The official estimates of casualties from the Federal Relief Commission, as of 18 November, are 73,320 dead and 69,392 seriously injured following the South Asia earthquake on October 8. Many are displaced and homeless and the need for relief work and humanitarian assistance is still high.

Jan Herremo, Ericsson Response Volunteer, has been deployed one month to support the relief operation, together with another Volunteer, Brent Carbno from Ericsson Canada. The UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) requested their support, and during the deployment they have been hosted in the Swedish Rescue Services Agency's camp in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, which is shared by approximately 90 UN staff members living and working there.

Due to the wide spread and remote, inaccessible locations, the major concern on location is to reach out with the help efforts to those in need. Carbno and Herremo's task has been to work with a Wireless LAN (WLAN) solution specially designed for emergency situations, developed by Ericsson Response, which improves the information sharing efficiency.
 
All users among relief personnel have been connected to an intranet that is maintained and updated, and where information transfer both within the relief organizations' own networks and amongst each other take place. The camp is then connected via a VSAT connection to UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in New York, where a connection to Internet is provided. The benefits with this system are that all relief workers have access to a common network and can share the same, local information.
 
The Ericsson Response Volunteers have also provided general IT support to the present UN organizations.

Last week Carbno and Herremo handed over the wireless communication network to their successor Volunteers; Tommi Sarhamo and Andreas Trabes from Ericsson Sweden and Germany respectively. Sarhamo and Trabes will continue the work with provision of relief operation and camp organizational information to the users hosted at the UN camp in Muzaffarabad. The scope is to further increase the communication efficiency at the disaster location with means of Information and Communications technology.