CMJ 236 Assignment 10-1: Disaster Management

Nick Acheson
April 1, 2010

When an emergency occurs such as a flood, hurricane, tornado, fire, etc., emergency management (disaster management) is required to help allocate a variety of resources to the disaster area, and also to inform the public about what has occurred and what is being done to fix the problem.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is usually the agency that is called in to coordinate with emergency teams in the event of a disaster in the United States and U.S. territories when the governor of that state has declared a “state of emergency.” If a “state of emergency” is not declared then the usual responders (firefighters, police officers, and other agencies) are used at the state and local level.

In the past emergency management has used a variety of different computer programs such as geographic information systems, and population trackers in order to get resources to where they need to go and to retrieve information on how many people are injured, missing, etc. But, when it came to notifying the public about the disaster, emergency management teams would use the usual lines of communication such as television, radio, government websites, etc. but it was still difficult to get the word out to everyone.

Until recently where twitter and facebook have been used in disaster/emergency situations in order to reach a large number of individuals (all Americans) in a short time span. Firefighters can now inform the public on one of these social networking sites about any variety of emergencies such as fires, tremors/earthquakes, car accidents, as well as many others.

This is exactly what the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has done through the use of twitter when in one case a “significant seismic event” had caused tremors in the Las Angeles area. And after more information was received, the LAFD posted more “tweets” about the size and exact location of the quake.

Los Angeles service officer, Brian Humphrey, described that the use of twitter is a way to keep people up to date on disaster information. When talking about the communication problems with hurricane Katrina, Humphrey said, “The people at the Superdome were darn hungry. They were darn thirsty, but they were not dying from hunger or thirst, what they were dying from a little bit at a time was a lack of information. We were dying from a lack of information as well. We didn't know what was going on. It was a two-way lack of conversing."

These social networking sites have greatly improved the communication process in a disaster situation. They can reach thousands of people very quickly which makes them a very important asset when disaster strikes.

Source:
http://www.govtech.com/gt/701799