NZ earthquake: the first respondent was online

Tweets, texts and wikis. From beneath the rubble of Christchurch’s nightmare, online services are again proving how quickly people and information can be connected in an emergency.
It’s been staggering how quickly New Zealand has responded. With about a quarter of its population overseas at any given time, all around the world Kiwis have been craving information from the wreckage of Christchurch’s streets, looking for real-time updates about loved ones.
And they haven’t been let down. As is now the drill the first respondents to a natural disaster on this scale are the social networks and services that are up and running online.
Among them Google’s people tracker—a tool to bring together information about survivors and the friends and relatives looking for them—is a simple two-click option and a fast way to collate details from the chaos that engulfs an emergency on this level.
Within hours of the quake the search giant also launched a Crisis Response resource, a one-stop portal for all news updates, real-time feeds from Twitter and other micro blogging sites as well as emergency services information.
How else would people know that the Christchurch-Arthurs Pass-Greymouth train services had been cancelled until March and free WiFi hotspots were being made available at Telecom Riccarton Mall?
Teamed by volunteers from around the world “working to process information” CrisisCampNZ was another first respondent online.
The web site reports launched a people finder and a resource to lodge incident reports.
Government web sites, too, have been running hot. The NZ Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management is using RSS feeds and Twitter to give information updates about the earthquake.
FutureGov’s citizen engagement journalist, Adrienne Valdez, spoke to Vince Cholewa, the ministry’s Public Information Manager.
He said that social networking was just one of the resources being used to help locate people and relate information to the public.
“It’s one of the media that the ministry uses. There is no one medium that is going to reach all the people you need to reach,” he said.
“Whether it’s radio, TV or different kinds of social media: each one has a specific audience, so the wider the range of media you can use, the wider the audience.”
Any changes in the emergency status or any news update on the earthquake triggers anRSS feed and sends out a Tweet from the ministry web site.
Messages will say “an update has been issued” and a tinyurl will lead back to the official site for more information.
“We’re not trying to engage in conversation or use Twitter or Facebook as a discussion medium, we haven’t gone that far,” he adds.
Traditional communication tools haven’t past their shelf life just yet either, as not everyone has access to online services in a crisis of this scale.
Cholewa recalls that following the Christchurch quake in September 2010, major retailers sold 19,000 battery-powered radios.
“That’s because if the power’s out, you can’t get online; your mobile battery is run down and you can’t charge them, and there is no other communication reaching you aside from the radio.”
But there’s no doubt New Zealand’s citizens have played the biggest role in the proliferation of news and information through their own personal feeds.
Be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter—Christchurch’s call has been heard loud and clear online.