Last Easter Sunday morning about 7 bombs went off in Colombo, Negombo, and Batticaloa areas in Sri Lanka. The bomb threat was very high during that whole day. I wanted to warn my fellow local guides and map users to stay away from those places/areas and to be alarmed about the Situation.
They could promptly act to Postpone any meetups until it is safe.
Usual Map users not to go to danger zones or places.
However, I couldn’t find such an emergency feature or a way to do that. Google has marked bomb blast areas later but it was a long time after the incident.
It might be a Bomb blast, Flood, Fire or a Nuclear leak. if there isn’t such a method already to mark danger, could we consider adding some mechanism?
I suggest it should be possible to mark a place/area on the map as a dangerous place or a zone with a category of danger(bomb threat, Flood, Fire etc…) and a short description of the situation. It could help greatly to map users as well as local guides to avoid danger zones and stay safe.
May need some approval or verification mechanism in place to confirm the authenticity of the Danger request.
If a map user searches about the particular place or request directions to the place Maps would warn him about the dangerous situation posted by local guide/s. if there are current or upcoming Meetup at such location, then Mapas will automatically send warning notifications to the participants in the meetup.
In some way @ravindus I agree with you, and the fact that Google marked, even if later, a bomb blast area, means that a system is already in place, to do this. So my question is: what do we need for this alert to be faster? I am a bit worried about the possibility for everyone (not only local guides, a bomb is not something for local guides only) to raise an alarm because, as you said, “May need some approval or verification mechanism in place to confirm the authenticity”. In my opinion the alarm should be raised by the local authorities, as I already wrote one year ago. If I remember correctly, this kind of mechanism is already active, just they are not used to do it. I will make a deeper search about this.
Thank you for posting about this so important subject
Demonstrations, protest, earthquakes, and terrorists activities would also be helpful as travelers might not understand the local language or be listening to the news. Japan just launched a similar mobile warning system for tourists.
Many thanks for your feedback @ErmesT , I agree with you.
What I’m worried is a little delay can make Catastrophic results in this kind of emergencies. Usually, authorities have to go through lengthy procedures to make formal announcements and it takes time. What if we could give an informational message as a piece of unconfirmed news so that the user can be aware something might be going on and make his due diligence related to that message and get it confirmed until authorities formally mark it on Maps.
Thanks, @MarkEpicurean , that is valuable information. Maybe we could learn from what Japan has done already.
As @ErmesT has mentioned in his comment it’s important how fast these announcements are published. I think most of the time the bottleneck is waiting for a formal confirmation.
I tend to agree with @ErmesT the system to do this is already in place through the right channels. While I like the idea from a safety perspective, I also understand that the economic impact of marking a major city say New York, London or even little old Melbourne where I live as some disaster happening would actually be more significant than any terrorist action or other disaster. It is a challenging situation and would need to be considered carefully.
@PaulPavlinovich , thanks for the feedback. I understand the gravity of this. As you have mentioned there could be huge economic and social impacts from a false alarm. I totally agree with that. And there could be instance where some irresponsible people misuse these kind of features for fun or disruption purposes. Even in this dire situation in Sri Lanka, there were few people who placed dummy bomb like parcels in public places to scare other people. People called authorities and bomb disposal units were summoned only to find out that it is a empty box warped to look like a bomb with some wires sticking out. Very sad situation.
However I still think there should be some thing that we could do. At least to speedup the formal process.
If guides can mark a place or area as a danger zone and it is directly publish to authorities for there information and due diligence. At least it can be a reminder for authorities to update the map warning via formal process if they are already aware. If they are not aware then they could verify the claim and act upon it.
Hi @ravindus I think it would not be Maps that would be the slow element for a disaster it would be the local authorities reporting it. They’re first priority will be the safety of the people already in an area and their own teams. For major things they will then set up an exclusion area if they think it’s reasonable, probably updating Maps is pretty far down their priorities list!
Hi @ravindus thank you for the suggestion on this. Do you know there is a feature already exists regarding this? @ErmesT@PaulPavlinovich I saw this alert immediately after the explosions. but still, I’m wondering who is updating this. cant see any option to add a new explosion site and need to wait until some relevant agencies to be added. we can enable a button for the public so the agencies can attend quickly.
Thanks @ErmesT that reminds me of the “war” that broke out between Google and Emergency Victoria when Google started to republish EMV information - you’ll notice there is nothing on that Map in Victoria!
Thanks for the link @ErmesT . It is very helpful provides a lot of information I was looking for. Since there is this SOS system placed already there let’s see what useful feedback and suggestions we could provide to make this emergency SOS alerts more efficient and accurate.
