On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. The ICT4Peace Foundation presents the following resources as those that contain, or in turn point to, resources including datasets, emergency numbers, helplines and updates, vital to aid efforts.
Begun as a group email and migrated to this wiki on 13 January 2010, this is a curated list compiled and maintained by Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation. A podcast featuring Sanjana's views on the use of technology in aid efforts in Haiti by UN OCHA's IRIN news service can be downloaded as a MP3 here.
From theNew York Times, 23 January 2010: The United Nations says Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says 132 people were pulled from the rubble alive by international search and rescue teams.
Information from the ground / Haiti
Master Contact List
UN OCHA published a master contact list on 23 January 2010 for Haiti. It is available for download from the OCHA OneResponse website here. For greater efficiency and effectiveness, the Foundation migrated the information contained in the original Excel spreadsheet online,
The UN's Dag Hammarskjöld Library has developed a new page with links to information on Haiti. For many years, the UN system has produced reports, statistics and other resources about Haiti. This page provides access to many of these resources in English and French. This page will remain online until 30th April 2010.
Twitter feeds with vital links to information on Haiti
Hope for Haiti now: Resources Twitter itself has researched to help learn about what’s happening in and around Haiti as well as simple and effective methods to donate directly to the cause.
A collection of videos on YouTube curated by Citizen Tube. The following video from British broadcaster Sky covers the telecoms / tech dimension to the tragedy, noting ironically that the world outside Haiti may know more about the earthquake than many Haitians in the country.
The devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January 2010, taking the lives of thousands of Haitians and over a hundred of our United Nations friends and colleagues, was the biggest single loss of life in the history of UN peacekeeping. Read the tributes to 101 peacekeepers and UN staff here.
Haiti Earthquake - Please keep frequencies clear (Radio amateurs are requested to keep 7.045MHz and 3.720MHz clear for any emergency traffic resulting from the Earthquake which struck Haiti on 12th January 2010 in case any Haitian hams manage to get on the air, and in case of other related events in surrounding areas, including aftershocks.)
Connected to Ham radio is the The Btown Monitoring Post, which at the time of writing has a number of posts up on Haiti with what seems to be useful information for those interesting in and using this communications method. Information here is unverified.
Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Emergency Information Service (EIS): The service allows survivors of Haiti's earthquake to receive critical information by text message directly to their phones, free of charge.
For vital contact details and more information on the Haiti deployment of EIS, click here.
Haiti Situation Tracking Formby Google (available in French and English. This is now replaced by entry / initiative below from Google.)
Person Finder by Google (updated with over 3,000 names at the time of writing)
Haiti Earthquake Support Center by The Extraordinaries uses crowdsourcing to tag, filter and match photos of victims and the aftermath of the earthquake.
Missing Persons Registry by The Globe and Mail, based in Canada. (It is unclear as to how information in this site integrates with information on the Google's Person Finder above)
With features and backend technology respectively updated and upgraded throughout January 2010, some very interesting and useful tools developed by University of California, Irvine for tracking missing persons and family members include:
Communicating with Disaster Affected Populations - Described as a blog that provides a place to share information about any efforts to provide communication assistance to the people of Haiti after the devastating January 12 earthquake. Some useful sitreps in here on emergency telecoms.
Haiti Earthquake Data Portal: In response to the earthquake which struck Haiti on Jan 12th 2010, the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis launched this web portal to provide GIS datasets for relief and reconstruction efforts.
A large collection of maps (as KMLs and shapefiles) related to earthquake on GeoCommons.com (some of these layers have been used in the Sahana Haiti deployment)
European Commission Joint Research Centre - Preliminary findings of a rapid damage assessment carried out by the JRC based on the analysis of very high resolution satellite imagery acquired before and after the disaster. (contains links to high-res satellite imagery as PDFs and press pack of before / after images)
US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Haiti Earthquake Crisis Relief - Public Site (some products on Haiti on this site only work in Internet Explorer. Lots of links on right hand side of page to useful geospatial and other information sources)
Mapping data / Imagery / GIS (very high resolution downloads)
Courtesy Lars Bromley at CrisisMappers Google Groups comes these links to extremely high resolution satellite imagery. Lars notes that WV-2 is the best quality and in color, WV-1 is good quality and black/white, and QB is slightly lower quality and in color. No usage restrictions.
Haiti Earthquake – Satellite Imagery downloads via Google (some of these files are over one gigabyte, so unfit for low bandwidth / high latency connections):
Who, What, Where directory by UN OCHA (it looks like this is pre-earthquake information, but maybe useful nevertheless)
Health and medical care
HaitiVOICES is a voluntary project administered by public health practitioners, physicians and humanitarian responders to facilitate the collection and dissemination of information pertinent to humanitarian response and logistics in Haiti from January 18th onwards.
The ICT4Peace Foundation is, unless specifically noted, not in any way associated with or part of the initiatives mentioned below. We cannot therefore vouch for their work, but have pointed to reliable sources such as Google who have first flagged the initiatives.
A Helping Hand for Haiti, by former US Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, published in The New York Times
Indie+Relief: On Wednesday, January 20, a group of over 140 Mac and iPhone developers will donate 100 percent of their software sales from the day to a charity of their choice through Indie+Relief. See write up of the initiative on Ars Technicahere.
