Using information from social media for

emergency management

Bert Brugghemans

Bert Brugghemans Antwerp Fire Service

Area manager

Emergency manager

CCO

@bertbrugghemans

Do we miss a lot of important information?

Love Parade Duisburg incident - Juli 24, 2010 - 1,5 milj visitors - 21 died - >500 injured - Mass compression, mass turbulence

Social media changes the velocity of the information flow about the incident. This also changes our need for information (management)! First youtube video was viewable a couple of minutes after the incident Social media may give us insights: what is happening (crowd compression, crowd turbulence) or what do people think is happening (bomb attack, falling people, …) (Palen et al, 2007) Proper monitoring of social media would have given the crisisteam very valuable information about the incident, a couple of minutes after the incident.

Train accident (BE) - 8u28 - 18 died - 130 injured - Twitter: 8u30 - First picture via twitter:

8u33 - First pictures in the

newspapers all came from Twitter

-> not used

Pukkelpop incident - August 18, 2011 - Very heavy storm over festival area - 5 died - >140 injured - 65.000 involved

H&M fire in Brussels - Brussels = 1 milj

inhabitants - Fire in H&M in the

center - Smoke cloud viewable

from 20 miles away - Very good local footage

from different perspectives

- A lot of geotagged information

-> not used

Why is social media changing the velocity of the information flow? - Information gap - Network effect - Evolution and penetration of social media

Time

Information

Information availability

Information demand

Effect of social media

Information gap

Online

Offline

Penetration of smartphones and tablets

How do we deal with this new velocity of information? - Make social media part of your crisismanagement strategy

- Information management - Communication

- Monitor social media from the first minute of the incident

and use the information!

Gathering intelligence

Fire in a chemical storage facility (Chemiepack) - Very heavy smoke - Very large social media

activity - Political consequences

to bad communication

Geolocation

• 1% in 2011

• 1,5% in 2012

• 2013?

Intelligence = gathering and managing information = This is why we want to use social media in the first place (communication is a nice by-product) Information can give us a new insight or a secundary opinion next to the professional opinions (eg position of smoke cloud, …)

What information can social media offer? - Human intelligence

- Wisdom of the crowd - Eyewitness report - Opinions

- Geospatial intelligence - Geolocated information - Maps

- Imagery intelligence - Visual information - Movies, pictures

- Big data

Information forensics (Patrick Meier - http://irevolution.net/) • Triangulating information • Use your network to verificate information • Use contact forms when you post press messages • Study the tweeters bio, followers, previous messages (look

him up in google) – how trustworthy does he look? • Contact the tweeter directly • Build in good filters: not all information has to be verified

Experiences in Antwerp: Fire Slachthuislaan 19/10/2012

Smoke stayed very low -> temperature inversion

We received some direct tweets:

And we started monitoring

Before the crews arrived on scene

There was a lot of visual information available

And we gathered our own information (picture taken from the 6th floor of a fire station with panorama 360 app on iphone)

Based on these pictures we decided to upscale

The crews were only seconds on scene when we started to talk back

Lessons learnt - Practical issues - KISS - Collaboration tools are important

Practical issues: It’s no rocket science, but … - How big is our crew to do this?

- Numbers - Knowledge

- Do we have the tools to do this - Smartphones - Tablets - Laptops - Connections

- Can we get the (curated) information to the officer on scene?

Our social media crisis information management team

The knowledge is not (yet) integrated in the organisation

We don’t use the crowd (yet)

KI(VVVV)SS - Keep tools very very very very simple - Existing tools are too difficult to use

on scene - Panoramic and normale pictures - Sending and receiving emails - Texting - …

Make these tools simple! • Panoramic picture • Automatic geotag + timestamp • Send with one button

Conclusions

Social media is present, big and growing

Social media is changing the velocity of crisiscommunication and the information flow

Conclusions

Crisis management has to deal with social media:

1e: monitoring (gathering information)

2e: communication (new way of participation)

Conclusions

Questions?

Bert Brugghemans Antwerp Fire Service

about.me/bertbrugghemans

@bertbrugghemans