Here is the full transcript of Geomatics engineer Rohini Swaminathan’s talk titled “There Is Nothing Natural About Disaster” at TEDxPlaceDesNations 2016 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Growing Up
Hello, I still remember the very first time I ever said that word holding a telephone. I grew up in a very small remote forest in South India, you know, the kind with no running water, just me and monkeys running around. And as a child, one of my favorite things was to hold a telephone and talk on it. But for me to do that, my parents would have to put me in a bus and make a 100 kilometer trip.
Technology still hadn’t gotten that far yet. One day, it was in December of 2004. It was just the day after Christmas. I was 15 years old, and I woke up to the news of what would become the deadliest disasters of recorded human history. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit the eastern coast of India, not too far from my little forest, with several other countries nearby. It took the lives of over 200,000 people and left millions homeless.
All that happened just in a few hours. At that time, part of my father’s job was go through coastal villages and assess the activities of the fisherman community. And for the very first time when I went with him, I saw what disasters could leave behind.
Witnessing Destruction
It was destruction beyond my imagination. As I was walking through this small village, there was an old grandfather pointing at a mass grave, and he said, “We had to bury hundreds of people together because we didn’t have enough time to dig individual graves.” When the first wave hit, he said, news about these majestic waves, waves as tall as coconut trees, spread so fast, faster than the waves themselves, that people woke up and ran towards the ocean to witness this mystery.
And the second wave, which was more forceful, took more lives with it. As an angry teenager, I asked my father, “Why no one did anything about this? Why did this happen?” And he simply replied, “Kiddo, ask what you can do if this happens again.” And there I was, a teenage girl who was growing up with monkeys in a forest, listening to stories about how it was nature’s wrath that took people’s lives. And I certainly didn’t think anything could be done.
It was, after all, a natural disaster. But a couple of years later, when I had to pick major for my college, for the first time, I heard about this thing called geomatics. Now, geomatics is the study of collecting data about our planet.
Discovering Geomatics
It could be any data, temperature, rainfall, vegetation, how high the mountains are, pretty much any data that we can collect, and the science of processing and analyzing this data into useful information. Now, the more we collect, the more we can process, and the more we can understand about what’s going on around us. So I thought maybe this is something I could do.
Maybe this is the way I can understand nature’s wrath. And 10 years later, today, I work with UNITAR in their program called UNISTAT, where I do just that. We collect as much data as we can, and we process them as fast as we can, so we can get the information into the hands of the people who need it the most.
Disasters Everywhere
When you look at this globe, there is not a single place we can point to and say, “This is free from natural or man-made hazard.” Disasters happen everywhere. In fact, in the last two decades, disasters have doubled in numbers.
Satellite data helps us to visualize and respond in a way it was not possible before. For instance, let’s look at floods, one of the most occurring natural hazards on this planet. In Thailand, during 2011 floods, satellite mapping showed us the complete extent of the flooded region, which we couldn’t see it from the ground.
We have satellites that can see through clouds or even during night. Or forest fires, we can see fire hotspots from space. We can visualize them over space a first time. We are also monitoring conflicts. By the end of 2015, there were well over 4 million Syrian refugees. This is al-Zahdari refugee camp in Jordan.
Monitoring with Satellites
This camp grew in a way no one could have imagined, from almost nothing. Satellite data helps us to study the camp’s growth, which becomes an important planning tool. This is crucial information which cannot be obtained from the ground. We are also looking at cultural heritage sites. This is the Temple of Bel in the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. It just disappeared from one day to the next.
Apart from all the conflicts we study, we are also monitoring cows. In South Sudan, during conflicts, when people leave everything behind, they will not leave their cows behind. It’s by finding these cows, we can actually see where the people are. So we can let the emergency responders on the ground know where help might be needed. So as you can see, disasters happen everywhere. But if you live in a developed world, you might not feel it the same way someone does in the developing world.
Haiti vs. Chile Earthquakes
For instance, let me show you an example of what happened during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. This is a heat map which shows the destruction to the buildings in the capital city. Even the presidential palace was damaged.
Yet the following month, a more powerful earthquake hit Chile in South America. It released 500 times more energy than the Haitian one. Chile lost 700 of its citizens when compared to over 150,000 Haitians who died the month ago. Of course, there were some geological differences between these quakes. But Chile, as a country with a longstanding history of earthquakes, was far better prepared.