Hurricane Earl
Here is the scenario: There is a category 4 hurricane headed directly for you. Forecasters say that it is going to turn north at the last minute and impact on your location looks to be minimal (but things can change at the last minute). There are hundreds of locals and tourist vacationing in your town and you need to protect them from a potential disaster. What do you do?
This very scenario occurred September 1-2, 2010 on the North Carolina Coast. Hurricane Earl was a monster of a storm heading directly for the Outer Banks of North Carolina, set to turn north at the last minute. Although the forecast looked as Earl was only going to brush the Outer Banks with some wind and rain, emergency local, state, and federal agencies did not want to take that chance. Evacuation orders given to the residents and tourists in the different counties in the path of Earl and people began preparing their homes and businesses for potential damage that was to come.
Among the more traditional forms of communication (TV, radio, press releases, etc.) from the different agencies to inform the public, Social Media was used. Some of the different social media sites that were used by the different agencies to inform the public, were Facebook and Twitter. The Federal, State, and local emergency and governmental agencies were constantly pushing information out to the public with short headlines with a link to find out more information often times linking back to their website or blog.
Not only were the Federal, State, and local emergency and governmental agencies pushing out information to the public, but the public was posting Facebook statuses and tweeting about what they were seeing and experiencing. Whether it was during an evacuation and there was a lot of traffic, or actually during the storm when there was some flooding and slight wind damage, people were using social media as a major form of communication.
The hashtag #earl became very prominent early on and was used by FEMA, The Red Cross, The Weather Channel, The Governor’s Office, and the hundreds, if not thousands of people that were referring to Hurricane Earl. If you are not familiar with hashtags, this this a way that you can search any tweet on Twitter even if you are not following that person and see what they are saying about a particular item. Because the hashtag #earl became the “accepted hashtag” of this event, agencies and the public were able to follow hashtag #earl and get a lot of information quickly from many different sources.
In the different tweets that were coming across my Twitter feed a lot of them had photos linked in them which was helpful because I could get a feel for what was going on in a specific area at that time even though I was 400 miles away. I use a tool for searching Twitter called Hootsuite. With Hootsuite I am able to have many different Twitter search terms in front of me at the same time. For instance, I had a search column for each of these terms: “#earl“, “#hurricane“, and “#hurricaneearl“. The most active of the following being #earl. I also wanted to search any tweet that had the hashtag #earl and the domain names of many of the photo services used when tweeting with a photo, this would essentially make a search column that returned tweets with photos attached to them that had to do with Hurrican Earl. Here is the search criteria I used: “twitpic OR yfrog OR tweetphoto OR twitgoo OR picktor OR mobypicture OR twitxr OR posterous OR pikchur #earl“. I was amazed of how many people were tweeting with photos of this event. I saw photos of the sunrise that morning before the storm made landfall all the way through to the next day where there was some flooding and wind damage.
Click on the photo to see video of: 2010 Hurricane Earl Moves Up the US East Coast
One last thing that I thought was most likely the most interesting part of the entire event was a hurricane tracker, @hurricanetrack (http://www.hurricanetrack.com/) streaming a live video feed from his truck as he drove around the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I found this feed as a tweet that came across my #earl twitter search. He was using the service USTREAM with a Sprint aircard/wifi connection. USTREAM is a free service that allows you to stream a live video feed of almost anything that you wish (within their standards). The unique thing about hurricanetrack streaming from his truck was that you felt like you were really there. For the folks that subscribed to his premium service, they could chat with him and he would even go to some of their homes to make sure that everything was alright after the storm had passed. Having the ability to stream live, the actual location of an event is invaluable to a team in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) during an event. It allows the folks that are making difficult and important decisions about your safety, the ability to see what is actually happening in the field.
With all that said, I think that social media is a great tool especially during an event, be it a hurricane, tornado, ice storm, or any other emergency situation you find yourself in. It is a way to obtain information from the people that are actually in the event with minimal effort. It also allows you to get your information from a more centralized place rather than trying to visit multiple websites, blogs, watch numerous TV stations, and listen to several different radio stations.
I also created a Twitter list with a list of people and agencies that I follow in an emergency. This list is constantly changing, but feel free to check it out and follow it if you need somewhere to start! http://twitter.com/LeeYount/ncemergency
If you have any questions about this post or would like more information about how to use social media in a emergency, let me know and I would be glad to help!
note: I completed an interview with Government Technology today about this very topic and you can view it here: http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/County-Monitoring-Social-Media-Emergencies.html
This past Friday I had the opportunity to host the first episode of “New Stuff” on TheMESH.tv.
I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a session at the 2011 North Carolina City & County Communicators Conference in Fayetteville, NC. The name of my session was Social Media – Shock and 
