Natural disaster, early warning and the role of mobile - Essay Example

e in Noah’s time which wiped out the whole world except Noah and his family; the January 24, 1556 earthquake in Shaanxi, China which snuffed the lives of 830,000 Chinese; the 1835 New York City conflagration which demolished 500 buildings; the March 18, 1925 tornadoes in Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota, USA which exterminated 689 lives; and the tidal waves cum floods that slaughtered some 900,000 lives along the Huang He River in China that fateful day in 1887 ( Hoffman 540-542), humanity absorbed all the losses with complete helplessness and came out of the trying experience traumatised but with a will to start life all over again.

Today’s disasters taught humanity to respond and prepare to that moment when nature on a mad rampage delivers once again its deathly whipping that normally results to a gnashing of teeth. Today governments and the private sector or various non-government organisations exert gargantuan efforts to resist these natural catastrophes. They have learned to formulate strategies to mitigate the destructive effects of these cataclysms. The first conceived step is the establishment of early warning systems wherein accurate, timely information about incoming disasters is gathered and relayed to specific agencies designed to With early warning systems, the menacing effects of these catastrophes can be diminished when communities are forewarned and given enough time to prepare especially to evacuate.

The accurate measurement of seismic waves as invented in 1935 by Charles Richter (McCarthy 433) using the seismograph invented as early as 132AD by Zhang Heng was a high landmark in the forewarning of an incoming devastating earthquake (Henshaw 185). A more important invention that allowed man to brace against the merciless onslaught of typhoons, cyclones or hurricanes was the TIROS-1, invented by NASA scientists in 1960 and which became the very first weather satellite that can detect hurricanes, typhoons or cyclones, which are basically