Making Cities Resilient - Using SnooCODE and SnooCODERED for Disaster Resilience
In the last 3 years, I have been to 2 cities which suffered terrible earthquakes afterwards… I can imagine how ironically ominous that sounds, today being Friday the 13th no less – allow me to explain. (FYI, it’s also International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction)
In March 2020, I travelled to Istanbul, Turkey, for the 1st time to participate in a symposium by the Royal Academy of Engineering under their Frontiers of Development programme. This symposium was on Disaster Resilience, bringing together “participants from engineering, medical, social and natural science backgrounds from across industry, academia, NGOs and government” (according to the Frontiers mandate) to find solutions to problems in disaster resilience. The UN defines resilience as the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions.
The symposium took place in Turkey due to a confluence of factors:
Turkey’s multi-hazard, high risk location; significant earthquakes and other disasters that had taken place there in recent times (See 2020 Elazig earthquake); the human-influx from Syria, bringing a different perspective and issues to their disaster risk management system…
As part of our fully loaded 3-day symposium, we enjoyed a small tour of Istanbul that included a visit to the Kandili Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute. Here, I learnt the astonishing fact that even in the 21st century, humans with our technology could still not predict when earthquakes would happen. 😨 This one fact often pops up in my head, both randomly and when I learn of an earthquake somewhere, a poignant reminder of humanity’s long-standing vulnerability and our need to strengthen resilience.
Sadly, 3 years after the symposium, on the 6th of February 2023, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, followed by a 7.5-magnitude event and more than 200 aftershocks, resulting in the deaths of over 50,000 people. 😔 As the world mourned, I pondered over the reality of our inability to predict earthquakes in 2023, and decided to do some more research on the subject. I learnt that on the positive side, scientists have more recently turned to Machine Learning (ML) to develop models by leveraging large amounts of data, e.g. seismology readings and data on Earth’s surface deformation. There is yet a huge problem, which this Nature article explains: Nevertheless, while promising, these models haven’t yet achieved the required precision. Challenges include a lack of data on the early warning signs to feed into the machine learning pipelines … and the fact that historical quakes occurring more than 25–30 years ago lacked automated and digitized data collection at that time, resulting in an incomplete data source.
As I’ve shared in some of my previous articles, data, particularly geospatial data, is crucial in disaster management and resilience. Imagine how much more accurate and effective the scientists’ ML models would be if 30+ years ago, the super precise SnooCODE digital address system had existed and been leveraged to archive incidents – today’s ML systems would have had records of events down to an accuracy of ±22cm! And then there is also the aspect of geospatial data for emergency response, which I tackle in my 2nd earthquake-affected country below.
In June this year, I travelled to Marrakesh, Morocco, for the 1st time to participate in the 1st GITEX Africa expo (African edition of the world’s 3rd largest tech conference). Representatives from all over the globe congregated in the country’s tourist capital over 3 days of insightful discussions, 1-on-1 meetings, investor pitches, networking and exhibitions. I was invited to exhibit SnooCODE, while I also earned a spot to pitch SnooCODERED for Healthtech in one of the side events, the Supernova Challenge. I put together a pitch deck showing how SnooCODERED helps medical, emergency and public healthcare workers do the following:
Accurately locate and navigate to a patient, health facility or emergency scene;
Determine, notify and confirm the closest, available, most appropriate health assets (ambulance stations, hospitals, pharmacies, doctors) to an emergency, improving response time and chances of survival;
Efficiently deliver authentic drugs and other supplies to remote areas by road or by drone, and verify each delivery;
Efficiently collect location data for epidemiological purposes, disaster resilience, etc.
Out of over 800 applicants, we made it to the shortlist of 50 startups to pitch onstage, and made it to the Top 10 finals. We may not have been among the final 5 winners, but I left with the knowledge that a global panel of judges appreciated the necessity of our solution for emergency response in a timely and efficient manner.
Sadly once again, this time, just 3 months after my pitch in Marrakesh, on the 8th of September 2023, Morocco suffered a 6.8-magnitude quake, the country’s deadliest in more than six decades. Almost 3000 people lost their lives and over 5,600 were injured.
It pains me to know I work with a technology that can greatly help in disaster, but it has not yet (at the time of writing) been marketed to these disaster-prone countries. Yes, pitches like the Supernova Challenge are useful for bringing our technology to the awareness of tech enthusiasts, however, little to none of these turned out to be decision makers in disaster resilience.
The problem requires substantial financial resources (as usual) and the concerted effort of stakeholders like the Red Cross to test our solutions, work with policy makers and together educate the public on the use of emerging technologies in times of crises and disaster.
The future is yet optimistic. Following the Turkey symposium, I became a collaborator on a follow-on Frontiers project with 8 other co-principal investigators to examine New Technologies and Participatory Approaches for Disaster Resilience.
With funding to scale such projects and hopefully engage more stakeholders, we would have the opportunity to demonstrate technologies like SnooCODE for accurate data collection for disaster prediction and SnooCODERED for timely and efficient emergency response. "
Join us help strengthen disaster resilience in a sustainable way around the developing world and beyond.
–ZARA ABBEY, SnooCODE HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS