Crisis Intelligence and Social Media

Bert Brugghemans

Bert BrugghemansAntwerp Fire ServiceArea managerEmergency manager CCO

@bertbrugghemans

Twitter can be a contrast medium to visualize the impact of events

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 could 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

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

InformationInformation 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 intelligenceDisaster intelligence

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

activity- Political consequences

to bad communication

Map: Harro Ranter @Harro

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, …)

= Situation awareness/sensemaking

Disaster Intelligence(Business Intelligence)

- Enriched information - Visualisation- Determing information

Graph + figure: Connie White

But can we trust the information?

Table: @EENA

Experiences in Belgium :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 (determing information)

Other examples

Wetteren

Lessons learnt

First it is a problem of strategy an knowledge, not technology

Practical issues:

It’s no rocket science, but …

- Gathering intelligence in fast burning crisis is difficult

- How big is our crew to do this?- Numbers - Knowledge

- Do we have the tools to do this - Can we get the (curated) information to

the officer on scene? - KISS

Gathering info in fast burning crisis?

Our social media crisis information management team

The knowledge is not (yet) integrated in the organisation

We don’t use the crowd (yet)

Team?

Tools

Do our incident commanders have the right tools?

And do they know how to use them? (Yes! Give them tools they can use everyday)

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

KISS

Conclusions

Social media is present, big and growing1

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

Conclusions

2

Crisis management has to deal with social media:1e: monitoring (gathering information)2e: communication (new way of participation)

Conclusions

3

Questions?

Bert BrugghemansAntwerp Fire Serviceabout.me/bertbrugghemans@bertbrugghemans