This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way.
The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley.
My guests were Jim Moffitt, a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, a realtime disaster mapping platform in Indonesia; and flood-warning analyst Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the Columbia Climate School. Among many efforts, he led a four-year international project called Towards A Global Flood & Flash Flood Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observatory.
We all agreed that one path to safer living in hazardous areas - something humans will continue doing given our habit of living in places that are “impossible and inevitable” - is simply better awareness of the hazard landscape under your feet.
Here’s Mahtani’s way of making the point:
And this awareness doesn’t come just by abandoning your devices and looking up. They can help and you can use your devices to help others.
We explored Peta Bencana’s success in using community-generated data, most from Twitter, to map unfolding floods and other natural hazards in the sprawling megacity Jakarta. When free access to that data was shut down with almost no warning thanks to Elon Musk, it dangerously jolted the system, Mahtani said:
“We had written agreements in place. And the way we found out that the service was being cut was not through any communication from their side…. It was through I was just checking our Twitter account because we were experiencing extremely heavy rainfall.
And I happened to see there was a tweet from the Twitter developer account saying that in seven days time, we're going to turn off the service.
I immediately recalled my post from that period: Why a Twitter Implosion Could be a Disaster in Disasters.
Here’s more on that moment:
Mahtani said their app is now using data from Whatsapp and and other social media. (I need to do a webcast on the many uses of Whatsapp, which those of us in the U.S. still see mainly as a way to make an international call!)
We looked at other issues. Just as is the case with Trump’s budget and staff demolitions at FEMA and NOAA, Indonesia is dealing with flooding in a time of budget cuts, as Global Press just reported.
And during our discussion I asked Mahtani whether the Trump demolition of USAID has had an impact. It’s similar to the abrupt Twitter data cutoff, she said. Her organization had been receiving USAID funding since 2017
How could you take funding that you've already committed to, that's already signed off on? We knew that we should expect changes in the future, but we had no idea that they could take back funding that was committed.
So that was also a moment where the ground really shook under our feet, and we're still trying to figure out and navigate our way through that.
Here’s the curtain raiser for the show, which has more links and background:
Postscript
Former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who was a guest on a couple of Sustain What episodes, wrote a vital opinion piece for Newsweek with this core line:
Today, we mourn the lives lost in Kerrville, Texas. But tomorrow, it could be any community—your community or mine. The threats we face are increasing, not diminishing. We can't afford to strip away the resources or experience needed to respond.
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