Laird Harrison
The Emerging Role of Social Media in Disasters
When a deadly temblor rocked Nepal on May 12, 2015, Miriam Aschkenasy, MD, MPH, was in a medical tent, trying to help some of the 22,000 people injured in the earthquake that devastated the country only 2 weeks earlier. After the shaking stopped, Dr Aschkenasy grabbed her phone. But she quickly realized that she had no time to personally reassure everyone she knew. So after making one call to her husband and one to her mother, she clicked the Safety Check button on Facebook. Her friends instantly learned that she was OK.
"When you only have a few minutes of Internet and you need to get a message out to a lot of people at once, that's a great way to do it," says Dr Aschkenasy, an emergency medicine physician and deputy director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Global Disaster Response team.
Increasingly, people who respond to disasters are finding social media indispensable. "It is critical that many public safety agencies engage on social media platforms," says Kevin Sur, an instructor at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC) hosted by the University of Hawaii.
The utility of social media goes far beyond reassuring loved ones in disasters. Emergency workers and volunteers are using social media to find people in need, map damaged areas, organize relief efforts, disseminate news and guidance, attract donations, and help prepare for future disasters.
"During a disaster, traditional communication systems become overloaded and tend to fail," says Sur. "However, mobile communications—including social media—remain viable platforms because of the small amount of data needed to communicate." And, he points out, the general public has become increasingly comfortable with the various modes of social media and adept at navigating them.
Reaching People in Need
Many aid organizations employ people who work full-time on social media. Even when the American Red Cross is not in the midst of a disaster, social engagement strategist Jordan Scott uses social media to report the organization's ongoing disaster preparation work, medical training, and support to the armed forces.
But when a crisis hits, his work accelerates. As Tropical Storm Bill loomed in mid-June, Scott and his colleagues began monitoring tweets and Facebook updates from people in its path. "In situations when we have a little bit of notice, we can provide preparedness information," he explains. "Then during the crisis we can provide information about shelter locations, contact information, hotlines, and so on."
Sometimes this information takes the form of public announcements, but social media specialists also respond directly to individuals, assuring them that help is on the way or pointing them to services nearby.
When Superstorm Sandy caused flooding in New York in 2012, the Red Cross directed some trucks and relief supplies specifically in response to tweets like this one:
"Oceanside, NY has been w.o power for 12str8 days. No heat, snow, n many lost homes.worried abt elderly n children WE NEED HELP."
"During the Sandy response, we documented 88 instances where social media posts resulted in similar changes on the ground," Scott says.
Reaching the Public
For Andisheh Nouraee, Jordan Scott's counterpart at CARE®, social media provides the ideal opportunity to attract funds for relief efforts. "Our first goal is to get news in front of people, and during the course of a disaster when CARE's response has started, to start talking about our response, and, if we are responding in a way that requires money, to solicit money."
Because its relief workers often arrive on the scene of a disaster before news reporters, CARE's reports on Twitter may be the first reports that anyone sees in the United States, Nouraee says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employ multiple full-time staff to monitor and respond to social media, says the team's leader, Jessica Schindelar. "It's helping us to refine our messaging, and to get a sense of the type of information and resources that people need during an emergency." During the Ebola crisis, more than 800 people participated in a CDC Twitter chat for healthcare providers about infection-control guidance for US hospitals.
Organizing Volunteers
Professional relief agencies are not alone in harnessing social media in disasters. Social media can help ordinary people step in if emergency responders are overwhelmed, as they were after the Nepal earthquake.
"Initially, regular citizens were using social media to alert other citizens where help was needed," says Kashish Das Shrestha, a writer and social media consultant from Nepal. "All of the relief effort was pretty much coordinated through Facebook and Twitter, and in that sense social medial has been pretty remarkable." Responding to social media appeals, volunteers cleaned up solid waste left by crowds of people living outdoors, constructed latrines, and donated blood, he says.
When Shrestha heard that the head of the Nepalese orthopedic society was asking for more orthopedists, he posted the request on Twitter. He got a quick response from some Indian orthopedists willing to volunteer and put the two groups in touch with each other.
Meanwhile, Kathmandu Living Labs created a detailed
map displaying reports of assistance needed or provided. As of May 18, the cartographers had collated, attempted to verify, and mapped 1800 reports.
Similar crowd-sourced crisis maps have appeared in response to many other disasters, including the locations of people in need after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; the spread of radiation resulting from the 2011 destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in
Japan; locations of shelters, supplies, floods, and landslides after Typhoon Haiyan in the
Philippines in 2013; and deaths in the current
Syrian conflict.
Facebook, Google, and many smaller social media companies provide specialized services to help aggregate and share such key information in a crisis.
Medscape.com, 2 July 2015