A landslide hazard warning system

Abstract

Hazard warning is necessary for effective mitigation due to disaster. People moving into a hazard prone area need to be made aware of the level of threat. In this study, a system to warn against hazard is being proposed. It aims to be independent, fast and pervasive. It is designed to be a generalized system that could be deployed across any region. The system is modular in structure consisting of four functional units and gets activated once it is fed with threat level with geo-location. The existing cellular network is being utilized for disseminating hazard information as short messages. Currently the system is built for warning hazard due to landslides and classification accuracy was previously tested in this domain. Now the message permeability is shown to be virtually instantaneous with a maximum time lag recorded as 50 seconds, minimum of 10 seconds. On an average, the perceived threat message whether high, moderate or low threat, reaches a mobile user within 30 seconds. Such a handy system could be very useful in a densely populated country like India where existing governmental policies to reach effected people is time consuming leaving the people unaware of the impending hazard. The system is light on resources and expenditure and thus, offers a trade-off between accuracy and usability. The system can be accommodated with any kind of hazard simply by replacing the kernel domain knowledge.