Thursday, July 19, 2012

Radio in a Suitcase - Media Before, During and After Disaster




There's a conference in London tomorrow about media and natural disasters. Mike Adams, who has done a lot of work in this field forwarded me this video of work his organisation has been doing in Indonesia with radio in a suitcase projects. Deserves a wider audience.




Mike got back to me to explain about a new project he is working on at First Response Radio.

After the 2004 Tsunami and 2005 Pakistan quake I was part of a group that has developed a team to provide emergency radio in disasters. We call our network of partners FIRST Response Radio. Teams are trained and have the KIT already in Indonesia, India, Philippines and Singapore. We are expanding more each year. I am also encouraged to see UN backing and many NGO's getting on board with the idea. The most active group is called CDAC which stands for Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities


Just today I posted a press release about the Indian team which is responding to the Assam Floods in the NE. They flew in with their "studio in a suitcase" and made programs in Assam, then broadcast them back in via shortwave radio. In other countries (Indonesia & Philippines) we will bring in an FM transmitter in a suitcase as well. Our experience shows us that a trained team can have the FM station on the air in well under 1 hour from arriving at an emergency location.  I was sorry to read that the RNW radio-in-a-box program will be coming to and end with the cuts. That's one fewer orgs involved in using radio in disaster. My overall assessment would be that there is a core group that has been steadily working to get radio into the place in needs to be - at the center of disaster response work.


I agree. Traditional media when combined with social media is the strongest case. Just look at these recent lessons learned from a resident of Florida, USA.

1 comment:

Jim Davies said...

So far I've been lucky enough to avoid any harmful natural disasters, but in 2010 and 2011 we got some heavy snowfall in the UK which caught the population and authorities by surprise.

In my area the winning source by far of reliable, up to date information was local BBC Radio on FM. Local BBC and commercial stations don't seem to be carried digitally here, and all sorts of websites such as schools and travel were either timing out under the pressure of early morning travel decisions, or not showing useful information.

The local DJ was able to rearrange his programming to advise, with friendly authority, solid information gained via the telephone, listing schools that were open or closed and travel routes that were running or not (local buses struggled with roads that couldn't be cleared in time).

The station also made good use of the opportunity to grow their audience, with suggestions to keep listening and give the show a chance once the snow had cleared if you'd tuned into their show for the first time!

In comparison at the time Twitter and Facebook tended towards very local information with a highly personal slant, along the lines of "I can't travel, look how snowy it is in my street", or "I'm not going to work today - yippee!". There was a lot of retweeting of authoritative messages, but at the time that only felt analogous to "they've been saying on the radio that the road is closed..." - I was hardly going to say to the boss I didn't come in because I read on Twitter that no one else was...

Battery powered analogue radios are great in this scenario, but only if the stations are ready and willing in the first place!

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