VOST emergency drill reaches 268,735 in TATGranada15

A big industrial fire was the scenario where @LuisSerranoR, the dircom of Llorente y Cuenca, set up an emergency drill with the cooperation of @vostSPAIN, including president @Galvez Rivas, spokesperson (myself), @VOSTEuskadi Jokin Zubieta and @VOSTCanarias @JaviBlancoF presidents, as well as other team members and emergency communications specialists.

The drill started during Luis Serrano speech about crisis commons when he announced that a live exercise would be held using Twitter. It started when @GalvezRivas tweeted  that a big fire has just started in a  solvents factory and 15 fire crews plus 5 ambulances were in its way to the place, even though there was no one hurt.

After the first tweet, seven more Twitter fake profiles worked for about 20 minutes to show how emergency services, VOST team and mass media (a radio station under the name @OndaCerosimulac) deal with an emergency in the social network and do their best to inform the citizens and to stop rumor spreading through the web. 

I was in charge of the mass media profile, @OndaceroSimulac, working from my office in Madrid, while my colleagues where attending the event live in Granada (South of Spain). All of us worked coordinated following the Timeline using the hashtag #SimulacroTAT  and uploading information and pictures as we usually do when there is a real disaster here in Spain. 

We also were counting on two profiles spreading rumors (@Trollsimulacro - @josetes112- and @enteradillosimu - @ffdezalcaide). Besides, we also had a person who was asking for his father, @familiarsimul - @Ant_Varon- whom she has not seen and who finally died due to the incident. 

@112simulacro (112 is the official emeergency number in Europe)  and @industriasimul (@JaviBlancoF, from VOST Canarias) led the communications process from the beginning, updating emergency numbers, facts and figures related to the emergency. So did VOST, who also included a picture with the hazardous substances forming a toxic cloud. The mass media radio station retweed the official sources (@112simulacro and @vostsimul) and asked all the rest updated information

@Brigadistasimul (@gemaimorcillo)   and @enteradillosimu (@ffdezalcaide) played two controversial roles. The first being a fireman tweeting inconvenient pictures and confronting the emergency service and the second acting as a person who seeks notoriety trying to be a source of information.  

The troll @Trollsimulacro  (@josetes112) as expected, cursed all the time and everyone. Obviously, no one talked to him.

The drill’s impact

If we have a look to Tweet Binder, the drill had  268,735 Potential impacts, 130,358 Potential reach, 85 Contributors,  1,534 Followers per contributor and 2.45 Tweets per contributor.

The activity peak was as 1.05 pm on June 23rd.

It was my pleasure to participate in the exercise and I feel proud to be a member of VOST, since they play a fundamental role, when a disaster strikes. I also find it very important to practice using a simulated scenario, so we will be ready in case the black swan appears. 

Don’t you agree?

Vanuatu, NGOs lead relief support though social media

Save the children, Red Cross, Oxfam and Care, among others, has played a fundamental rol monitoring information and taking over the pleas for help using social media after the President of Vanuatu, Baldwin Lonsdale , made an emotional plea for humanitarian assistance following the widespread devastation caused by category 5 Tropical Cyclone Pam last weekend.

Care was one of the organizations who warned people about the danger of Pam becoming a category 5 cyclone on Friday 13rd, affecting- they thought- to at least 20.000 people and anticipating what would inevitably come “extremely damaging wind gusts, heavy rainfall, flash flooding and strong storm surges”.

All at once, the NGOs in the area, as well as United Nations, used their twitter accounts to ask for help and to warn the citizens of the affected area.

Both, Red Cross  and @RedCrossAu reported utter devastation and also explained what the organization was doing to face the disaster.

@NZRedCross also took part in the relief operation using its twitter account to let the world know so.

#Vanuatu and #CyclonePam, two hashtags for a the Cyclone Pam

Social media is an especially important back channel when communications are down, as @RedCrolssAu and some others said. The good news is that all the information was organised in two hashtag, so is was not very difficult to follow the updates.

The bone to me was the lack of official information in Twitter. The Vanuatu's Govermnet has a Twitter account since november 2010, but it is dumb since july 2012. Being this the case it probably would not had been relevant its use, taking into consideration that it only has 723 followers. Moreover, a disaster is no the best time to create engagement. As any emergency management knows, you must create a community before using social media as a channel in emergencies.

What do you think? Would it be relevant to create a community if you are in area prone to natural disasters?