Telecommunications for Disaster Relief (TDR) is a proposal by the

International Telecommunication Union The International Telecommunication Union (ITU)In the other common languages of the ITU: * * is a list of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information ...

to establish worldwide standards of interoperability and availability of emergency communications. The notion of establishing such standards was spurred in part by the

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami On 26 December 2004, at 07:58:53 local time ( UTC+7), a major earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2–9.3 struck with an epicentre off the west coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The undersea megathrust earthquake, known in the sci ...

which devastated

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. The ITU assigned

telephone country code A telephone country code is a country-specific telephone number prefix for international direct dialing (IDD), a system for reaching telephone service subscribers in foreign areas via international telecommunication networks. Country codes are de ...

is +888 for TDR, administered by the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is a United Nations (UN) body established in December 1991 by the General Assembly to strengthen the international response to complex emergencies and natural disaster ...

. Numbers were assigned for the duration of a particular relief activity only, and could be reused for a future event. However, country code +888 was withdrawn from service and is now officially marked as “returned to spare.”

References

External links

ITU-T Workshop on Telecommunications for Disaster Relief, 2003
* ttp://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/CategoryView,category,Telecommunications%20for%20Disaster%20Relief%20(TDR).aspx ITU-T Newslog Telecommunications for Disaster Relief (TDR) Disaster preparedness Emergency communication {{disaster-stub