Chennai Floods and the damages it had caused to life and lifeless things are enormous. Hope the people rebuilt it with zeal to make it a better place, withstanding any natural and man-made disasters in the future.
This post tries to dream or fantasize, how much could be done to minimize the pain and suffering of the people who were badly affected, by using the upcoming and future technologies.
1. Electrical Power
The most fundamental element - as lots and lots of our equipment and devices, food and even water are dependent on electricity. So, we badly need a way to generate it with little manual power in case of emergency situations. A recent innovation unveiled by Manoj Bhargava that uses pedaling power to produce electricity is a good place to start with. A detailed article can be found here. Probably a leaner, efficient and compact machine for individual homes, if becomes available in future will be grabbed by many!
2. Water
People need clean and pure drinking water.In today's environment, the water is pumped up to the overhead tanks through electrically powered motors. So, electricity is required, and of course regular water supply is also required. With these two constraints in getting the drinking water, it's going to be tougher in these situations. Even if we manage to get, purification will be another problem, unless people use the traditional LPG stove and boil the water for 20+ minutes. Low-energy water purification systems that may come into play in future can be found here.
3. Communication and Home Delivery
With energy being available, communication would eventually be available. Proposals to use balloons, and drones by Google and Facebook respectively aim to use the Stratosphere for providing Internet Connectivity. Whether they will be able to come out of red-tape and be able to offer these services remains, but probably will be allowed to function under emergency situations. Also, Amazon's idea of using drones for delivery of items such as medicines will come in handy in these kind of natural calamity.
