Sunday, May 18, 2014

Emergency Twitter

On Saturday, a day after we returned home from being evacuated because of the San Marcos wildfire, many of our neighbors were still not back from wherever they went. There is no damage on our street or in our neighborhood, but the blackened hillsides and pervasive smell of smoke remind us of what happened. During the two days that we stayed with friends (along with our two dogs and bird), we continually searched for news of what was happening with "our" fire, as well as around the rest of the county. What I realized is that during this emergency, I got most of my news from Twitter.

Tweets from news organizations and reporters provided updates more quickly than their television broadcasts did. Cal-Fire, the City of San Marcos, Ready San Diego, 2-1-1 San Diego, the County of San Diego, and other official agencies posted information on Twitter as fast or faster than on their websites. Perhaps most importantly, news and information were crowdsourced to hundreds of amateur photographers and reporters, the people who live in the area and were being evacuated. These first-hand witnesses became so important to news-gathering that news stations requested on-air that people tweet their pictures and stories to them.

On Wednesday the 14th, I had been at Carmel Valley Middle School meeting with a teacher. As I was returning to the office driving north on I-5, I saw a dense plume of black smoke and began trying to guess where it was. On returning to my office, I turned on NBC7's live feed on their website, and learned that the smoke I saw was from the Carlsbad fire, and that it was not currently threatening my own neighborhood or school district. I kept that website open and monitored the news throughout the day. In another window, I opened Tweetdeck and created a column for the hashtag #CarlsbadFire, where I got more information, especially from the school district employees and official accounts that I follow. That's where I learned that Carlsbad Unified had sent home non-essential employees from their district office, that two elementary schools had been successfully evacuated, and that La Costa Canyon High School was going to be used as an emergency shelter. I noticed that there were other fires in the county, but the vast majority of my attention was on the Carlsbad fire.

About 3:15, I closed up shop and headed home. In the car, I turned on 600 KOGO for news updates. At that point in the afternoon, there really wasn't much new information. I made my final U-turn before arriving at my own street, turning to face east, about 3:45, and that was when I saw the smoke (and more alarmingly, large flames) on the hillside above CSUSM, about a mile from our house. It was obvious that the fire had just started. I parked and went inside to tell my wife, and we both went out on the street to see the smoke plume, with many of our neighbors. As I stood in the street, I pulled out my phone and took a picture. My immediate thought was to put it on Twitter to let everyone know that there was a new fire in the county:

At just about the same time, I got a Twitter direct message from a colleague in the San Marcos school district, telling me about the fire and that it was near my house. (I found out later that this colleague and another were trying to let me know but they didn't have my cell number, so the best way they came up with to contact me quickly was through Twitter.) I also got a number of texts and emails from people who knew where I lived and had heard about this fire, so I was continually looking at my phone.

Back inside, we turned on the TV to see if we could get more information, but NBC7 was not yet mentioning the San Marcos fire. We started to gather stuff in case we had to evacuate. Meanwhile, my initial tweet had been retweeted by a couple of news organizations including Channel 8, so I started to get requests for more information. People I don't know tweeted me questions: Is it near San Elijo Hills? Which way is it moving? How close is it to CSUSM? I tried to answer these questions to the best of my ability, but quickly. One teacher in the district sent me an email saying that she had seen my tweet on CBS8 and asking for more info. (At first I thought she had been on Twitter and seen the retweet, so I was confused why she would email me. On re-reading her message, I wonder if she saw it on CBS8 television. I'll have to ask her.)

While I was gathering important materials and checking my phone for messages, I saw this tweet:

OK, I thought, time to go. As we got our dogs and bird and stuff into our two cars, I let our neighbors know that the evacuation order had been issued, in case they hadn't seen it. One of our neighbors, an older woman who lives with her brother, came and asked me if the order was official. She wanted me to go talk to her brother, who didn't believe the order and thought she was just over-reacting. He told her that if it was a real evacuation, sheriff's deputies would come knock on everyone's doors and drive around with loudspeakers. I told him that I saw the evacuation notice from the City of San Marcos official Twitter account, that with all the fires in the county that day there was not enough manpower to go around door to door, and that my wife and I were leaving. Looking back, what I could have told him was that Twitter is the official loudspeaker now (or at least one of them).

As we got to our friends' house and got our animals settled, we began looking for more information. They had the TV on, but I was looking at Twitter on my phone. I use Plume on my Android phone and tablet, so I can create multiple columns. I started one for #sanmarcosfire and another one for @sanmarcoscity, to get official notifications. One thing I noticed was the fluidity of names: the fire was initially called "the San Marcos fire", then "Washingtonia fire", then "Cocos fire". (The last two are the names of streets near the fire's origin.) As a consequence, the hashtags changed as well, from #sanmarcosfire to #washingtoniafire to #cocosfire. Looking for information on Twitter meant using all of these tags, since not everyone switched to the most current hashtag immediately. (I have not figured out in Plume whether I can create a column that would show two or more hashtags; e.g. #sanmarcosfire OR #cocosfire.)

Throughout our evacuation, I relied on Twitter for my initial information. Through tweets, I found out about the scheduled news conferences, which we turned on the TV for, but which rarely gave any new information. At one point, a celebrity with 3.3 million followers tweeted something like "pray for San Diego" and included all of the fire hashtags. The enormous number of retweets from those 3.3 million followers crowded out the actual information in the #cocosfire hashtag. I had to set up a "mute filter" in Plume, but the only way I could find to mute all the retweets was to filter on the actual text of the original tweet. It worked, but was cumbersome. I searched Plume for a way to exclude retweets in a column, but I did not find it.

As Thursday turned into Friday, and it became obvious that the fire was moving away from our neighborhood, we began to become impatient with the continued mandatory evacuation. We could not figure out why we were not being allowed back in. I saw an attempted explanation, which began a discussion:





You can see the amount of guesswork and frustration going into trying to understand the continued evacuation. Other people contributed to the discussion in this hashtag, as we waited for official word from the city. What we got was not particularly helpful.
The City of San Marcos did a good job using Twitter as an official loudspeaker, giving out information more quickly than they would have been able to otherwise. They used the fire hashtags, which made it easier for people to find their announcements, and they should be lauded for that. What they did not do well, however, was use Twitter as a two-way means of communication. Pleas for information or estimates, or even acknowledgement of reading residents' tweets, went unheeded. Simply replying to tweets, even if no information was forthcoming, would have helped calm down most people who were just trying to find out when they might be able to go home. In looking at the @sanmarcoscity tweets, the first reply to an individual that I can find came at 6:23 pm on Saturday the 17th. That's long after most people were back in their homes.

Friday afternoon, the first indication that our evacuation might be lifted came from a tweet from someone who said they saw the sheriff's deputies removing the roadblock at Rancho Santa Fe and San Elijo Hills Dr. After a few minutes of high expectations, we finally got the official tweet from the city with a revised map, meaning that we could go home. Lots of others were still evacuated, but many people could go home. It was a great relief, and news came through Twitter, like most of my news had for the previous few days.

The last big firestorm in our area was in October of 2007. My wife was in Boston for work at that time, but I was in contact with her and with our friends through my cell phone. I didn't have a smart phone then, just a flip phone. I don't think I even had SMS on that phone, or if I did, I didn't know how to use it. Twitter had just been invented the year before, and few people even knew about it. This time around, Twitter was an indispensable resource for communication.

UPDATE 27 May

The teacher who emailed me about seeing my tweet on CBS8 tells her story:
Yes, we did end up having to evacuate because we are living in SM. I was at school testing kids and I had the channel 8 news up on my computer in the background while the kids were testing. I was watching the La Costa fire because I was afraid some of the kids were going to get pulled and wanted to make sure the winds didn't shift and affect us. Then I saw your retweet on the side. There were a bunch of people talking about different fires, but I didn't really believe them because...you know...hysteria. But then I saw your name! You were a much more credible source. Since I was testing, I didn't want to pull out my phone and I thought it would be easier just to email. When I heard back, I contacted my husband (who was at home) and he started to gather up the cats and some of our things and then pick up my grandma (who lives a couple streets away). Your tweet gave us the heads up we needed to get prepared without being totally rushed! Thanks!!!
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