2010 Haiti Earthquake Deployment

I. Description of Disaster

From Wikipedia: The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately 25 km (16 miles) west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded.[7] An estimated three million people were affected by the quake; the Haitian Government reported that an estimated 230,000 people had died, 300,000 had been injured and 1,000,000 made homeless. They also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged.

II. Sahana Deployed by

For the first time, the Sahana Software Foundation self-deployed - hosting a public instance of our Sahana Eden software. This was also the first time Sahana Eden was deployed for a disaster response. The site was hosted at http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org and the community managed access for registered users (those from charitable organizations, government agencies and educational institutions were given create/edit permissions to the site; while most of the data remained publicly available (read access) excluding sensitive information (such as personal contact information for agency staff).

III. How Sahana was used

Where and How it was used: The Sahana portal was stood up within a day of the January 12, 2010 earthquake. It remained actively used as a source of disaster information through the end of February, 2010, after which time the site was maintained as a historical archive for several months.
By whom was it used: The Sahana portal was publicly accessible; there were 239 registered users to the system and 8,627 unique human visitors accessed the site.
What version of Sahana was used: Sahana Eden
What modules were used:

IV. How Sahana Community Supported the Deployment

The Haiti response was a community voluntary effort. Many individuals deserve recognition for their tireless efforts to support our work. Apologies to anyone not mentioned below. The following list of contributors to Sahana's efforts is taken from a paper submitted to ISCRAM 2010 conference:

The core team was comprised of SSF Director and CEO Mark Prutsalis, SSF Director and CTO Chamindra de Silva, SSF Director Gavin Treadgold, SSF Director David Bitner, Sahana Eden PMC Chair Fran Boon, Sahana Eden PMC Member Dominic Konig, and Sahana Eden PMC Member Praneeth Bodduluri.

From the Sahana community: Shreekant Bohra, Trishan de Lanerolle, Michael Howden, Ajay Kumar, Tim McNamara, Greg Miernicki, Abhishek Mishra, Ralph Morelli, Glenn Pearson, Nicholas Preston, Reka Sandaruwan, Kethees Selladurai, Dilantha Silva, Nilushan Silva, Connie White, Dan Zubey and many others.

Members of other open source projects and communities also contributed greatly to Sahana’s work, including: Luke Beckman, Heather Blanchard, Kate Chapman, John Crowley, Noel Dickover, Brian Herbert, Josh Herman, Erik Hersman, Todd Huffman, Eduardo Jezierski, Jeff Johnson, Sophia B. Liu, Patrick Meier, Tim Schwartz, Andrew Turner, and Lin Wells. Finally, the authors would like to acknowledge the governmental and international organizations whose staff have supported the work and efforts of Sahana: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), US Agency for International Development (USAID), US Coast Guard, US Department of Defense, US Department of Health and Human Services, US Department of Homeland Security, US Department of State, US Southern Command, the World Food Programme (WFP), and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

V. Major Accomplishments/Outcomes

How Sahana helped host manage the disaster; results of the deployment
1-2 sentence narrative on how Sahana helped
Quantitative Information on the effectiveness of Sahana:

  • 162 Medical Facilities were geographically located and their status was reported in the Hospital Management System
  • 696 Organizations were registered
  • 9558 Messages from Haitians to responding agencies were logged from Project 4636 and Tweak the Tweet
  • 41 data layers from various sources were aggregated onto one map.

VI. Lessons Learned


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