|
Videos
October 30, 2012 By Jessica Mulholland
Starting at 8:05 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 26, New York City communicated to residents through its official Twitter feed about Hurricane Sandy's arrival -- which wreaked havoc on the entire subway system, "in every borough and county of the region," said MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota in a statement, adding that the storm ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots.
Over the last five days, the city has tweeted and retweeted information about evacuations, road and bridge closures, power outages, school closures and blood donations, among many other things, some of which are displayed on the map above (view a larger version here).
Using Twitter during a disaster is becoming much more prevalent, as also illustrated in August 2011 when a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck central Virginia and was felt from New York City to the Carolinas and west to Ohio.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/e-government/NYC-Takes-to-Twitter-During-Hurricane-Sandy.html
.jpg)
What is Big Data? What can it do for you? 
Discover the BI capabilities you already own.
It is sad that the creator of this article could not find a map newer than the pre-9/11/2001 map shown above.
Unfortunately, using Social Media to inform the masses is only as good as the masses having access to power for their devices, the internet for delivery, and 3G/4G for smartphones. I read where half of NYC is/was without power.... what about those who lost power, lost interent, lost cellular, etc etc etc Relying on Social Media sounds good, but in real life it still lacks.
The article above is actually a non-story an obsolete map = #journalismFAIL!!
The article above is actually a non-story accompanied by an obsolete map = #journalismFAIL
I agree with R McIntyre that use of Social Media is only as good as the ability to power those devices used to access said media. This however does not lessen it's effectiveness. It is easier to charge a smartphone or a laptop than repair a damaged electrical grid --- you can recharge if you have access to a car, hand cranking devices are available that can give hours of use at a time. The important thing I think is that we all see the problem & steps can be taken to correct them for the next storm
Twitter is nice in these circumstances. It is too bad that where I work, all twitter feeds are blocked. My employer is a state agency in the Mid Atlantic region with 5000 employees.