Richard Martin Blog: In Disaster, Social Media Fail

When we first started smelling smoke on Monday morning, at our house up Four Mile Canyon west of Boulder, Colo., I walked outside on the deck to see a towering cloud of evil-looking, dark greenish-gray smoke pouring from the Rocky Mountain foothills above us. I went inside to try to get some information about what was obviously a big forest fire, and found very little.

Over the last four days, as the Four Mile Fire, the worst fire in the last 50 years in Colorado, has destroyed 170 homes in the canyons above Boulder, forcing us and about 3500 other people to flee our homes, clear and timely information has been an increasingly scarce resource. And modern technology, including social networks, Web sites, text messages, reverse-911 phone calls and email, has been close to useless.

That first day the county’s emergency-management Web site was devoid of news about the fire, and local news sites hadn’t gotten the story up yet. The county’s official fire-information line was continuously busy; they hadn’t yet figured out how to set up a voicemail system with regular recorded updates. I was reduced to a news crawl across the bottom of the TV screen – 50-year-old technology. Finally I resorted to good old face-to-face contact: I drove down to the turn-off where Four Mile Road meets Boulder Canyon, and asked the state troopers stationed there to block traffic for information.

They said, essentially, “You should get out."

So we did, with two cats and a dog, our laptops, and some hastily grabbed documents and photos. When we checked our voicemail later that day we found that we’d gotten an evacuation call around 5:30 p.m. – long after the fire had raged out of control, spreading to the north and west and destroying dozens of homes in those first several hours.

Since then getting updated information on the fire has become an art, with friends trading obscure Web sites and possible information feeds like stock-trading or horseracing tips.

The Office of Emergency Management page, the most authoritative source of official information, has been anywhere from several hours to half-a-day behind events all week.

The “Boulder fire" Twitter feed has been useful for links to news stories and Google Earth imagery and “Our prayers go out"-type messages, but not very good for verified real-time information for evacuees, which you’d think would be rather the point of Twitter, would you not?

Email has been great for trading rumors. My brother’s ex-wife, who lives up Sunshine Canyon in the midst of the worst destruction, has been whipsawed by conflicting information on whether her house is still standing (it is).

The best source of data has been online mapping and satellite-image pages, like the one at Digital Globe, which includes some stunningly detailed images of the fire’s actual perimeter – which turned out to be less than two miles from our home.

Frustration boiled over Tuesday night in a community meeting on the University of Colorado campus, as 750 or so evacuees gathered to hear the sheriff and other first responders tell us that there wasn’t much new to tell us, at that point. One woman stalked loudly out of the meeting and told TV cameras that her daughter found images on Google Earth that showed her home, and her stable, destroyed, but “Boulder County can’t tell me anything." Most of the crowd started streaming out halfway through the meeting.

“This meeting was long on platitudes, but short on information," a commenter with the moniker Unitary_Moonbat (definitely a Boulderite) wrote on the Daily Camera Web site. “The speeches amounted to ‘I feel your pain, check the website, and firefighters are awesome.’ While I agree with the last of these, I don't need politicians telling me they empathize with my plight, nor the new incident commander's story of the time his vacation cabin almost burned down, nor that I'm on some kind of ‘journey,’ as asserted by the woman from Mental Health. What I do need is to know if my home has been reduced to a pile of rubble - or barring that, at least a ballpark idea of when I might be able to go check for myself."

At the meeting we were asked to fill out a form with our email address and cell-phone numbers, so that we could be contacted with urgent updates. The next day I got an email from a county employee – instructing me to check the Web site.

On Thursday we were subject to conflicting stories on whether we’d be allowed up to our homes briefly to gather belongings. Power was still out; the fire was “30 percent contained," which is standard firefighter lingo for “We don’t have any idea what this thing’s going to do." The official county map of the fire, a 1.2 MB .jpg file, took an hour to download (apparently they hadn’t figured out how to mirror their servers, either.) People were reduced to the oldest form of social networking: gathering outside in the street to talk to each other. “What have you heard?" became the most frequent text message for 24 hours. Late Thursday afternoon, officials said that northwest Boulder – including the Wonderland Hills neighborhood, where we were staying, should “prepare for evacuation." So we spent the evening, as the winds picked up again into the 60-mile-an-hour range, helping our friends pack their belongings – and wondering how we’d get word in the event an evacuation was ordered. We took turns through the night getting up to check the OEM Web site. No call came.