Together with Taipei City Government in response to Typhoon
Typhoon Soudelor hit Taiwan in 2015, over 3000 cases of tree down were reported for Taipei city, but only half of them were resolved after 2 weeks.
The amount of work loads to clean up those wiped-out-tree are massive. Even the Taipei City Government worked 24/7, the progress seems slow still. GeoThings was thinking about, it should be resolved together with community, and need to have some mechanism to feedback to the authority.
Last month, Typhoon Nepartak hit and caused quite a lot damage to eastern part of Taiwan. Since geoBingAn has already supported some local governments as situation report platform, now we further collaborate with Taipei city government for EOC (Emergency Operating Center) case update and Parking Information Notification before/during/after typhoon in response to Nepartak.
For the predictable natural disaster, such as typhoon, both central and local government will setup EOC so can response to any emergency in time. During the typhoon affected period, citizen usually call the local government to report the situation in order to get it fixed. Such as tree down, power outage, building damage, and so on. The geoBingAn from GeoThings is not just allowing the citizen to report with geo-tagged photo, but also can make it to be the update/supportive information to reported cases. Via geoBingAn, now the citizen can report what happened near by (geoBingAn Report feature), can know what happened near by (geoBingAn Near By feature), can even feedback what’s fixed near by (simply reply the reports in geoBingAn).
With those valuable information that feedback from citizen, local government doesn’t need to deal with the issue that might be already fixed/handled by community, situation is more up-to-date for both citizen and government agency. The most important thing is, community can really be a part of the response process after disaster. This capacity should be built not just for Taipei, not only for Taiwan, but should be built for all other disaster prone areas.
GeoThings spent the whole night with EOC staff, we now know much better about the work flow of emergency report and its process. Thanks to Department of Information Technology of Taipei City Government for the APIs that connects geoBingAn and EOC system. Also thanks to the hard-working GeoThings team for the quick response to the API integration in a very short time!