Wampum

For the past week I've been to busy to post, even the note that yesterday's SCOTUS ruling on campaign finance contained the Court's first mention of the word "blog" was a noted-but-not-posted kind of thing.

On the 15th, while I was still in Geneva I sent the following to the NANOG list:

After the Katrina landfall a diverse group of wireless people started organizing a relief effort, culminating in work around Waveland. There was also a group from the NPGS in Monterey, who worked on the Boxing Day Tsunami aftermath.

Does anyone have a similar contact set?

At about the same time, Kim Davis who works for the IANA wrote an update on ICANN's blog. Since then it has been a blur of hard work. For no particular reason I became a skype contact of the last remaining engineer at the NAP on Boutilliers Hill, east of Port au Prince, and spent the weekend of the 15th and 16th working contacts in the industry and the USG (State and Southern Command) to get diesel to the NAP to keep the generators running. On the 17th Reynold Guerrier had managed to scrounge up 56 gallons of diesel, moving the NAP's dry tank fail point some 8 hours, into the morning of the 18th, with battery fail point some 8 hours later. Noon Eastern on the 18th I deplaned at Newark and sat down at a hotspot to start work. The chain of consequences letters then reached into the Whitehouse, the DoJ, State, and Southern Command, which released 5 jerrycans of 54 gallons each and the Dominican Republic embassy release another 2 jerrycans to Reynold late in the day of the 18th, which made the Boutillier facility fuel-secure through Friday.

The Boutillier facility is where Haiti's Internet Service Providers (approximately 5) maintain their network infrastructure, datacenters, an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), which allows Internet users to connect within the country, and microwave links to the Dominican Republic. The network facilities are housed in two buildings on the crest of a ridge on the Haiti/D.R. border. Here are some photos of the hill and antenna farm and random snapshots.

Meanwhile Mary Beth had been pursuing information about an orphanage where two four-year old girls, twins, were waiting for final approval of their paperwork for adoption by the professor who taught her ConLaw class during the Fall term. Susie Madrak wrote a summary on the 18th that captures the complexity -- How Bloggers Helped Save The Orphans – And The Haiti Internet and again on the 20th -- Still Trying To Save The Haitian Internet -- progressive and feminist bloggers to Congressional staffers. Not in Susie's post of the 20th is the rest of the trajectory -- members (Chellie Pingree, Earl Blumenaur, Pat Murray, ... ) to the State Department and Homeland Security to the Speaker's Office.

On the 19th Reynold spent the morning at the airport with ministers and posted the following to NANOG:

We would like to provide to the haitian government a UC systems with several branches:

• President office -- 10 Endpoints
  
• PM office -- 10 endpoints
  
• 12 mayor city hall offices -- 3 for each -- 36 endpoints
  
• Ministries -- (9 differents locations 3 for each) -- 27
  
• Communications Center -- 20
  
• emergency Clusters -- 14

Total -- 117 endpoints

and started work getting a T3 run from the hill down to the airport where the Haitian government was now located.

That afternoon I replied to someone from Google [ask if they want their names] who responded to my note(s) to NANOG

... one of the things we don't have is current imagery. Everyone uses Google Maps, but the images are pre-event. Reynold responded to me a couple of days ago when I asked the address where his wife and small children are (their house collapsed), see below:
[1/17/10 5:15:10 PM] reygji: wshe lost it when she tried to escape the house
[1/17/10 5:16:52 PM] reygji: there is practically no address system in Haiti
[1/17/10 5:16:58 PM] Eric Brunner-Williams: ok
[1/17/10 5:17:01 PM] reygji: in Port-au-Prince now
[1/17/10 5:17:12 PM] reygji: no street
[1/17/10 5:17:24 PM] reygji: it's practically rubble
[1/17/10 5:17:44 PM] reygji: my only point of contact is the phone number and my email
At some point the base imagery needs to be replaced. I'm not talking about the Google car (it would have trouble finding the streets), but Google doing something Google is good at -- getting images tied to space and making a incrementally completing mosaic available. ...

Within minutes I'd this reply

Ok, I think we can check one thing off your list... :-)

Downloadable KML overlay for Google earth with updates.

Post-Earthquake imagery.
http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/#imagery

All I did was have a blank mind (one of my qualities) while walking two blocks to pick up my 1st grader wondering "what could Google do?" I skyped this to Reynold who started to pull the images (large data sets) so that the best current imagery could be local to the Haitian governmental network segment (the NAP and IX servers. It was that quick. The next day I wrote a friend at Google, copying the Geo-Data people who'd contacted me from NANOG:

this kind of stuff makes me proud to even know you, let alone use your product.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-imagery-of-port-au-prince.html

Somehow file transfer made me ask if Reynold needed an account on a machine outside of Haiti, so I set that up on the machine next to the machine that hosts this blog and he pushed family pictures so that I could get them to State.

The second refueling took place yesterday. Another set of jerrycans. The NAP is fuel secure through Monday. But Reynold's wife Dominique, and their children Nikki and Aurelia, ages 3 and 1, remain in the Delmas region of Port au Prince.

Now back to work.