on the SARS and HIV epidemic modeling system last year, I began to think about a more general emergency prediction, warning, and notification system. This might be too complex and expensive to implement currently, and I am not up for leading such a project, but it is something to ponder....