Fires in California - How Social Media is helping + Moblie Phones
by Rob Paterson
If you live where I do 3,000 miles away from the fires, maybe pictures of the fires and interviews with people who have lost their homes might be interesting. BUT what if you live where the fires are? Surely then I would want to know in real time EXACTLY what was going on.
KPBS - a public TV Station is providing this service using Google Maps, Twitter & Flickr. They are also broadcasting on air and on the web! They have all the bases covered. I have suggested to some PBS/NPR stations that they should create an Emergency Plan - they have pushed back saying that they don’t do “News”. Here is a joint license showing that covering emergency well is surely one of the key “Public” tasks of such a station - showing also how by using social media - they can do this really well by accessing their community
Here is the Google Map - all the key detail is there - what is going on and where and when (875,000 views and counting this morning)
Here is the Twitter feed - note that the feed is operating on a minute by minute basis
Here is the link to Flickr
They are using the Comments Section on a blog as a tool to allow people to make local reports - see how it works here
They have got the full suite all cleverly applied
Update - In this kind of emergency - Mobile Phones are now the main link - here is a great post by Debi Jones on how this is playing out:
The disastrous fires burning in San Diego have initiated a service used by the city and county government to inform and update residents. Mandatory evacuation orders have been communicated via reverse 911 on both landline phones and mobile phones. The messages are prerecorded and as I’ve said, three messages have been received on my phone. The first was an evacuation order. The next message was a notice that San Diego schools are closed until further notice along with the instruction to keep children inside and restrict their activity levels (smoke and ash is so thick in the air that keeping it out of your house is impossible during large fires). The third message was information on evacuation centers that were still open as several are already full.
Regulation in the US for Enhanced 911 or emergency service which incorporates location data has resulted in a number of emergency related services that are unique to the US market when compared to other geographical regions like Western Europe or Asia. The reverse 911 system isn’t specifically a mobile service, but that it does include mobile phones is impressive and to see this system work in the case of a disaster saving time and lives is an important development. To this point, 262,000 households have received reverse 911 calls.
It is likely in a very bad situation that cell phone networks will get jammed - what we are learning though is that SMS tends to get through - so Twitter as a feed may be the core of a good plan
Advisories have been announced on CNN and local San Diego TV stations asking people to limit their mobile phone use as the networks are saturated. This is a common problem during emergencies as we’ve seen over and over. The one component that continued to provide communication during the London bombings, post Katrina flooding in New Orleans and now in San Diego is text messaging. Twice today my mobile calls have been rejected with the network reporting, “all circuits are busy”. And yet, I’ve continued to be able to send out SMS.
