PDC Updates | Mar 1, 2010

How can you get timely, accurate, and easy-to-understand information about disaster events?

PDC Tweets
PDC alerts on Facebook and Twitter
Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) is now posting its hazard-warning and disaster-event notifications to the most popular social media sites: Twitter and Facebook. Now, users can easily follow alerts and events from their mobile phones, smart phones, or computers around the world, using these social networking sites.

No account is needed to follow these alerts on Twitter. Facebook users, however will need a valid account on the site to access the information.

The advantage here is that short alerts posted to these sites provide easy and timely access to accurate information regarding current and potential disaster events. These short messages offer a brief description of the event including event severity (Informational, Advisory, Watch, or Warning), event type, characteristics, and location. Then, to provide access to more detailed information, each message is linked to a “Regional Report” that provides a wide range of information about the event, a map of the region, and baseline data about the population and infrastructure in the vicinity of the event.

PDC Regional Report
Example of some elements from a Regional Report. PDC Tweets and Facebook postings link to these information resources.
The input and content for PDC’s disaster notifications and related postings are gathered only from authoritative and reliable sources and data providers, eliminating the need for users to sign up for and/or monitor multiple sources at over time for new information.

PDC has been collecting these data and has been developing applications to analyze them for over a decade. This information has been made publicly available through the Center’s public website and Atlases. The same information has also been provided to disaster managers for many years. As part of its mission to “serve public good,” PDC is now making this information even more accessible to all communities around the world.

While PDC continues to increase the number of hazard types reported and to enhance the analytical information about these events, the Center also will continue to improve its use of social media delivery services. “We are very excited about these new capabilities, and hope that the public can be better served by having more access to these notifications” said Ray Shirkhodai, PDC’s Executive Director. He went on to say, “We believe that the use of the social media will help circulate the information more widely, and will make early warnings more accessible to communities around the globe, helping—in a practical way—to save lives and foster disaster resiliency.”

In recent years, PDC has been working to enhance delivery of early warning services and to expand its coverage from the Asia Pacific region to the rest of the world. With these services in place, PDC expects to quickly offer a wide and growing variety of disaster alerts and information services in the coming months, including enhanced web-based visualization tools and impact modeling.

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