Online public communications by police & fire services during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy

Abstract

Social media and other online communication tools are a subject of great interest in mass emergency response. Members of the public are turning to these solutions to seek and offer emergency information. Emergency responders are working to determine what social media policies should be in terms of their "public information" functions. We report on the online communications from all the coastal fire and police departments within a 100 mile radius of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall. Across four types of online communication media, we collected data from 840 fire and police departments. Findings indicate that few departments used these online channels in their Sandy response efforts, and that communications differed between fire and police departments and across media type. However, among the highly engaged departments, there is evidence that they bend and adapt policies about what constitutes appropriate public communication in the face of emergency demands; therefore, we propose that flexibility is important in considering future emergency online communication policy. We conclude with design recommendations for making online communication media more "listenable" for both emergency managers and members of the public.

Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets

“…While not all social media information is tainted by memes, it is important to separate the signal from the noise, to support the actors involved in social convergence following a disaster, and to connect them to the right resources (Hughes et al 2014). Then it is possible to converge on the right information, reach the right audiences when they need it, and move people and organizations toward or away from response operations as needed.…”

“…However, both require organizational resources and in some cases policy shifts to facilitate implementation . Monitoring social media can generate valuable situational awareness and actionable intelligence for emergency managers as well as encourage conversations with constituents (Sutton 2009;Hughes et al 2014). This type of work can be done manually or with the aid of search and sorting technologies used to identify problems and needs (Latonero and Shklovski 2011).…”

“…During emergencies, for example, people increasingly contact public safety officials via social media channels as opposed to traditional 911 calls. This requires organizations to shift policies and dedicate resources to social media monitoring whereas in the past, resources were not needed (Hughes et al 2014).…”

“…Denis et al (2014) described an incident management team in Colorado that requested photos and videos during flood response operations in order to conduct damage assessments. Other crowdsourcing tasks include fundraising, volunteer mobilization, and other types of resource seeking (Hughes et al 2014).…”

Italian codified hashtags for weather warning on Twitter – who is really using them?

“…Many studies analyzed how social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook and Twitter have been employed during natural hazards like earthquakes (Yates and Paquette, 2011;Smith, 2010), wild fires (Sutton et al, 2008;Merrifield and Panechar, 2012), floods Vieweg et al, 2010;Bruns and Burgess, 2014), hurricanes (Procopio and Procopio, 2007;Hughes et al, 2014). People use social media in disasters for a broad range of reasons, as also recognized by recent studies (Fraustino et al, 2012): to have timely information that no other media can provide (Kavanaugh et al, 2012;Kodrich and Laituri, 2011); to receive unfiltered information (Liu et al, 2013); to offer and search help and organize emergency relief (Starbird and Palen, 2011;Horrigan, 2005); to seek and offer emotional support (Procopio and Procopio, 2007;Stephens and Malone, 2009;Sutton et al, 2008).…”