WASHINGTON—When destructive tornadoes ripped across the South in late April, the first people on the scene came armed only with cell phones. And though they didn’t have training, fire trucks or life-saving equipment, the community members were an integral part of disaster response—by tweeting, updating and blogging critical information about the devastation.
Emergency response organizations are proving that they aren’t as media savvy as the communities they serve. As the communities begin to replace mobile-based social media with traditional forms of emergency communication like land-line phone systems or traditional 9-1-1 calls, officials are beginning to find themselves lagging behind in communication trends, highlighting the need for a completely new emergency communication system.
“There’s never going to be a major event in this country again without public participation,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen told the Associated Press in April. “There’s a growing discontinuity between what the American public expects the government to do and what the government can do.”
Nearly 70 percent of respondents in a recent American Red Cross survey said they would turn to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to contact emergency responders for help during emergencies, and three out of four of them would expect a response within an hour.
“Those were some eye-opening expectations, and we know they don’t match reality,” Suzy DiFrancis of the American Red Cross said in a subcommittee hearing of the Senate on Homeland Security and Government affairs.
A separate survey of emergency response organizations echoed her concern, showing that 90 percent of first responder organizations don’t have adequate staffing to monitor social media requests. In fact, DiFrancis said when people tweeted for help from under the rubble after Haiti’s massive earthquake, the Red Cross wasn’t always able to find their tweets and respond in time to save them.
“It’s far more than just listening to people,” DiFrancis said. “It comes in a lot of places with different hash tags and symbols, and it’s hard to read.”
Some emergency agencies don’t even have access to the data, according to Heather Blanchard, co-founder of CrisisCommons, an organization focused on integrating new communication into disaster response efforts.
“We were shocked to find that some centers lacked high bandwidth Internet, technical skills or collaborative tools,” Blanchard said. “We were also dismayed to find that many agencies have stringent security policies blocking their workforce from using social media tools for operational purposes.”
But many emergency management officials welcome this seismic shift in communication, and are looking for ways to adapt. One of the leaders in the push for reform is FEMA director Craig Fugate, who has tweeted his way through the launch of several emergency websites, Twitter accounts and YouTube pages and other endeavors. He’s also pushing to bring cell phone chargers to disaster areas so that victims can charge their cellular devices, instead of bringing along the phones that have traditionally been a staple of communication during a crisis.
“In order to fulfill our mission, we must recognize that the public is an important participant in the emergency management community and that we must work together as one team,” Fugate said. “The notion of treating the public as a resource rather than a liability is at the heart of our emergency management framework.”
But the experts who addressed Congress said they didn’t believe government should step in to create rules for emergency social media communication just yet. Instead, they suggested government-funded grant programs for organizations or agencies who develop ways to aggregate and analyze social media data in real time during emergencies. They’re also asking for support and advice from the government as they navigate a new age in emergency communication.
“Lets not try to fit people into our system,” DiFrancis said. “We want to work with their system.”
