Telecommunication: A blind spot in disaster resilience science, yet essential for disaster mitigation and recovery

During major natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans (2005), the Nepal earthquake (2015) and Hurricane Irma on St. Maarten (2017), the failure of all telecommunication created a disaster within a disaster, causing chaos and seriously hampering mitigation measures during and directly after the event. Despite these and other examples, most of the models and impact chains drawn by scientist to investigate disaster events ignore the role of telecommunication failure that aggravates the situation in the field. Also, scientific tools to predict risks and support disaster management are often provided via internet links, ignoring the likelihood of them being inaccessible when they are needed most, due to a telecom blackout. It is therefore essential to draw more attention of researcher to the role of telecommunications in disaster impact chains, and to interact with telecommunication experts and emergency organizations in the field to better prepare for telecommunication failure during and after disasters.