For the past few weeks, Chennai city has been flooding with torrential rains that has created massive devastation in the capital city of Tamil Nadu. People have been struggling a lot with these heavy rains as it has severely damaged the roads, electricity lines and infrastructure of the city. It has witnessed that this is the Chennai’s worst rain in 100 years that batters the city. To help people cope with the depredation created by the incessant rains in the city, tech giants like Facebook and Google have launched resources to help with the relief efforts in Chennai.

The two giant tech firms mobilised their crisis response modules to Chennai floods, as several parts of the city continue to remain water logged following with rescue operations. Facebook, the giant social networking site has activated the ‘Safety Check tool’ to let family and friends know you are safe. This tool allows users to mark themselves as safe as an indication to notify family, friends and loved ones.

Facebook Activates ‘Safety Check’ Tool

Facebook has introduced this Safety Check tool in the month of October last year and first activated during the Nepal earthquakes which occurred in April. This feature is very much useful in a horrible situation when most other conventional communication lines like telephone networks are down across the affected areas at this time. Through this feature, the people in affected areas can notify their connected friends and family so that they will be aware of their condition during such natural and man-made calamities.

Once users activate the Safety Check tool, it will determine their location using the city they have listed in their profile. The tool also determines the last location they’ve shared or the city where they are using the Internet. If suppose, they are in an area affected by a natural calamity, Safety Check tool will send them a notification inquiring if they’re safe. If they say YES, their friends on Facebook will be notified that they are marked safe. But, there’s no option to say No. Users can also mark their friends as safe, but the friends who are affected by the disaster have to approve it.

Also Read: 21 Moments When #ChennaiFloods Brought Out The Best In Humanity 

In the past, Facebook had been criticised for being discriminating in activating Safety Check, with abuse being exposed after it surprisingly activated the feature following the Paris terrorist attacks last month. Facebook activates the Safety Check feature, which allows users to mark themselves as safe, after natural disasters, but not bombings or attacks. The social media noticed the criticism, and activated the feature for the recent Nigeria blasts as well.

Google Published A Crisis Response Page

Google, the search engine giant has announced a crisis response page with resources such as links to emergency helpline numbers, aggregating data on relief centres, and crowdsourced maps that mark out water logged roads and streets with slow traffic. It is a good initiative by the company so that one could get help from emergency sources and people who are affected by the devastating floods will be aware of relief centres. Also, people who are in a safe place will become conscious about the roads which got water logged.

Arun Ganesh, a data mapping specialist at Mapbox published crowdsourced data on streets reported as flooded by Chennai residents. The map is currently reporting 5,541 inundated roads at the time of writing. Tech companies in Chennai like IBM, Cognizant, Infosys have been forced to relocate key personnel and functions to neighbouring Bengaluru and other cities to avoid disruption to the business.