When Disaster Strikes: The Humanity of Technology
When disaster strikes people in a city, our humanity is tested. What we do and how quickly we do it matters.
By Josh Wolfe
Disasters seem to be occurring more frequently, whether they are natural – from historic hurricanes in the Caribbean to record-breaking wildfires in Northern California – or man-made – political and humanitarian crises forcing people to flee to safety. Either way, the result is millions of people living in unsafe, unhealthy conditions in tent cities the world over.
A month after Hurricane Maria, 80% of Puerto Rico is literally powerless; some of those people have been without electricity since Hurricane Irma struck them weeks before. It’s worth remembering that more Americans live in Puerto Rico than in 21 states (including Iowa, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi and Nevada). When you lose power, you lose communication. You are trapped by fear and uncertainty, unsure of who to turn to for help and how, whether to stay or evacuate, and even where to go. You are desperate for information and basic humanity as much as for food and water.
The people are a city’s living cells; the roads its circulatory system; the food ecosystem and waste disposal are its digestive system; the electrical grid its nervous system; and communication networks are its eyes and ears, rendering a victimized city deaf, blind and mute.
We speak of “revitalizing” cities — bringing them back to vibrant life — in situations where urban blight, job loss or epidemics have eroded economic stability and old infrastructure needs to be modernized. When natural disasters strike hard, even modern cities can be sent hurling, as if in a time machine, back to third-world status. Basic necessities we take for granted everyday suddenly seem to be far-out-of-reach modern luxuries.
Many founders and entrepreneurs aim to lead humanity into a better future, but when disaster strikes and humanity is sent back to the past, technology can also help pull it back to a better present. Restoring communications infrastructure, power and transportation can restore sight, sound and mobility – which in turn make it possible to deliver emergency aid such as food and healthcare.
Numerous startups are leading the charge in disaster recovery. One of them is a company called Kymeta. In recent weeks Kymeta’s founder and CEO, Nathan Kundtz, oversaw a daily flurry of communications between the Kymeta team, the government of Puerto Rico, Intelsat and Liberty Global – all volunteering their people and services – as they navigated obstacles small and large to restore communications via satellite.
Their goal: To provide essential internet connectivity and reliable communications to people who were hardest hit so they could contact loved ones, get critical information about recovery efforts and apply for aid from FEMA. How did they do it? Kymeta has the world’s only commercially-viable electronically-scanning satellite antennas. They teamed up with Intelsat to provide flat-satellite antennas, which were mounted on vehicles coordinated by John Malone’s Liberty Global. Before FEMA’s ability to get aid was limited by the speed of people with clipboards and paperwork traveling back to headquarters. They have helped 10,000 people in the first week. Now FEMA can go from town to town, able to instantly connect people in need on the ground and get applications processed and approved to have aid hurried at the speed of satellite.
Kymeta wasn’t built to serve disaster markets. The founders had a future-forward focus on a hard problem. They planned to usher in a world of abundant bandwidth shining down on Earth, particularly as more communication satellites launched into space, and more boats, trains, trucks, cars, planes and remote areas of earth demanded to be connected to high-speed internet.
It can sound sanctimonious in moments like this, but Lux has always had a bias to fund what we call “matter that matters” – the hard stuff, which if it works, can have a huge impact.
A number of the companies we’ve backed at Lux are finding a new kind of utility and purpose in this new world:
Kurion was focused on the hard problem of cleaning up nuclear waste in commercial and defense markets. They rushed to help Japan when natural disaster struck in the form of an earthquake and a tsunami, which led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Kurion delivered cutting-edge technology to help control and reduce the radioactive aftermath.
CyPhy was focused on industrial and military flying robots but teamed up with first responders and police departments to provide safety for the Boston Marathon and the Red Cross for disaster relief drones. For the marathon they flew multiple drones non-stop from sunrise until the last runners crossed the line, providing real-time video to Massachusetts Emegency Management Agency for crowd monitoring and spotting potential threats. For the American Red Cross they used a tether drones flying 400 feet above with 30x zoom, giving tens of miles of visibility to help spot homes that experienced water damage long before flood waters would recede.
AirMap recently supported recovery efforts with Hurricanes Irma and Harvey by providing airspace management and services. This allowed the people working in emergency operations centers to coordinate drone activities in the disaster areas.
Matterport has been working with homeowners and insurance adjusters to precisely document damage and speed up the rebuilding process by providing 3D scans of homes and properties.
Hangar’s automated drone image capture technology was used by the Alameda County Sheriff’s department after California’s wildfires to map the 2,500 homes that were burned and where people had gone missing, uploading 360 degree views for firefighters and rescue crews to coordinate efforts.
Saildrone’s ocean-going drones have successfully been used by a consortium claled ECOGIC to autonomously detect and track oil spills and track new hurricanes.
Planet’s satellites take detailed daily images of the earth and provide information to global governments and humanitarian efforts so they can quantify and understand the scope and nature of refugee crises and ecological disasters.
Other NASA technology has been used recently after Mexico’s earthquake in search-and-rescue efforts with a suitcase-sized device called FINDER that uses radar to detect human heartbeats trapped inside rubble.
Technology can play a role in rebuilding and restoring things to the present – but it critically depends on people and their individual, as well as collective, sense of humanity.
