Disaster, Communication and Public Information

Abstract

These are only two examples of how disaster mitigation management, information and communication are closely related. As Fred Cate states (Cate 1995), ‘Technologies, skills, and media are essential to link scientists, disaster mitigation officials, government officials and the public.’ Additionally, they are also necessary to ‘educate the public on disaster preparedness, track approaching hazards, alert authorities, warn the people most likely to be affected, assess damage, collect information, supplies and other resources, co-ordinate rescue and relief activities; account for missing people, motivate public, political and institutional responses, and support rational policy making and priority setting.’

News of the devastating Los Angeles earthquake reached President Clinton forty minutes after the first shock waves were felt in Los Angeles on the morning of 17 January 1994. The President was informed [...] by the Housing and Urban Development Secretary who was in the CBS television studios in Washington.

A few years later, the world learned of the devastation in Kobe, Japan, not only through television and other mass media, but through the global network of information networks, the Internet the ground was still shaking [...] when university students began firing up their computers to spread the word of the disaster. In the days that followed the earthquake, although phone service to much of Kobe remained in shambles, the Internet carried requests for supplies, maps and photographs of the affected area, the names of survivors, and grizzly details about the dead and the injured.