UPDATED 13 MAY
Another powerful earthquake, registering 7.3 on the Richter Scale, struck Nepal yesterday. It was felt as far away as New Delhi. Our team is looking at ways to help.
Free calls to loved ones in Nepal
You can now call friends and loved ones in Nepal for free from most places around the world, using
Google Voice, the
Hangouts Dialer on an Android phone, your computer using
Hangouts or from Gmail if you’re using
Google Talk. We are working hard to ensure that spammers do not abuse this offer and stress Nepal's infrastructure, and will be monitoring closely, but wanted to make calls to those affected as easy as possible.
Already, people in Nepal with a data connection can use Hangouts or Gmail to call phones in the U.S. and Canada for free, while calls to India are 1 cent per minute. Voice or video calls between Google accounts are always free. Please note that telecom infrastructure has been impacted in the country, so lines may be busy or unavailable at times.
Person Finder available
Person Finder is fully operational to help those affected by this new quake. Records can be added or searched below or on the
Person Finder site. And can be searched vis SMS by texting “search <name>
” to 6040 in Nepal, +91.977.330.0000 in India or +1.650.800.3978 in the U.S.
We'll update here as we have more information to share. Our hearts go out to those affected in Nepal who were just beginning the long journey to recover and rebuild.
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UPDATED 28 APR
On Saturday night, Nepal experienced its worst earthquake in more than 80 years, registering 7.8 on the Richter Scale. Our team is doing a few things to try to aid the response.
Updated satellite imagery
We continue to update satellite imagery to a
Crisis Map to hopefully help those responding in their work to identify impacted areas, locations most in need of aid and evacuation routes. Here is a small collection of before and after imagery showing some of the extent of the continuing impact, from damaged buildings to tents being erected as shelter in open spaces ('before' on the left, 'after' on the right, all ‘after’ imagery is from Apr 27):
You can also look through the satellite imagery in the map below, on the Crisis Map directly or download the data in full for use with Google Earth (
KML files). Use the layers menu to select different sets of imagery and adjust the transparency to compare to earlier imagery:
Person Finder
We launched
Person Finder just after the quake hit in English, Nepali, Hindi and several other languages available in the drop-down menu in the top right of the page. Person Finder gives people a way to post and search for family or friends affected by the disaster. If you’re worried about someone, click on “I’m looking for someone” and type in their name. If you want to let people know you’re safe or have heard from someone in the area, then click on “I have information about someone” and put in their names and details.
We’ve also made the Search function of Person Finder available through SMS. In Nepal, India and the U.S., simply text “search <name>
” to 6040 in Nepal (toll free), +91.977.330.0000 in India or +1.650.800.3978 in the U.S.
The Person Finder tool can also be embedded on any website using the following HTML code:
<iframe src="http://google.org/personfinder/2015-nepal-earthquake/?ui=small" width=400 height=300 frameborder=0style="border: dashed 2px #77c"></iframe>
Call loved ones in Nepal for 1 cent per minute
To help people communicate with friends and loved ones in Nepal, we’re reducing the cost of calls through Google Voice into the country for the next week from 19 cents to 1 cent (that’s 0.01 USD, with similar cost in other supported currencies) per minute. We chose 1 cent, instead of making calls free, to prevent spammers from abusing our systems and possibly adding more load to the already stretched Nepalese telephone network.
If you don’t have a Google Voice number, you can make calls at this reduced rate using the
Hangouts Dialer on an Android phone,
through your computer using Hangouts or
from Gmail if you’re using Google Talk, from most places around the world.
Already, people in Nepal with a data connection can use Hangouts or Gmail to call phones in the U.S. and Canada for free, while calls to India are 1 cent per minute. Voice or video calls between Google accounts are always free. Please note that telecom infrastructure has been impacted in the country, so lines may be busy or unavailable at times.
Searching to help
The world’s response to the tragedy can be seen in this map of the world searching for “Nepal” and “help” in various languages in the earthquake’s aftermath.
This can be embedded on any website using the following HTML code:
<iframe width='100%' height='520' frameborder='0' src='https://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/6714a43a-eca5-11e4-9f3d-0e853d047bba/embed_map' allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>
Giving to the response
Google.org has committed $1 million to response efforts, and we are providing an additional $750,000 in employee gift-matching.
Sadly, we also lost one of our own to this tragedy, Dan Fredinburg, who was on his way to try to summit Everest. He was a long-time member of our Privacy team and an all around amazing person. Our thoughts are with the people of Nepal, and with Dan’s family and friends during this terrible time.
Posted by Nigel Snoad, Product Manager, Google Crisis Response
