Crisis Mapping: A Valuable New Tool in Responding to Public Health Disaster?

Background: The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, resulted in a humanitarian and public health disaster of biblical proportions, with hundreds of thousands of injuries and lives lost. At least one-million people lost their homes and the Haitian government sustained a total loss of its paper-based infrastructure. Multilateral and non-governmental organizations responded with a known crisis management system termed the Cluster Response. In addition, Ushahidi, an open-sourced crisis mapping global communication network, deployed its web- and Frontline SMS-based texting network to coordinate reports of need and response. Since then, crisis mapping has exploded in applications to both governance and natural disaster emergencies. However, almost no evaluation has been undertaken to determine the efficacy or potential of such technologies in stemming the impact of such public health calamities.

Purpose: To evaluate the successes and failures of the new innovation of crisis mapping for disaster response. Methods: We conducted 30 interviews with key stakeholders involved in the Cluster and crisis mapping responses in the Haiti disaster.

Results: Initial hostility between the two bodies prohibited maximizing available resources and information. However, by the second-wave disaster, which comprised the cholera epidemic, the cluster organizations had largely accepted the value of crisis mapping and adopted it as an in-house tool.

Conclusions: Despite the opportunities crisis mapping offers for disaster management, radio persisted as the most important means of communicating with individuals most at risk. The implications for managing large-scale public health disasters through such new technologies have gone unrealized and require further exploration.