A Lesson Learned: Tyler Suchman’s Emergencity

[Ed Beakley]

The "Day Fire" (started on Labor Day, September 4 - contained on October 13, 2006) is the sixth largest fire in California history. By, October 1st, it had burned over 162,700 acres , cost $70.3 million, and at one point, had 4,600 active firefighters.

During the Day Fire, only one website, a blog called the OjaiPost.com, (run by local technologist Tyler Suchman) digested all of the data that was out there and put it into a simple and useful format so that people in the Ojai Valley could quickly see where the fires were; where the evacuation centers were; what roads were closed, etc. The site also allowed for public input and feedback. The Ojai community (site of lengendary Shanri-La in the 1937 film, Lost Horizon) contains 8,000 - 10,000 homes- population about about 32,000. Once publicized, the site was getting 8,000 unique hits a day. Do the math and you will see that most everyone in the valley, even people traveling out of the country and wondering about their homes, had a simple, single place to go to for the best collected information available. Tyler drew his data from a variety of inci-web type sites and made it consumer friendly.

People got the news they needed. There was no panic in the valley and the firefighters were able to get the job done. Contrast that with the floods of 2005 when a complete lack of knowledge about road closures - essentially one way in/out - and their duration each day caused a mini panic in the Ojai Valley that led to the shelves of most grocery stores being stripped bare.

But to get people to go to his site, in essence, Tyler had to fight his way to the podium at a townhall meeting, and it took awhile to get normal media to “understand” and publicize. Working together across organizational and functional boundaries comes hard - no matter how logical.

Sometimes the good guys get buried, but not always. Please read about Tyler Suchman “leaning forward” in development of Emergencity (RC #12 on the Project White Horse Forum)
http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/?p=40#more-40

[Tyler Suchman]

Thanks much Ed, and I'd be happy to dive into what worked and what didn't, if anyone is interested. Much of what I learned is being funneled into Emergencity, Inc., which is building a platform for community hubs with emergency management capabilities.

In a nutshell, we are building a network of local community websites that citizens can use on a daily basis for news, events, jobs, and local networking. The sites also accelerate disaster preparedness and local volunteerism (CERT, Red Cross, etc.). In the event of an emergency, the site facilitates various parties to convey actionable intelligence to the community, allowing citizens to make smart decisions about their families, property, pets and businesses. This is a combination of official agency information and user generated content such as eyewitness reports, photos, real-time timelines and map mashups.

We're testing and populating content right now for the Ventura County pilot, which will have 12 municipal sites under the umbrella.

[Dag von Lubitz]

Curiously enough, while Tyler was fighting to convert the idea into practical reality, Beakley, Patricelli, and I were fighting editors of scientific journals to get the theoretical considerations established. Both theory and practice saw the light of the day about the same time without their authors ever speaking to each other before,

[Dag von Lubitz]

One more paper that may be pf interest to all of you.