Existing Tools, Social Media, Mobile Platform Could Enhance Disaster Relief Operations, Witnesses Say

As the government looks to respond to and recover from disasters, “it’s important that we find new and creative ways to communicate information to those facing often chaotic circumstances that surround emergencies and disasters,” said Chairman Mark Pryor, D-Ark. A 2010 American Red Cross study found that when some people couldn’t reach 911 in emergency situations, they try to contact responders “through additional means such as email, websites or social media,” he said. It’s important to understand how social media is being used and what opportunities there are “to use this when we have natural disasters and other types of situations where we need to get out reliable, important, sometimes life-saving information,” said Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., ranking member.

Incorporating social media is a new challenge for FEMA, said Administrator Craig Fugate. The government’s ability “to communicate with the public and have two-way conversations has always been limited,” he said. The typical approach has been to create systems requiring people to adapt to how the government communicates, he said. “We don’t always adapt to how they're communicating.” The agency learned the power and reliability of the mobile platform after the earthquake in Haiti last year, he said. “We're moving more and more away from a web page capacity to a mobile environment.” Before the earthquake, “we assumed that wireless communications in areas of devastation would be unreliable,” he said. Going forward, the first communications likely to be restored after a disaster are wireless services, he said.

During the aftermath of the most recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and Japan, millions of people used Google’s Person Finder tool to post notices of missing relatives and friends, said Shona Brown, a Google senior vice president. In Haiti, the government had 14 different missing persons databases, she said. They weren’t integrated, “all were running on different infrastructure and all had a different amount of data,” she said. Person Finder was developed as one central database, she said. FEMA has moved information into mobile formats and it’s working with Facebook, Apple, Craigslist and other companies to discuss ways of using digital capabilities for public safety, Fugate said. The agency also has staff dedicated to digital engagement.

To develop the system using social media tools, the government must find ways to incorporate existing tools in order to reduce costs, some witnesses said. Another challenge “is to incorporate the other technology players and do that in a way that builds a system that we can continue to enhance without necessarily limiting ourselves to just what we do now,” Fugate said. It has to be done by deploying technologies already in use “instead of looking to a system that takes decades of capitalization to build,” he added.

While the private sector has a huge role to play, the government can do a lot, said Heather Blanchard, founder of CrisisCommons. The government has different types of mechanisms such as advisory councils, and it can support local and state authorities by providing aerial and satellite imagery during disasters, she said. “The federal government does data really well,” she said. “Being able to share their lessons learned as it applies to emergency management, I think, will be really helpful,” she added.

Google recommends that the government should adopt “simple, open and standard ways of publishing and disseminating information,” said Google’s Brown. Using the same standards and protocols across agencies will enhance the private sector’s ability to work with the government, she said.