A year has passed since the East Japan Earthquake triggered the tsunami that hit the Pacific coast at Tohoku 11 March 2011, causing the devastating Fukushima crisis, and affecting hundreds of thousands of residents. Ongoing recovery reconstruction efforts have helped revive spirits.
The Microsoft Disaster Response team, in collaboration with Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), was fast to respond on the day and helped pave the way to re-establish lines of contact for over 150,000 victims of the quake and relief personnel working to help deliver support to both survivors and volunteers.
“We were shocked and saddened
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A year has passed since the East Japan Earthquake triggered the tsunami that hit the Pacific coast at Tohoku 11 March 2011, causing the devastating Fukushima crisis, and affecting hundreds of thousands of residents. Ongoing recovery reconstruction efforts have helped revive spirits.
The Microsoft Disaster Response team, in collaboration with Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), was fast to respond on the day and helped pave the way to re-establish lines of contact for over 150,000 victims of the quake and relief personnel working to help deliver support to both survivors and volunteers.
“We were shocked and saddened by the images and reports coming from Japan. It was a human tragedy on a massive scale,” says Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director of Microsoft’s Global Community Affairs.
The Digital Caravan
Microsoft’s efforts focused on providing logistical help to volunteer centres and evacuation centres by initiating the “Information and Communications Technology Caravan”, a mandate to ensure that 3,000 PCs would arrive ready-made and ready-to-use in Tohoku.
“We made sure that all the applications were installed in Tokyo, so that when the PCs reached the disaster sites, people could use them within three minutes,” reveals Lena Ryuji, External and Community Affairs Manager, Microsoft Japan, who spearheaded government-NGO relations during the disaster and recovery programme.
The ICT Caravan programme helped deliver the necessary tools to make the afflicted communities connect not only with the outside world, but with important help and aid networks who were in a position to provide real support. The project eventually evolved into a larger movement involving industry collaboration sponsored by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industry Association (JEITA).
Immediately after the tsunami hit and communication networks went down, Shugo Ikemoto from the NPO Support Centre for Programme Development led his organisation to install satellite connectivity and ensured Internet connectivity was available for people to be updated with information, to share their status and to connect with their families.
While food, water and shelter are the three essentials in crisis situations, Ikemoto, acknowledging that ICT played a vital role during the disaster, considers it the fourth essential in relief situations. “What we take for granted, like the Internet, is so normal now, but what would happen if we didn’t have it - it makes you truly appreciate being connected.”
Tohoku is a unique area as it has a rapidly ageing population where the number of people that are ICT-savvy is very limited. In anticipation of the potential problems this might create, Ikemoto’s team sent student volunteers together with the PCs to help the evacuees connect to the Internet.
Ryuji also shares her appreciation of cloud computing technology that proved to be efficient in facilitating volunteer work in terms of sharing and visualisation of information to assist decision-making. For evacuees, information and communication via the cloud was central in helping them find their families, reach necessary support and stay connected when critical connections and physical servers were down and the healthcare, banking and transport systems were broken.
Office 365 with SharePoint gave volunteers in remote locations an easy and reliable way to deposit, share and communicate information. Microsoft Lync allowed volunteers to liaise in real-time through instant messaging, voice communications and audio and video conferencing, making the extent of support more immediate.
Ryuji recounts scenes of people in front of evacuation centres frantically waving pieces of paper in their hands, searching for their families: “It would have been nice if everything had already been up on the cloud and the local government had a system of overcoming strict privacy-protection of all information in advance. This way, people would not have to go through the initial stage of stress in trying to find their families and information,” she says. “No single party, no local government, no single NGO or company can do everything on its own; all sectors have to work in collaboration.”
The Role of Technology at Refugee Centres
In Japan, within three weeks of the tsunami, Microsoft distributed approximately one thousand PCs loaded with Office 365, Lync and SharePoint to disaster support centres and refugee centres.
An NGO source says that PCs have immensely improved the operation at the centres. “During the initial stages, everything was on paper and information would easily get lost or confused. Now supporters and volunteers from across Japan can instantly remain up-to-date with relief efforts as soon as they step into a disaster support centre.”
“The sharing of information also allows effective allocation of resources and on time delivery of relief goods. PCs were saving lives.”
PCs at refugee centres provided real-time information updates via e-mails and blogs while supporting the information access needs of the refugees on critical items such as temporary housing, insurance and employment, which were changing on weekly and sometimes even on a daily basis.
Microsoft Japan Recovery Projects
Microsoft Japan delivers a lot of public-private partnership programmes to rebuild the affected areas. Many businesses are faced with a lack of new premises for restarting operations due to the loss of offices and factories in the disaster, having to replace office fittings and other business equipment from scratch, and the double burden of servicing existing debt from before the disaster and preparing reserve assets.
In cooperation with Ricoh Japan, Microsoft distributed “Office Recovery Support Packs” to support the resumption of operations of the affected companies. The Packs consisted of a Ricoh colour printer/copier, office furniture, notebook PC, and Internet connection and maintenance service together with Office 365 and Office Professional Plus. The licenses of Office 365 and Office were provided free of charge.
“PC Donation Projects” for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in cooperation with the Academic Exchange for Information Environment and Strategy, Tohoku Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, helped restore PCs owned by universities and distributed them free of charge to Chamber of Commerce and Industry member companies in the affected areas after they had been refurbished.
To help prevent a drain of young people from the damaged regions to large urban areas, the employment assistance programme “Tohoku Up Project” supported the expansion of employment opportunities for those affected in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima by teaching ICT skills. Microsoft also collaborated with Toyota to provide information on usable roads.
Mr Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International, tells of how Microsoft provided Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science & Technology (MEXT) information on radioactivity levels at all sites. “We were able to build this system within just two days, establishing a mechanism that could release the information in just one hour after announcements by MEXT.”
“We expect that this experience of Japan would be a good example for the resolution of future global crises,” comments Courtois.