Hunt for S'pore runners in Boston
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One Singaporean took it upon himself to track down all 18 entrants from Singapore at the Boston Marathon and has confirmed that six are safe.
Yun Liu, 26, who was on his way home after having watching the race from the sidelines when the first explosion went off, decided that the best way he could help was to try and locate the runners and determine their safety status.
Liu, whose work in his graduate programme at Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology revolves around medical data, used the competitors’ race bib numbers and the marathon organisers’ live bib tracking system to locate where each runner had been at the time of the explosions.
With a spreadsheet indicating name, bib number, last known location and current status, he then refined the information to get a better idea of which runners are likely to have been near the explosion site at that time.
“For instance, runners who completed the race an hour ago are unlikely to be still around, while runners who have not reached the 40,000 mark are certainly not at risk,” Liu said.
Realising that most of the Singaporean runners were not based in the city, he then searched social-media. Through a combination of e-mails, social networks and word-of-mouth, Singaporean networks from within and around Boston are helping to fill in some of the blanks, most of them strangers drawn together by this concerted effort to account for all 18 runners. Liu says he is “cautiously optimistic that none of the Singaporean runners are casualties”.
