Tag Archives: emergency

Social Networks for Public Safety Alerts

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He says using social media to distribute crime and other such alerts will be the committee’s main goal. Once the alerts go live, residents will be able to sign up for, Twitter alerts, Facebook messaging or even text messaging and e-mail,” Burch said.

His group is getting input from officials at the sheriff’s office who said the committee will be groundbreaking in keeping residents alerted to crime.

“Especially if we have suspects, suspect vehicles, we can get that information out to the people, what to look for,” said Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Chief Paul Hunt.

But the social media alerts won’t just be useful for crime Hunt said. “In like a flooding situation, which we have had that out in that area,” he said.

via Town to use social media to communicate public safety alerts – News14.com.

Twitter Helping Respond to Gulf Oil Leak

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RT @Twitter: Tweet with #BPspillmap to report an incident to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade or check out reports so far on this map: http://bit.ly/aeQb0Y

Twitter announced yesterday on it’s official Twitter account the integration of Twitter and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.  The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a system created by students to allow everyday citizens to report oil in places they frequent, because of the Gulf Shore oil leak.

What is the Oil Spill Crisis Map?

This map visualizes reports of the effects of the BP oil spill submitted via text message, email, twitter and the web. Reports of oil sightings, affected animals, odors, health effects and human factor impacts made by the eyewitnesses and the media populate points on a this public, interactive, web based map. The information will be used to provide data about the impacts of the spill in real time as well as document the story of those that witness it.

Who made this?

The Oil Spill Crisis map is brought to you by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and was developed in partnership with students of Professor Nathan Morrow of Tulane University. This technology, utilizes the Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) crisis mapping platform to map eyewitness accounts of the oil spill disaster. Ushahidi was first used and developed by Kenyan bloggers to display reports of post-election violence. Since then Ushahidi has been used in other emergencies like the Haiti Earthquake (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) response, Washington DC’s winter blizzard (http://snowmageddoncleanup.com/) and in Atlanta (http://crime.mapatl.com/) to track crime. The Oil Spill Crisis map is first application of Ushahidi in a humanitarian response in the United States.

Power of Social Media in a Crisis

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FP Wellman, a former Army public affairs officer, has an older post about the power of social media and new technology in a crisis.  He explains how social tools can be very helpful to existing crisis response plans, specifically talking about a shooting and a blizzard:

Mr. Don Carr, Director of Public Affairs, tells me that “most of what we did is part of the PA (public affairs) annex to the installation’s adverse weather response plan. The SM sites are not specifically part of the annex; we just did it. Our update to the annex will roll ‘em in.”

Mr. Carr goes on to note what made the social media outlets especially powerful “was the ‘instant’ feedback we got on FB and Twitter. As residents or employees would post a comment about how things were, I was able to cut-n-paste them into emails to the IOC (Installation Operations Center), DPW (Department of Public Works) or the Housing folks, so that priorities for plows and other work could be adjusted accordingly.”

I think if you are a PIO or anyway involved in crisis response, this is a very valuable article.