“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.
“There are a lot of emergency management programs that are one-man shows,” Howson said. In a crisis, these managers are trying to coordinate with fire departments and other emergency service providers, as well as government officials such as county commissioners. “They don’t have the resources or the time” to monitor social media.
To help sort through the information, emergency managers are increasingly turning to VOSTs, or Virtual Operations Support Teams.
“A VOST is a group of people that come together acting as a trusted agent for local jurisdictions that either have a pre-planned event or incident. They help manage social media for those jurisdictions,” Howson said. “They are not there to replace or displace any kind of social media footprint that a local jurisdiction already has. They’re there to augment the local reps.”
When a tornado hit Oklahoma City in May 2013, the National Weather Service asked the Oklahoma VOST to get reports about damage from social media. Lloyd Colston, director of emergency management in Altus, Okla., volunteers with VOSTs, including the Oklahoma team and the American Red Cross.
As the event unfolded, Colston directed his team to include requests for rescue. When a team member discovered a tweet from a woman who reported being trapped in a warehouse, Colston called Oklahoma City 911. A short time later, the woman tweeted that she had been rescued.
“If I’m in Oklahoma and a tornado is bearing down on my city, how much monitoring can I do?” Colston said. The advantage of a VOST is that the team is virtual — volunteers in other locations monitor social media while those at the disaster site focus on other tasks. Having members in different time zones also makes it easier to ensure there’s 24-hour coverage during an incident.
VOSTs can be activated to help either a government entity or a nonprofit. The volunteers may be local or in other parts of the country — or even international.
Team members communicate with one another during an event using tools like Skype, Google Hangouts or Google Docs to document workflow, track hours and seek feedback.
VOSTs offer several advantages for emergency management agencies. Requests for help may be more likely to come via social media because data communications channels tend to be more resilient than voice communications, said Colston. So people who can’t call 911 may still be able to send a tweet saying they need help.
When jurisdictions are required to match FEMA funds with money or volunteer time, the hours VOST volunteers spend can help offset local costs, Colston said.
Before jumping onboard and creating a team, each emergency management agency needs to specifically define the VOST’s role.
“One of the things that’s established when a VOST is activated is what does the local jurisdiction want?” said Howson. “What is the mission? Does the local jurisdiction want the VOST to monitor what’s been done on social media? Track it? Curate it so it’s saved for a later date? Do they need stuff created for them — a blog or website?”
Howson started to develop a VOST in Ohio after taking a class on social media for disaster response and recovery and subsequently joining a VOST from the Pacific Northwest. The first incident he worked on was a wildfire, and the response included the tribal and federal governments. “I monitored social media and watched for incidents, requests for help — anything that might come through that would be of interest to the public information officer.”
Howson’s team saw reports of smoke, concerns about public health and an account of an accident involving a fire truck. The team made sure the public information officer knew about the public health concerns, for example, so the department could distribute information on how to handle the hazards of smoke. “And if people expressed kudos to the firefighters, we made sure they knew that,” he said.
This is a typical job for a VOST. Generally volunteers may amplify official messages, by retweeting them or sharing them on Facebook, for example, but they don’t use official emergency management accounts. Although VOSTs will sometimes take on the role of updating a Web page, in many cases they simply report on what they see on social media.
“The Colorado VOST only provides situational awareness,” said Micki Trost, strategic communications director for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “They are not PIOs. Our mission is to make sure the local PIO is aware of what’s going on so they can provide the right messaging during their event. We’re always in the background.”
The VOST leader will likely be asked to report back to the local entity at specified times, said Cheryl Bledsoe, technology manager with Clackamas County 911 in Washington state and a certified emergency manager. She runs monthly conference calls for the VOST Leadership Coalition. It’s also important for the jurisdiction to set escalation criteria: “If ‘this’ happens, notify us immediately.”
Bledsoe said that during a wildfire, local jurisdictions may want to be notified anytime there are references on social media to a firefighter dying in the line of duty — “not because they don’t know that the firefighter has died, but because they want to be able to reach the family before the name breaks in the media.”
It’s also important for the local jurisdiction to plan how it could use a VOST during an emergency. “It’s really difficult to send people to surf the Internet for anything and everything,” Bledsoe said. “It is a huge haystack of information; pre-planning is vital.”
That planning process includes deciding who will be on the team and how it will be activated. The Colorado VOST has a formal process for becoming a member, as well as protocols for activation, said Nathan Hunerwadel, communications specialist with the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Together he and Trost manage the Colorado VOST.
Members participate in a mini social media exercise and complete a background check. They also are required to participate in a certain number of activations per year.
When a local jurisdiction needs assistance, they fill out forms explaining the resources required to get approval through the chain of command. The process can move rapidly — normally fewer than 30 minutes.
The Colorado VOST, which became a state resource in March 2014 but existed on a local level before that, supported Jefferson County when it was hit with floods in 2013 and for the 2014 memorial service for a law enforcement officer. It also has helped during protests in Boulder and for planned events like the 2014 USA Pro Cycling Challenge and 2015 Alpine World Ski Championships.
In a typical activation, the team organizes volunteers into shifts during which members monitor social media — from Twitter and Facebook to newer, anonymous apps like Yik Yak. Depending on what the jurisdiction is interested in, the team may be gathering information about road closures, traffic problems or where crowds are gathering.
Hunerwadel said one key to success is to make sure that either he or Trost has a direct connection to a local leader. “When we find something that’s related to the mission, we notify the liaison on the ground,” he said.
Ongoing training is important as well. The team Howson formed in Ohio now has monthly training sessions. “It takes a level of commitment,” he said.
Social media can be complex, and VOST members need to be trained to distinguish legitimate information from rumors.
For example, some of the photos circulating online during an emergency are doctored or from previous events. It’s important for VOST members to be able to differentiate between a real photo of a current event and a spoof or a photo posted to honor an anniversary, for example.
“A lot of the VOST teams are scouring social media and learning how to validate that data — how to look at metadata and tell if a picture is fake or accurate,” Bledsoe said.
Setting up a mechanism for team members to talk to one another also helps, Hunerwadel said. “We have a Skype chat room where we talk back and forth. If a question comes up, they can post in that room.”
VOST members, and the local emergency managers who activate the teams, must also stay up-to-date on the latest technology and know who is using which types of social media.
It’s critical for anyone trying to use social media in an emergency to know what platforms are popular in the community they serve, Colston said. “There’s a social media platform for Russian-speaking expatriates. If you don’t know your audience, you’re not going to hit them.”
Social media is always changing, and the teams must stay abreast of what’s new. Just six months ago, the Colorado VOST focused primarily on Facebook and Twitter. Now a new generation of social apps like Yik Yak and Snapchat are gaining popularity. Some are location-based, which is helpful, but also anonymous, which can complicate follow-up.
These are challenges, but they can be overcome.
“There was a lot of fear initially about whether or not information could be validated on social media,” Bledsoe said. She pointed out that 911 dispatchers send police officers and firefighters in response to one phone call even though the caller’s information can’t be validated. Rumors on social media can be dispelled quickly (though they also can be amplified).
Bledsoe advises those organizing a VOST to consider issues including liability insurance and whether volunteers working from their homes out of state would be covered. The jurisdiction should treat the VOST like any other volunteer organization, providing training, doing background checks and keeping volunteers engaged with the program.
I firmly believe that the VOST teams of today will be the 911 dispatchers of tomorrow,” Bledsoe said. 911 centers are working toward being able to accept text and video messages in addition to voice calls — and the evolution of emergency communications systems isn’t likely to stop there. As 911 centers begin to need employees who can sort through other types of information, Bledsoe thinks people who have been on VOSTs will have many of the skills they need.
For VOST members and emergency managers, keeping up with technology will be critical.
“Technology has evolved very rapidly,” Bledsoe said. “It’s really important to understand that the tools that are working today might not work the same way tomorrow.”
People’s expectation that social media can be used to communicate with emergency workers is unlikely to change, though.
The public “expects people to be monitoring — they expect that when they tweet they get help,” Colston said. “On the government side, I’ve had police, fire and EMS folks say, ‘I don’t have time to monitor Twitter.’ They are absolutely busy.”
And that can create a rewarding job for VOSTs.
“The best thing about it is knowing that you’ve helped someone,” Howson said. When Toledo’s water supply was deemed unsafe in 2014, Howson’s team assisted the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. “We found a tweet from a single mother with a special-needs child — she tweeted that she needed water for her and her child.” The response was escalated to the American Red Cross, and “within about 30 minutes they were delivering water to her. That was the most rewarding thing I’ve done online in a long time.”
