Response to DQ

Disaster can be devastating to any jurisdiction. Vital information needs to get to the households within the jurisdiction regarding and leaders need to communicate to those responders in the field. My jurisdiction adoption of social media a means of communication not only with responders but with citizens within the community. Our emergency management agency is discovering that most members of the community are subscribers to radio networks such as “XM Radio and Sirus Radio,” so a decision was made to go with using television as secondary communication resources. The numerous smartphones that are used making it possible for emergency responders and citizens within the community to receive vital information in the form of mass texted, emergency response messaging, or through the use television application that downloaded from various news agencies partnered with the emergency management agency. Social media platform such as Twitter and Facebook Live can deliver prompt update information to citizens of potential disaster information or between first responder and leadership of current situation (Eski, Celikli, & Kiyan, 2014).

There are challenges that exist with any new technology. Some challenges experienced by my jurisdiction dealt with getting the emergency management leadership to commit to innovations in communication technology. The leadership concerned with possibility outages of the internet that may affect the use of social media platforms were slowed to approve the use. The offline use of these social media platform might run into trust issue because outsiders who recently moved into the community were hesitate accepting information received due to weak ties (Gultom, 2016).

The solution to combat challenges, especially with outsiders who moved into the community, were providing education using online education video using platforms such as “Vimeo” and “YouTube.” Newcomers to the community were also directed to the community website to download applications for receiving important required community events and potential disasters (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2014). The solution for getting the support of the emergency management leadership accomplished by having IT specialist conduct educational programs to provide beneficial information to leadership buy-in. 

Eski, A., Celikli, S., & Kiyan, G. S. (2014). The effects of social networking on disaster communication used by emergency medical and rescue staff - The case of the van earthquake. The Journal of Academic Emergency Medicine, 13(2), 58-61. doi:10.5152/jaem.2014.19971

Gultom, D. I. (2016). Community-based disaster communication: how does it become trustworthy? Disaster Prevention and Management, 25(4), 478-491. doi:10.1108%2FDPM-02-2016-0026

Haddow, G. D., Bullock, J. A., & Coppola, D. P. (2014). Introduction to emergency management (5th Ed.). Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.