Can effects and after effects of natural disaster be tamed?

Several million earthquake hits our ground every year and majority of them does not get detected due to small magnitude or occurrence in a remote area. But the big earthquakes which are larger in magnitudes impact our lives to a great extent in terms of life and economic loss. Now the main question is how to reduce the losses to the minimum level or how to avoid the major losses? How the emerging technology can help us in minimizing damages and maximizing safety?

Around 13000 people loose their lives per year due to earthquakes and approximately 5 million people gets severely affected by it.  Recently the stability of Indian subcontinent was disturbed multiple times by a major earthquake and it’s after effect whose epicenter was located deep in Himalayas in Nepal and was measured 7.9 on Richter scale. It was estimated that about as many as 10000 people were dead and around 25 percent to Nepal’s GDP was destroyed. This is a huge loss for a developing nation which has pushed it many year back. Can technology help in reducing these damages?

Scientists are unlikely to be ever able to predict earthquakes with any amount of certainty, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). They can say that an earthquake can hit a particular place in near future but cannot predict exactly when it can occur. However, big data analytics is providing the leap in accuracy of quake predictions, says Forbes, with recent predictions being 90% accurate. Companies using satellite data are increasingly able to forecast major quakes from one to 30 days before they occur in all key seismic prone areas.

In today’s time we are well connected and by using SMS massaging, GPS signalling, stable wifi and constantly in use social media can made a cluster which can be helpful in relief work and even pre calamity data can be helpful in finding out trends and more accurately predicting natural disasters. Even the Crisis mapping technology and evolving of digital maps are extremely useful sources to expand relief programs in the disaster affected regions. Currently USA and Japan are working jointly in developing six different projects on disaster management using Big Data and data analytics.

Google has launched People Finder after Haiti earthquake in 2010 and it was updated around 5300 times in first two days of Nepal Earthquake. Facebook’s safety check also covers people whose GPS data shows that they are in danger zone. Similarly during Sandy storm, Geeks without bounds and Splunk4Good worked together to analyse data from Twitter feeds so as to find out patterns and trends of activities in certain area. The European Commission, together with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee has developed an Index for Risk Management (INFORM), an open-source global risk analysis tool for understanding the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters. Using data from 191 countries, INFORM can assess a country or region’s actual risk with high levels of specificity.

It has also been proposed by scientists to study electromagnetic fields which are thought to be changed just before earthquakes. Animals can sense earthquake more effectively and much before then human beings. According to a study published in journal of Zoology that 96% of male toads abandoned their breeding site five days before the earthquake which struck almost 74 KM away. May be in near future we may borrow this disaster detecting ability from animals and we may become more equipped in reducing damages from natural disasters.