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Minneapolis bridge collapse: people will communicate, but how?
By WDavidStephenson | August 1, 2007
I just talked to Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe, who was asking me whether the Minneapolis bridge collapse and public reaction to it illustrated any of my points about how personal communication devices should and shouldn’t be used in a crisis of this sort.
My initial reaction:
- officials asked people to minimize their use of cell phones to avoid bringing the network down.I can’t emphasize it enough: from my experience, the best way to alert your family and friends in a disaster is to sign them up in advance for Dodgeball.com — even if they don’t live in one of the cities the system services or would never use it for the social networking uses Dodgeball was created for. In a crisis, by sending a single text message to Dodgeball: !I’m safe and I’ll contact you later (or whatever — but making sure it’s preceded by an exclamation point, which the Dodgeball software reads differently from a regular message, and instead of blasting it only to those of your contacts who are within a 10-block radius of where you are at the moment, it instead blasts it instantly to your entire list, wherever they live.You satisfy that primal need to let people know you’re ok, while you use almost no bandwidth.
- If Minneapolis had the kind of enhanced 911 that Mayor Bloomberg will institute in NYC to allow attaching photos or video to 911 calls, individuals on or near the bridge could have provided instantaneous situational awareness — again, one of the things authorities can gain from empowered individuals using their mobile devices is real-time, location-based information.
- if Minneapolis was using the Square Loop Mobile Alert Network, police could have broadcast an alert that would have been received only by drivers near the bridge, alerting them to the danger while not needlessly alarming people miles away.
We’ll see, once the situation is analyzed, what, if anything else might have been contributed by an alert and empowered public, but it does seem to me that this tragedy was yet another reminder that the public will definitely use any and all devices at their command, and that smart government agencies will learn to supplement their traditional alerting services with new ones specifically tailored to capitalize on these devices and their new powers.
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homeland security smart mobs networked homeland security government IT location-based services geo-spatial web homeland security 2.0 disaster management emergency communication I-35W bridge bridge collapse Minnesota St. Paul disaster planning Minneapolis
Topics: technology, empowering public, policy and politics, e-gov transformation, networked security | |
