Astaylor's List: Hurricane Sandy and the use of Digital Tools

• We have offices in three cities affected by the storm (Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston), and many staffers and clients suffered damage and power outages during the storm. Our New York office was without power for a week, but staffers who had power offered their homes as coworking stations for colleagues who suffered damage. Scenes of incredible generosity between neighbors were commonplace in New York, and inspired several of us to join in efforts to help our neighbors rebuild across the city.

   

    I spent three days volunteering in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, and I couldn’t believe the devastation I saw. Hundreds of families from all walks of life lost their homes in a single night of horrific floods, winds and fires. Even today, almost three weeks after the storm, with temperatures dropping, more than 25,000 to 30,000 people still lack power on the peninsula.

   

    During those days of distributing food, cleaning out flooded basements, and talking with residents who narrowly survived, it was obvious that the need was enormous and wouldn’t disappear immediately when the lights come back on. Volunteers will be needed in affected communities for months, but since I tend to think the Internet can solve anything, I found myself wondering how myself and my talented colleagues at BSD could use technology to help.

• Hurricane Sandy marked a shift in the use of social media in disasters. More than ever before, government agencies turned to mobile and online technologies. Before, during and after Sandy made landfall, government agencies throughout the Northeast used social media to communicate with the public and response partners, share information, maintain awareness of community actions and needs, and more.
• New York City, with support from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, began using social media for a variety of purposes after Hurricane Irene in fall 2012, enabling the city’s services, offices and departments to engage and inform the public through digital means. Even before Hurricane Sandy, the city’s social media presence attracted 3 million followers across more than 300 city accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more. In addition to managing NYC.gov, the city maintains numerous channels, including Facebook pages, Flickr, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter (in both English and Spanish) and YouTube. Throughout response and recovery to the storm, these channels provided the city with the means to share information in various formats, enabling people to find and consume information as they preferred. 
• FEMA also used social media heavily in addition to traditional means, sharing information and engaging the public across multiple channels both on and offline, including face to face, television, radio, print and digital (Web, social and mobile) for preparedness prior to landfall, and to provide actionable, practical, relevant and current information to those in the affected areas and others outside of the storm’s path. FEMA published a Sandy-specific page on FEMA.gov as a one-stop-shop for all Sandy-related information, and stood up Sandy-specific Facebook and Twitter profiles as well.

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• As Hurricane Sandy approached the US in October last year hundreds of thousands of people used social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to keep abreast of the storm. When the dust settled, people turned to those networks again to follow recovery efforts and find out transport information.

• Michael Clendenin, director of media relations at Con Edison, said the @ConEdison Twitter handle that the company had only set up in June gained an extra 16,000 followers over the storm. He was also able to clarify that the much-shared "explosion" that happened at the company's 14th street power plant in Manhattan, was not actually an explosion.

  "It was more of a flash", Clendenin said. "It was a power relay that went out." He said "that piece of equipment never blew up".
• Video footage of the intensely bright light flaring close to the East River Park was one of the most shared items as the storm battered Manhattan. Clendenin said the 25 videos Con Ed posted during the few days before and after the storm were viewed more than 100,000 times, while the images it posted to Flickr got 140,000 hits.

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• Several cities in Connecticut, including New Haven and West Haven, use the Everbridge system, and the Town of Middlefield just recently implemented it. The primary function of the cloud service is to blast out automated phone, mobile, phone, text message and email notifications to the residents of a town (or the employees of a subscribing company), for example warning of flooding conditions in a particular area during a hurricane. With an upgrade launched earlier this month, Everbridge added the ability to send out notifications through social media as well -- and, more importantly, monitor social channels for chatter about a developing crisis. In addition, Everbridge added a mobile app capable that allows citizens to participate more actively in the response to an emergency, for example by allowing them to relay pictures of a dangerous situation to emergency response coordinators as it is happening.
• Social media capabilities were part of the list of requirements he developed when looking for a new mass alert system, Maynard said. The primary reason Ventura County was looking for an upgrade was capacity, he said. By switching to a cloud service, the county gets access to a "near infinite" number of phone lines for making lots of outbound calls quickly. Previously, the county used an on premises system, which was limited by the capacity of the phone system, he said.