Disaster Response Now and Then

 Disaster Response Now and Then

Recently I read an opinion piece in the newspaper and annotated it extensively. I am offering it below in case you have not read it.

While I appreciated the information content in it, I definitely did not agree with the tone of a part of one sentence: “Digital dashboard, predictive analysis, drone surveillance, and GIS tools replaced traditional paperwork and panic-driven coordination,” talking about things available today and those that could not have been available 30 years ago, and “[T]raditional paperwork and panic-driven coordination” were the only ways to get the job done then. 

The above asynchronous sentence of the writer disrespects−yes that is precisely the meaning I ascribe to the phrase, “...replaced traditional paperwork and panic-driven coordination.” The writer, had he been old enough, say, 70 years plus, (I am assuming things I have no right to, but which carry much weight in this write-up), would have remembered how people survived disasters doing only “traditional paperwork” and could coordinate with one another only in a “panic-driven” mode.  

It is OK to highlight how things have improved but is NOT OK to put down how things were done in the past, in the absence of technologies available today. I wrote code in FORTRAN in the 1970s and ‘80s, and now even coders do not know what kind of an animal it was (as extinct as a dinosaur).

Raghuram Ekambaram