When a disaster happens, emergency managers need as much information as they can get about where the problems are, who needs help and what the public wants to know. The advent of social media has made much more information available more quickly, but the information can be chaotic, difficult to find and not always reliable. And the volume of data can be overwhelming.
“With a fast-breaking, big event, you could have hundreds if not thousands of tweets in an hour,” said Tim Howson, deputy director of the Ashtabula County Emergency Management Agency in Jefferson, Ohio. “This could be thousands of bits of information that someone may need to be aware of or decipher or discard. Someone’s got to do that.”
And many emergency management departments are not set up to do that on their own.
Full article: http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Virtual-Operations-Support-Teams-Monitor-Incidents-via-Social-Media.html
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