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演说者：Caitria and Morgan 演说题目：当灾难来临时，我们该如何拯救自己？ 灾难这个词听起来似乎离我们很遥远，但是它的发生也许只是突然的一瞬间。当灾难来临时，我们应该做些什么？接下来让我们跟着Caitria 和Morgan来了解灾难时一些组织给到的援助以及自己该采取的措施。 我们该如何拯救自己？ 来自英语演讲课堂 00:00 09:40 00:15 (Video) Newscaster: There's a large path of destruction here in town. ... pulling trees from the ground, shattering windows, taking the roofs off of homes ... 00:24 Caitria O'Neill: That was me in front of our house in Monson, Massachusetts last June. After an EF3 tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off, I decided to stay in Massachusetts, instead of pursuing the master's program I had moved my boxes home that afternoon for. 00:41 Morgan O'Neill: So, on June 1, we weren't disaster experts, but on June 3, we started faking it. This experience changed our lives, and now we're trying to change the experience. 00:51 CO: So, tornadoes don't happen in Massachusetts, and I was cleverly standing in the front yard when one came over the hill. After a lamppost flew by, my family and I sprinted into the basement. Trees were thrown against the house, the windows exploded. When we finally got out the back door, transformers were burning in the street. 01:07 MO: I was here in Boston. I'm a PhD student at MIT, and I happen to study atmospheric science. Actually, it gets weirder -- I was in the museum of science at the time the tornado hit, playing with the tornado display -- 01:21 so I missed her call. I get a call from Caitria, hear the news, and start tracking the radar online to call the family back when another supercell was forming in their area. I drove home late that night with batteries and ice. We live across the street from a historic church that had lost its very iconic steeple in the storm. It had become a community gathering place overnight. The town hall and the police department had also suffered direct hits, and so people wanting to help or needing information went to the church. 01:46 CO: We walked to the church because we heard they had hot meals, but when we arrived, we found problems. There were a couple large, sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church, but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet. As we watched, they became frustrated and left to go find somebody to help on their own. 02:03 MO: So we started organizing. Why? It had to be done. We found Pastor Bob and offered to give the response some infrastructure. And then, armed with just two laptops and one air card, we built a recovery machine. 02:19 CO: That was a tornado, and everyone's heading to the church to drop things off and volunteer. 02:24 MO: Everyone's donating clothing. We should inventory the donations piling up here. 02:28 CO: And we need a hotline. Can you make a Google Voice number? 02:31 MO: Sure. And we need to tell people what not to bring. I'll make a Facebook account. Can you print flyers? 02:36 CO: Yeah, but we don't even know what houses are accepting help. We need to canvas and send out volunteers. 02:41 MO: We need to tell people what not to bring. Hey, there's a news truck. I'll tell them. CO: You got my number off the news? We don't need more freezers! 02:48 (Together) MO: Insurance won't cover it? CO: Juice boxes coming in an hour? Together: Someone get me Post-its! 02:55 CO: And then the rest of the community figured out that we had answers. 02:59 MO: I can donate three water heaters, but someone needs to come pick them up. 03:03 CO: My car is in my living room! 03:04 MO: My boyscout troop would like to rebuild 12 mailboxes. 03:07 CO: My puppy is missing and insurance doesn't cover chimneys. 03:10 MO: My church group of 50 would like housing and meals for a week while we repair properties. 03:14 CO: You sent me to that place on Washington Street yesterday, and now I'm covered in poison ivy. 03:20 So this is what filled our days. We had to learn how to answer questions quickly and to solve problems in a minute or less; otherwise, something more urgent would come up, and it wouldn't get done. 03:30 MO: We didn't get our authority from the board of selectmen or the emergency management director or the United Way. We just started answering questions and making decisions because someone -- anyone -- had to. And why not me? I'm a campaign organizer. I'm good at Facebook. And there's two of me. 03:47 CO: The point is, if there's a flood or a fire or a hurricane, you, or somebody like you, are going to step up and start organizing things. The other point is that it is hard. 03:58 MO: Lying on the ground after another 17-hour day, Caitria and I would empty our pockets and try to place dozens of scraps of paper into context -- all bits of information that had to be remembered and matched in order to help someone. After another day and a shower at the shelter, we realized it shouldn't be this hard. 04:14 CO: In a country like ours where we breathe Wi-Fi, leveraging technology for a faster recovery should be a no-brainer. Systems like the ones that we were creating on the fly could exist ahead of time. And if some community member is in this organizing position in every area after every disaster, these tools should exist. 04:32 MO: So, we decided to build them: a recovery in a box, something that could be deployed after every disaster by any local organizer. 04:40 CO: I decided to stay in the country, give up the master's in Moscow and to work full-time to make this happen. In the course of the past year, we've become experts in the field of community-powered disaster recovery. And there are three main problems that we've observed with the way things work currently. 04:55 MO: The tools. 04:56 Large aid organizations are exceptional at bringing massive resources to bear after a disaster, but they often fulfill very specific missions, and then they leave. This leaves local residents to deal with the thousands of spontaneous volunteers, thousands of donations, and all with no training and no tools. So they use Post-its or Excel or Facebook. But none of these tools allow you to value high-priority information amidst all of the photos and well-wishes. 05:21 CO: The timing. Disaster relief is essentially a backwards political campaign. In a political campaign, you start with no interest and no capacity to turn that into action. You build both gradually, until a moment of peak mobilization at the time of the election. In a disaster, however, you start with all of the interest and none of the capacity. And you've only got about seven days to capture 50 percent of all of the Web searches that will ever be made to help your area. Then some sporting event happens, and you've got only the resources that you've collected thus far to meet the next five years of recovery needs. 05:53 This is the slide for Katrina. This is the curve for Joplin. And this is the curve for the Dallas tornadoes in April, where we deployed software. There's a gap here. Affected households have to wait for the insurance adjuster to visit before they can start accepting help on their properties. And you've only got about four days of interest in Dallas. 06:15 MO: Data. Data is inherently unsexy, but it can jump-start an area's recovery. FEMA and the state will pay 85 percent of the cost of a federally-declared disaster, leaving the town to pay the last 15 percent of the bill. Now that expense can be huge, but if the town can mobilize X amount of volunteers for Y hours, the dollar value of that labor used goes toward the town's contribution. But who knows that? Now try to imagine the sinking feeling you get when you've just sent out 2,000 volunteers and you can't prove it. 06:47 CO: These are three problems with a common solution. If we can get the right tools at the right time to the people who will inevitably step up and start putting their communities back together, we can create new standards in disaster recovery. 07:00 MO: We needed canvasing tools, donations databasing, needs reporting, remote volunteer access, all in an easy-to-use website. 07:07 CO: And we needed help. Alvin, our software engineer and co-founder, has built these tools. Chris and Bill have volunteered their time to use operations and partnerships. And we've been flying into disaster areas since this past January, setting up software, training residents and licensing the software to areas that are preparing for disasters. 07:26 MO: One of our first launches was after the Dallas tornadoes this past April. We flew into a town that had a static, outdated website and a frenetic Facebook feed, trying to structure the response, and we launched our platform. All of the interest came in the first four days, but by the time they lost the news cycle, that's when the needs came in, yet they had this massive resource of what people were able to give and they've been able to meet the needs of their residents. 07:49 CO: So it's working, but it could be better. Emergency preparedness is a big deal in disaster recovery because it makes towns safer and more resilient. Imagine if we could have these systems ready to go in a place before a disaster. So that's what we're working on. We're working on getting the software to places so people expect it, so people know how to use it and so it can be filled ahead of time with that micro-information that drives recovery. 08:12 MO: It's not rocket science. These tools are obvious and people want them. In our hometown, we trained a half-dozen residents to run these Web tools on their own, because Caitria and I live here, in Boston. They took to it immediately, and now they are forces of nature. There are over three volunteer groups working almost every day, and have been since June 1 of last year, to make sure these residents get what they need and get back in their homes. They have hotlines and spreadsheets and data. 08:36 CO: And that makes a difference. June 1 this year marked the one-year anniversary of the Monson tornado, and our community's never been more connected or more empowered. We've been able to see the same transformation in Texas and in Alabama. Because it doesn't take Harvard or MIT to fly in and fix problems after a disaster; it takes a local. No matter how good an aid organization is at what they do, they eventually have to go home. But if you give locals the tools, if you show them what they can do to recover, they become experts. 09:09 MO: All right. Let's go. 00:15 记者：城里遭到了严重破坏 ...大风吹倒树木,打碎窗户 掀起屋顶 00:23 Caitria O'Neill:那个就是我 在麻省的Monson,我们的房子前面, 一股EF3级龙卷风袭击了这里, 掀翻了我们的屋顶 我决定留在麻省 而不是去读硕士 那个下午我已把经箱子搬回了家 00:41 Morgan O'Neill:6月1号时我们还不是灾难专家 但从3号我们就假装是了 这段经历改变了我们的生活 现在我们要努力去改变它 00:50 CO:龙卷风一般不会袭击麻省 当时我正灵巧地站在前院 一个龙卷风从山丘上刮来 一个路灯杆在身边飞过 我和家人迅速冲进了地下室 树木呗吹向房子,砸碎玻璃 当我们终于从后门出去的时候 一些多变压器在街上燃烧 01:06 MO:我当时就在波士顿 我是一个MIT的博士生 我碰巧是学大气环境科学的 巧合还不止这些 龙卷风来袭的时候,我在科学博物馆 玩模拟龙卷风的仪器 所以我没接到她的电话 Caitria给我打来电话,告诉了我消息, 于是我开始在网上观察雷达图像 当又一个漏斗云形成的时候 叫家里人回去 之后我带着电池和冰块连夜开车回家 我家对面是一个老教堂 它标志性的尖顶被大风吹走了 一夜之间成了附近居民的避难所 市政厅和警察局也遭到破坏 因此需要帮助和消息的人们... ...去了教堂 01:46 CO：我们去了教堂,因为听说他们没饭吃 不过到了那儿却发现些问题 有几个汗津津的壮汉拿着电锯 站在教堂中间 但是没人知道让他们去哪里 因为还不知道破坏有多严重 我们看着他们很沮丧地离开了... ...去找一些他们可以帮助的人 02:03 MO：于是我们开始组织大家 因为总得有人去做.我们找到了Pastor Bob 他主动去帮助修复基础设施 之后带着两个笔记本电脑和一张AirCard (注:AirCard是一种无线网卡) 我们组建了一个重建机器 02:19 CO: 那是个龙卷风 每个人都去教堂去放下些物资,志愿帮助大家 02:24 MO: 每个人都在捐衣服 我们应该把这些捐来的东西储存起来 02:28 CO: 没错,我们需要一条热线.你能不能弄个谷歌电话的号码 02:30 MO: 没问题.我们还需要告诉人们不该带什么 我去创建一个Facebook帐户.你能把那些传单打印出来吗? 02:36 CO: 好.不过我们不知到现在哪些房子会接受帮助 我们需要做个调查,然后派出志愿者 02:41 MO: 我们需要告诉人们不要带什么 看,那儿有个新闻车.我去告诉他们 02:44 CO: 你是从新闻上看到我号码的? 我们的冷柜已经够用了 02:49 MO: 保险公司不赔偿这个? 你需要一队人去重新刷你的房顶? CO: 六箱果汁还有一小时就到? 合:谁帮我把便利贴拿来! 02:54 CO: 后来其余的邻居们发现 我们心里有数 02:58 MO: 我可以捐3个热水器 不过需要有人来把它们拿走 03:02 CO: 我的车在客厅里 03:03 MO: 我的童子军能做12个邮箱 03:06 CO: 有只小狗不见了,保险公司不担保烟囱 03:10 MO: 我50人的教堂小队能在大家重建家园时 提供一周的住所和食物 03:14 CO: 你昨天把我送到华盛顿街的那个地方 现在我浑身都是毒葛 这些充实了我们的日子 我们必须学会如和快速找到方法 然后在1分钟内解决问题 否则会出现更紧急的情况 于是问题永远解决不了 03:30 MO: 我们既没有得到行政委员会的授权 MO: 也没有被应急办主任或是Uited Way批准 （注:United Way是一个美国的慈善组织联盟) 我们只不过开始回答问题并且做出决定 因为必须有人这么做 为什么这个人不是我?我是选举组织者 我玩Facebook玩的很好 而且我有两个账号 03:46 CO: 重点是,只要发生洪水,火灾,或者飓风, 你,或者像你一样的人 都会站出来组织救灾 不过当中充满困难 03:57 MO: 又一次工作了17个小时之后躺在地上, Caitria和我掏空口袋 努力把掏出的纸片上的信息整理出来 任何值得记住和需要匹配的信息 为了帮助别人 又过了一天,在避难所洗了个澡 我们意识到事情不应该这么困难 04:13 CO: 在我们这样的国家 可以享受无线网络服务 利用科技去加速重建应该很简单 像我们在飞机上建立的那种系统 能提前做好准备 如果有社区居民, 无论在哪儿,每次灾难后都挺身而出 这些办法就会存在 04:32 MO: 因此我们决定去为他们-- 创建一个'重建箱' 它装着一套在灾难后可以被当地人 利用的东西 04:39 CO: 我决定留在自己的国家 而不去莫斯科读硕士 然后全力为实现这一目标努力 通过去年的经历 我们成为了社区支援灾害救助领域的专家 我们观察到三个主要问题 它们有关目前的工作方式 04:55 MO: 首先是工具,大型救助组织提供了 重要的灾后补给资源 但是通常在完成特定任务之后 就离开了 这使居民需要自己处理... ...涌入的志愿者和物资 他们没有经验和工具 所以他们才用即时贴,Excel或者Facebook 但这些会影响你从 图片和祝福中甄别重要信息 05:20 CO: 第二是时间的把握 灾难救助其实是政治选举的反过程 在一场政治选举中, 开始你没有兴趣和能力去实践 后来兴趣和能力逐渐累积 直到在选举当天达到顶点 在一场灾难当中,你则是从兴趣出发 而不是能力 并且你只有7天的时间去搜罗... ...可以利用的那50%的网络信息... ...去帮助你所在的地区 然后遇到一些事情需要冒险 可是你只能用手头有限的资源... ...去应对灾后5年的重建需要 屏幕上是卡特里娜飓风 这是桥普林(注:位于美国密苏里州) 这是四月份达拉斯的龙卷风 我们用软件进行了分析 这里有个缺口 受损家庭必须先等保险公司勘察之后 才能接受援助保护财产 而且在达拉斯,热情只持续了只有四天 06:15 MO: 看看数据 数据一向很枯燥 但能极大推动一个地区的重建 FEMA和所在州 (注:Federal Emergency Management Agency 美国联邦紧急事件管理局) 会支付联邦宣布的灾害事件85%的损失 其余15%需要城镇自行承担 这笔支出数额巨大 但如果可以发动X个志愿者服务Y个小时 所创造的美元价值... ...会直接计入城镇开支之中 但有多少人明白呢? 现在想像一下那会多么崩溃 如果你贡献了2000个志愿者却无法证明 06:46 CO: 这三个问题有一个共同的解决方案 那就是如果我们有恰当的时间和工具 给那些必须重建家园... ...重建社区的人们 我们就能建立救灾重建的新标准 06:59 MO: 我们需要宣传工具,捐赠物品清单 需要媒体报道,远程志愿者联络 它们被整合在一个易用网站中 07:07 CO: 我们也需要帮助 我们的软件工程师和合伙人Alvin设计了这些工具 Chris和Bill贡献了自己的时间... ...去协调企业和合作伙伴 从一月开始,我们便不停穿梭于各个灾区 设置软件,训练居民 并把软件授权给需要预防灾害的地区 07:26 MO: 四月达拉斯的龙卷风是我们最早的行动之一 我们飞到一个镇上,那里的网络不稳定 Facebook也用不了,很难协调工作 于是我们搭建了自己的平台 它的效益持续了四天 一旦灾害不再是新闻焦点, 我们便有其他需要 好在他们有大批人们提供的物资 并且这些可以满足人们的需要 07:47 CO: 所以这个系统可以运转,而且可以更好 做足准备对于灾后重建很重要 因为它可以让城镇更安全,更坚韧 假如我们在灾害发生之前 能够做足准备 这就我们的工作 我们努力把这套系统部署到位 让人们期待它,了解它的用法 在灾害发生前做好准备 用琐碎的信息支援重建 08:11 MO: 这不像研究火箭 人们切实需要这些工具 我们在家乡训练了6个居民 他们可以独立使用这些网络工具 因为Caitria和我住在波士顿 他们很快就用上了 现在已经成了本能 有三组志愿者几乎每天都在那里工作 从去年6月1号就开始了 为了让这些居民得到他们所需,重建家园 他们有热线,记录单,数据 08:36 CO: 效果十分明显 今年6月1日是Monson风灾的... 周年纪念 我们的社区第一次如此团结和强大 我们能够看到同样的改变 发生在德克萨斯和亚拉巴马 因为这用不着哈佛或者MIT... ...飞到灾区解决问题 它动员了当地的力量 不管一个救援组织多么出色 他们最终还是得回家 但是如果把工具交给当地居民 如果教给他们如何重建家园 他们就成了专家 09:08 (鼓掌)MO: 好吧.我们出发！ |
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