NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 66

REMOTE RESCUE
Cat Graham,
cofounder of the
Virginia-based nonprofit Humanity Road,
reviews Facebook
disaster maps of
Mozambique after a
cyclone hit the East
African nation earlier
this year.

66 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

public messaging, which put the emergency response industry a bit behind
the learning curve, he said. But that is
beginning to change.
"The first few years we taught the
course, when we would go around the
room so everyone could say why they
were there and where they were from,
there would inevitably be a couple of
them who would say things like, 'Social
media is the devil and it will be the
death of America,'" Rueter said with a
chuckle. "But that switched within a
few years to, 'I don't want to be here.
I'm afraid of [social media]. But I
understand that somebody in my organization needs to be able to look at this
stuff.' At this point, I think most emergency managers understand the need
for social media. Not everybody can
necessarily spend a lot of time on it,
but almost everybody understands the
need to get somebody on there looking
during incidents."
A lot of this aversion comes from
a longstanding notion in the profession that, during a crisis, information
should be tightly managed and doled
out carefully so as not to spark more
confusion or chaos. Even now, the
idea of giving up control over the flow
of information, especially to outside
volunteers, causes some emergency

managers to be wary of the VOST concept, Reddy-Hjelmfelt said.
"There's a discomfort amongst incident management people about using
volunteers. I've had PIOs that I personally work with on a volunteer basis
who go, 'I want a VOST, but I don't
want your team to do it, I want agency
people to do it,'" Reddy-Hjelmfelt said.
"The whole point was that the agency
people didn't have time, right? I think
the problem is that most agency people
don't know how to do it. I think this
could be the job of someone in the PIO
shop during an incident, but nobody
ever gets assigned to do what I do."
Even with a receptive agency, there
are hurdles to clear before VOSTs
and other forms of social monitoring
achieve a more widespread acceptance,
Rueter said. The biggest is getting
enough unpaid citizens with the proper
skill set to sign up for the significant
time commitment. "It takes a tremendous amount of effort to keep up," he
said. "Our Oregon VOST team has to
keep doing consistent training, team
building, and activating. We have tremendous support from our director of
emergency management. But if there's
nobody there to champion it, it's not
going to happen."

'Every disaster is local'
While some public agencies are still
struggling to get comfortable with the
idea of social monitoring, the private
nonprofit sector has been championing
its techniques with great success for
nearly a decade.
Twin sisters Cat Graham and Christine Thompson cofounded one of
these organizations, a nonprofit called
Humanity Road, after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. The idea
was an extension of the work they
had done five years earlier when, after
Hurricane Katrina, the sisters set up
large banks of computer stations in
affected areas to give residents without
working phones or Internet the ability
get online to communicate with loved
ones and begin signing up online for
much-needed services. "But when
the earthquake in Haiti happened,
we couldn't deploy physically with
computer gear, so we decided to try to

HUMANIT Y ROAD

freelancers on Twitter who put VOST
in their handles but aren't actually
coordinating with any official response
on the ground.
"We developed this concept many
years ago, and I can't believe that
by now there is not a solid, sophisticated VOST in every state emergency
operations center across the country," lamented Scott Rueter, a digital
disaster expert who runs the Oregon
State VOST and frequently works with
FEMA on its social media monitoring
activities. "We showed everybody how
to do this. We even built all these free
tools that are out there. The concept is
there, and it's rock solid. It is a matter
of adoption now."
Despite his disbelief, Rueter is in a
better position than most to speculate
why the VOST concept has struggled
to gain more widespread adoption.
For nearly a decade, he has traveled
the country speaking with countless
disaster managers as an instructor of disaster social media courses
sponsored by the National Disaster
Preparedness Training Center at the
University of Hawaii. From the beginning, Rueter said, many emergency
managers were resistant or even
openly hostile to the idea of monitoring social media as a way to shape
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