Posted on May 26, 2006 at 2:36 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Slidell resident Brian Oberkirch of Weblogs Work and Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog shares his thoughts on the state of technology and hurricane readiness down south as we near the start of hurricane season, in this guest entry:
Hurricane season starts next Thursday, and we're still picking up the pieces from the last storm. I live in Slidell, Louisiana, and the eye of the storm passed directly over our town. I blogged about the aftermath of the storm extensively at the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, and wrote up some of the lessons learned here in advance of the Recovery 2.0 meeting in San Francisco.
My message for you today is that the disaster still persists. I took the photo above in April, not September. I travel a lot, and people always ask about how things are when they learn I'm from SE Louisiana. Lately, there seems to be an assumption out there that things are back to normal. "You had Mardi Gras, right?" "Jazzfest?" "All that money is going down there, so you must be back on your feet."
Let me disabuse you of those thoughts. I created this flickr set, in part, because I wanted to show people what it was still like around Slidell, even as the next storm season approaches. If I could take you around town, I'd show you street after street of gutted houses awaiting repair, more FEMA trailers than you can shake a stick at, and some people still living in tents. Hardly anyone I know has been paid their insurance or disaster relief money to fix their flooded house. Thus, the limbo our town is in. I assume that's why there are still cars out there yet to be towed. I don't know.
I do know there is going to be a ton of freakout that happens when the first storm shows up in the Gulf. Imagine people hooking up the aforementioned FEMA trailers and trying to get out of here. As scary as it is comical. Here's why the Web & other Internet technologies are so crucial for us right now. We need all the information, attention and resource allocation we can get. Invoke the self-healing networks the Internet is built upon and route around bureaucracy, inefficiency, apathy, the works. Put the power back in the hands of the people to do the barn raising needed.
I just got back from an inspiring meeting at the Aspen Institute in Maryland, where a group of media (old & new), non-profits and government types gathered to talk about disaster communications. My colleagues from New Orleans (Jon Donley, Martha Carr and Chris Slaughter) told amazing stories of how they covered the storm against long odds. More importantly, I believe this meeting will spur real activity to improve disaster communications. For example, I was in a working group that included Jim Cantore, Barbara Cochran, Bob Long, Tom Evslin, Bill Gannon and Tucker Eskew, and our goal was to come up with specific things that would improve communication among various media outlets during a disaster. I suggested a Barcamp type meetup of traditional media and bloggers to arrive at a working protocol for sharing information and republishing everyone's work. Bob Long runs the news for the NBC stations in L.A., and we are putting together a meetup for disaster media in the L.A. Basin. We're also working with the New Orleans group to align our procedures before the next storm.
Maybe we just know who is who in the area. Maybe we make sure everyone is using feeds so our material is easily republished. Maybe we agree on a standard tag so our stuff can be easily found. Whatever it is, we should have the discussion beforehand.
The other thing we've committed to is building 'hardened' wifi zones that will serve as open nodes for anyone who wants to publish information during a disaster. Again, KNBC has dozens of sites throughout L.A., and they could provide and publicize these sites as open information distribution points.
You can read Tom's write up of our brainstorming ideas here, and listen to a podcast we did the following day here.
It was great to hear the news about EarthLink bulking up the wifi network in the city. We don't have time to fool around. We need open channels to the outside world, so we can rebuild our social networks and lean on them to help us fix the Gulf.
-Brian Oberkirch