This article sheds light on communication needs of evacuees in shelters during a post-disaster period and advocates that it is essential to develop a completely new communication service for those in shelters to maintain communication channels with those outside shelters as well as with those in other shelters. We then present assumptions and requirements in developing such service and show a service and system concept, termed Shelter Communication System. SCS is composed of a computer (termed Shelter Server) connected to the Internet and a set of personal computers (termed shelter PCs), one in each shelter, also connected to the Internet via an appropriate Internet access connection such as High Speed Packet Access. Shelter Server and Shelter PCs cooperatively provide a message communication service for those in shelters and those outside shelters. A prototype of SCS is presented to demonstrate feasibility of SCS. A simple evaluation shows that SCS potentially provides a message communication service for enormous number of evacuees in shelters in the case of large-scale disasters and surpasses other message communication services such as cellular phone mail and facsimile.
