Disaster preparedness plan must include social media

SINGAPORE—The day after Super Typhoon “Yolanda” ravaged Tacloban City, 20-year-old Joanna (not her real name) went out and walked for about an hour, braving roads then still littered with storm debris and bodies, to do something important. She used Facebook.

Power and phone lines were down, but Joanna heard that hundreds of people had been flocking to City Hall to get free access to the Internet. She had an important message to share with family and friends she knew had been worried about her. She wanted to tell them she was alive.

In the aftermath of Yolanda (international name: Haiyan), Facebook became an important alternative form of communication and future emergency preparedness plans should include it.

This is one of the conclusions reached by a research team whose report this writer copublished recently. Supported by a small grant from Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the study was based on this writer’s fieldwork in Tacloban City in March.

In the report, the team argued that future emergency preparedness plans should anticipate the breakdown of power and communication lines and designate access points where alternative forms of communication such as social media would be set up.

The appropriate agencies “should clearly and widely communicate where these locations would be, and what time periods they will be made available, prior to the disaster, so that residents can also plan ahead.”

Hundreds of residents took advantage of the free Internet service the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) had set up in front of Tacloban City Hall the day after the storm. But it took a while for word about the service to reach residents in isolated areas.

The DSWD prepared a few laptops and residents were allowed to access the Internet for a maximum of five minutes each. This guaranteed that more people could use the service but it also meant each resident had to be quick.

For Joanna and many others, posting a status update on Facebook was the quickest way to communicate.

“Instead of calling people individually, residents chose to post a quick status update on Facebook to inform their loved ones about their conditions,” the team wrote in the report. “Faced with limited access, Facebook proved useful to many residents to update their relatives about their plight as well as to ask for help.”

Joanna said that when she opened her Facebook account that day, many relatives and friends had already left messages for her. Others tagged her in posts, asking if she was all right.

Not only did she update her Facebook status to report she was safe but she also tagged in another post a few other people—other relatives, neighbors and friends—she knew were also safe so their families would also know and would no longer worry.

Peace of mind

A few others the team interviewed also narrated doing the same thing, many of them adopting an existing social media function they had previously used to share usually the most mundane of messages to deal with a particular need at a crucial time.

Their experiences again highlight the importance of communication in the aftermath of disasters not only for the coordination of rescue and relief operations on the part of government agencies but also for affected residents and their loved ones’ peace of mind.

The team concluded its report by saying: “What happened during [Yolanda] demonstrates how media users quickly learn to adopt technologies to suit their peculiar needs during a communication network paralysis.”

But the team also called for more research into how the team could further maximize the use of social media as an alternative form of communication in the aftermath of disasters: “Educating residents about the value of social media channels will make social media use during disasters more efficient.”

You can access (and download) the full report at the Natural Hazards Center’s Quick Response Program website: www.colorado.edu/ hazards/research/qr/qr251.html.

(Editor’s note: The author is a journalism researcher and professor at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This article is based on a research paper coauthored with Bruno Takahashi, an assistant professor of environmental journalism at Michigan State University.)