Twitter and the Victorian Bushfires – A relationship that could have been so much more…
Several days have passed since the worst bush fires in Australian history raised some of the most beautiful places in Victoria to the ground. As we now put the disbelief and despair to one side, it’s time to look at one thing that makes the biggest difference in the time of crisis – communication.
The worst bush fires in Australian History
If there’s one thing that Australians do best, it’s the willingness to take up of new technology, and with the wide open spaces in this country, mobile communications has really found it’s niche. After all, mobile phones outnumber people in this country by nearly 4 to 1. With many phone companies battling to win the consumer dollar, the race to provide fast and reliable, communications has been a formidable challenge for some, and for others, they couldn’t roll it out quick enough .
3rd generation mobile communications is extensive in the areas hardest hit by the fires, but even still, the older 2nd generation technology is still well and truly entrenched as well, so in the hours leading up to the fires, and as the fires cought hold, how could we use the communications technology better?
We communicate with our phones in two ways, firstly with voice communications, and secondly with SMS (Short Messaging Service). In a time of disaster, instinctively we pick up the phone to call our neighbour, friend, or relative – even the essential services if required. Everyone does this which is only human instinct, but the reality is, it takes up what becomes a valuable resource for the duration of a call. As the cell in which your calling from reaches capacity, no other call can connect, resulting in congestion on the network. SMS on the other hand does not tie up the mobile phone network anywhere to the extent that voice does. It’s a short burst of data between your phone and the mobile phone network.
But SMS is an inefficient way to communicate during a time where every second counts. True – if it’s a two way conversation, but what if it’s a one way transmittion of vital information to anyone who needed it?
Introducing Twitter, a short message based social networking platform, which has been somewhat crippled in Australia for reasons which we can only speculate about. Twitter is free to use for anyone in the world either from a computer OR a mobile phone. Naturally if you send a message to Twitter you pay your SMS rate, but in the time of a crisis, sending an SMS will be the last thing on your mind.
Here’s how twitter works.
Anyone can establish an account on twitter. If you like what that person or organisation is tweeting, (in phone terms SMSing or messaging) then you can FOLLOW them. Each and every time that person tweets (sends a short message), it will come in to you account – all 140 characters nothing more. You can follow one or many individuals. In countries other than Australia, you can configure Twitter to send those tweets, or short messages to your mobile phone. Nice.
Would it surprise you that the the Victorian CFA @CFA_NEWS (County Fire Authority), as well as 774 ABC Melbourne @774melbourne, the government radio station tasked with broadcasting updates every few minutes, were tweeting urgent and critical updates about fires every few minutes?
Twitter used to send tweets to mobiles in Australia up until recently. The reason why they stopped is only know to select few, but speculation would identify a cost issue with the Telcos in Australia. SMS in this country is one of the most expensive in the world.
By now, you’ve hopefully put the pieces into place. Firstly, if you were in a high risk fire area, you could have FOLLOWED the CFA or the ABC and received SMS notification of fire updates ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE. Secondly, these updates would reduce the need for unnecessary voice calls hence reducing congestion on the mobile phone network leaving circuits available for potentially life threatening calls. And finally, SMS messaging uses store and forward technology, this means that if you are in an area of poor mobile reception, maybe because a phone tower has been damaged by fire, as soon as your phone gets a sniff of signal from a working base station, maybe many miles away, that message can be delivered to your handset in a split second. Job done. Where as initiating a voice call word more than likely fail due to low or no signal as handset moves about.
Now this is certainly a new way of communicating. It’s an SMS to many, instead of one – and a new way of thinking about how we can use this sort of technology. In fact, here in Victoria, the emergency services has just completed a trial of similar technology where every mobile phone and fixed line in an are can have an SMS sent to it in time of need. I just don’t think it was ready to be turned on yet.
Some examples of what was being tweeted:
774melbourne For current updates and alerts visit http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au , follow @cfa_updates and keep listening to ABC Local radio
774melbourne Yea – Murrindindi fire: Emergency relief centres located at Alexandra Community Complex, & Wallan multipurpose Centre Bentinck St 57831450
774melbourne Mansfield grass fire: police advising residents in Monkey Gully Rd, Rifle Butts Rd, or Old Tonga Rd, to enact fire plan.
774melbourne Urgent threat message remains for the communities of Connellys Creek, Crystal Creek, Scrubby Creek and Native Dog Creek
cfa_updates Awareness Message – Kinglake Complex-Kilmore East, Goulburn River Valley
cfa_updates Latest Community Newsletters for Churchill Jeeralang, Dargo White Timber Spur, Wilsons Promontory Maroondah/Yarra fires.http://bit.ly/1KsP9r
Now I wasn’t being harassed by a fireball coming down on me at 100km per hour, but I’d be pretty happy getting this sort of information to my mobile phone as I made my escape.
The purpose of this blog is purely to draw your attention to technology that is available to us right now, and free of charge. If it is unrealistic telecommunications prices that have prevented Twitter from sending SMS to mobiles in this country then it looks like corporate greed has not been restricted to the downfall of our global economy.
Social networking is a good thing. It allows everyone at all levels to communicate. Twitter provides a vehicle like no other, and in hindsight, would have been a life saver if given its best chance.
My heart felt sympathies go out to all who have been touched by this cataclysmic event. At the time of writing this blog, out family property is under threat by the Yea – Murrindindi fire. If we at Tech Talk Radio can encourage positive discussion to bring about technological change by using technology that is in place now, then I’m all for it.
Andrew McColm
Producer
Tech Talk Radio
more reading: Social media explodes in wake of deadly bushfires
[...] new and old media has been getting it wrong with the bushfires (2009-Feb-11) [mUmBRELLA] Twitter and the Victorian Bushfires – A relationship that could have been so much more… (2009-Feb-11) [McBlog] Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Victorian Fires: [...]
This weeks links (2009-02-09) focus on #vicfires « Visible Procrastinations said this on February 12, 2009 at 9:00 am |
Your point about the necessity for realtime updates and delivering timely information to people in danger zones is well taken. And I completely agree. However Twitter isn’t the right medium for vital emergency updates (yet) for a number of reasons.
First of all, Twitter isn’t real time. In times of high traffic Twitter can take minutes for messages to propagate through its system. I know this because I have tested it during the CES conference and other high load times where Twitter messages took as much as half an hour from the time the end user posted them until they appeared in the public timeline.
In the case of the fires that hit Marysville for example, minutes are all that people had to go from knowing that the fire was in the area to knowing the fire front was at their house. Any lag in the messaging system makes it dangerous, if you are trusting your life to the system.
Second, the two examples you post for 774 and cfa_updates are actually just relaying information from primary sources at the CFA which are already available to people vis RSS feed.
This actually makes them dangerous because the Twitter users imply that they are up to date when they aren’t. They may be minutes behind. Particularly in the case of cfa_updates since the person who runs that feed has admitted he is (tirelessly and selflessly) doing much of the updating manually. 774 was re-posting the same Threat Warnings over and over, causing you to re-check the information or assume some new information had come in when none had.
A good question would be why the CFA doesn’t have a direct SMS notification system of its own, either for subscribers and/or based on the address attached to a phone number. I’d bet cost is a component, I’d also bet that cost doesn’t seem prohibitive at all now. In either case Twitter is a middle man that most people don’t need.
You also say that “Now this is certainly a new way of communicating. It’s an SMS to many, instead of one – and a new way of thinking about how we can use this sort of technology.” SMS to many has been in use for a long time, long before Twitter came to be. I’ve long been able to tell my mobile phone to send an SMS to multiple recipients, and lots of organizations use centralised SMS for warning systems to notify their employees or students in case of disaster.
If you’re using SMS, it should be a direct message service from the agencies with the primary information. i.e. the CFA and DSE, or some body that coordinates information from these and other official sources (Local police and city officials) and either funded by subscriber fees for users who want updates, or by tax revenues. I’d favor funding from emergency services spending to make the service available to all.
Twitter is a great, fun service, but its not nearly robust enough for the kind of life or death application we’re talking about here, where a delay or a wrong piece of information coming down the wire can mean the difference between a timely escape and an untimely demise.
The place where Twitter trumps a direct message system from the authorities is ONLY when Twitter users are generating the content and have access to the information faster than the authorities do. So IF people 10 minutes away from me were tweeting “#Marysville #bushfire is at the edge of town!” and IF I was already subscribed to #bushfire and IF their posted report got to me faster than the CFA notifications did and IF I had some reason to believe that person was a reliable source that I should bet my life on.
I think we should be pushing the technology envelope in all cases. But the truth is when it comes to the sort of notifications we’re talking about here, the correct solution is the most widely adopted, reliable and time tested communication service we can find. For the most part that is radio and tv, with SMS I’d argue being a worthy addition.
By the way I should have said I truly hope your family’s place, and more importantly your family themselves are alright. My parents’ place on Whanregarwen road is under threat from the Yea-Murrindindi fire as well. Any discussion, including these sort of posts on your blog, that has the opportunity to open new channels of communication and save lives is a good thing. Cheers.