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When the excrement hits the fan

What a disastrous 24 hours we've just been through. Not for me but for thousands of people living in the Pacific.

Several powerful earthquakes caused death and destruction in Samoa yesterday morning and now I hear that another quake has hit Sumatra with a third rocking Peru just minutes before I typed this.

They say that such earthquakes come in threes and I have trouble believing an expert on NatRad this morning who claims the three events were not linked. Come on... when the stresses in one part of the earth's crusts are released by way of quake, surely that alters the loads on other fault lines and makes them more disposed to shift?

But the how's and why's of the situation aren't the topic of today's column -- the role the internet has to play (or not play) in the aftermath is what I'm worried about.

One thing that must be a bit of a worry is that NZ is connected to the rest of the world primarily by way of undersea cables. Any major undersea movements must therefore pose some form of risk to that connectivity.

Indeed, there have been incidents elsewhere in the world where quakes have damaged such cables and severely compromised nations' connectivity.

I wonder what contingencies New Zealand has in place to cope with a major failure of the Southern Cross cable in such circumstances?

How would we cope with the loss of crucial connectivity at a time when our nation may have been devastated by a seismic event and have urgent need to establish and maintain connectivity with those who may need to help us?

Forget the distress of those who may have lost loved ones under piles of rubble or washed away in a tsunami -- think of the legions of schoolkids who would be unable to tweet and whose Facebook pages might not get updated for weeks (oh the humanity).

Unfortunately, a sudden and dramatic loss of connectivity is something we may just have to live with in the event of such a disaster.

We'd then be reliant on satellite phones and maybe even (what's left of) the HAM radio community to provide us with the international connectivity that would be so crucial to organising relief efforts.

Okay, so that's a worst-case scenario. What about something a little less severe?

Well you'd think that in an age when most mobiles have web-browsing abilities and most people are connected (or can be) all-day, the internet would be a primary source of civil defence information -- right?

Apparently not so.

When a tsunami warning was issued yesterday for parts of the NZ coast, details of that warning were decidedly sparse and lacking detail on the Civil Defence website.

Indeed, the situation prompted one reader to email me with concerns over this paucity of online information. Unlike radio and TV, the CD website gave no indication of where or when a tsunami might be expected to reach NZ. The site simply said:

At the same time, other news organisations were providing a wealth of information, advising the most vulnerable locations and times when the tsunamis were expected to make landfall.

Surely CD has to up their game when it comes to the internet.

There was perhaps a time (in the pre-internet age) when CD's role was to keep broadcasters supplied with critical information relating to unfolding events but these days they do have a link directly to the people, through their website. If they fail to use that link adequately then they're bloody idiots.

Perhaps they figured nobody would be sitting at home logging onto their webpages through their dial-up modem and desktop PC. Well sorry but *lots* of folks would be busy accessing the CD website from their mobiles, PDAs or whatever.

My only other concern is whether the CD website would stand up to the beating that it might receive if a more critical disaster loomed? Given the regularity with which the MetService website fails with an "overloaded" message in the face of advancing bad weather, could we expect the CD website to do the same?

It's time someone took a close look at the CD's internet resources and how they're used in times of national emergency. We need to be 100% sure they're adequate and properly implemented *before* they're called on to save lives.

As a matter of interest, where did you turn yesterday for more information on the threat of a tsunami headed NZ's way?

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