Tracking hurricanes in the 21st century

By Dorothy Ramienski
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio

Hurricane Ike is bearing down on the Texas coast and many in the Gulf Coast Region have already fled.

One of the challenges for feds involves sharing information with state and local partners.

One resource that does this is the Hurricane Information Center, which sounds like it would be a government Web site, but, in fact, isn’t.

On Friday’s Daily Debrief, hosts Christopher Dorobek and Amy Morris spoke with Andy Carvin, a senior product manager for online communities at National Public Radio and creator of the site.

Carvin explains that this isn’t his first online emergency project. He also worked on sites during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. He says hurricanes08.gov started when it became clear that Gustav was going to be a threat.

I basically started setting up a page on the Internet where I could pull together a variety of resources representing official sources, news sources, user-generated content — and then started inviting volunteers all over the world to help me pull it together.

hurricanes08.gov took about an hour to put together. Carvin says the set-up wasn’t challenging because the information was already out there.

A lot of the tools we used were feeds that you get on different Web sites. So, you can go to google news and get an RSS feed from there. The National Hurricane Center has feeds that you can take off their Web site, and so a lot of it was simply connecting the dots and creating modules to plug them in. In other cases it was also just a matter of finding volunteers with certain skill sets, like people knowing how to install a wiki or how to create a google map.

The plethora of information is partially what inspired Carvin. Since so much was available, he created hurricanes08.org as a home for the information found on different government and private company sites.

What we wanted to do was to be able to have a site that could connect the dots between these resources, but also add in information that’s being produced by news entities, as well as the general public. So you could do a quick scan of everything that was available and everything that’s going on.

Gathering information is easy, but making sure it’s correct can be difficult. Carvin says he had to be careful and look out for misinformation.

If you’re using a site like google news and you’re looking for stories that feature the words ‘Hurricane Ike’, you’re going to get a lot of stories that come from major news sources, but you might also get some random blogs and other sources that may not be as credible. It’s often a challenge when you’re pulling things together automatically. Sometimes you’ll get stuff that’s slightly off topic, but, at the same time, the content is being processed so quickly, things that may not work at that particular moment get pushed off the page pretty quickly and then you get back to the usual churn of information.

hurricanes.org started as gustav.org. Carvin says he didn’t work with specific agencies or private companies; rather, he saw the opportunity to create a site and did so. The result? Carvin had authorities contacting him.

We did hear from folks at Homeland Security and they came and told us that they had created a new widget that we could plug onto the page — and anyone else could plug onto their own site — that had useful links and so it was nice that they passed that along to us.

Carvin says, other than that, he and his team have been coalescing the information themselves.

It wasn’t clear how many people visited the site when Hurricane Gustav threatened New Orleans. Carvin says he was so busy trying to get information posted that he didn’t worry about metrics tools as he was working.

It was only about halfway through the storm that we plugged those tools into place and so, by the time the storm had passed, we still had somewhere close to around 100,000 people visiting — so the [overall] number was probably a bit higher than that.

Carvin isn’t simply relying on word of mouth, however. He has his own blog and also uses twitter, a social networking and microblogging service, to let people know about hurricanes08.org.

I have around 3,000 people who subscribe to me on twitter, so, by telling people I’m trying to create a resource and need volunteers, please pass the word along, it didn’t take that much time for it to go along the twitter grapevine and get passed along from person to person and blog to blog. So, within the first 36 hours, give or take, we had about 600 people signed up to participate in one way or another.

Carvin notes this does not mean that all 600 people were working on the site at the same time. The 600 people were getting the word out, though, which was just as important as Gustav loomed.

Even though we had hundreds of people get involved, a lot of them were doing very small tasks — and then there were a few dozen of us who were coordinating the overall activities and concentrating on certain projects, like the google map or creating the wiki.

Carvin says, though he has experience creating Web sites like hurricanes08.org, the experience changes each time because technology advances.

I remember back at the Oklahoma City bombing in the mid-90’s, people were using e-mail discussions lists to coordinate information and find out where they could donate things. On September 11th, I ran a large discussion group that did essentially the same thing. For Katrina and for the tsunami [of 2004], a number of people got together and created blogs and pages that aggregated content and other news services.

As much as technology has advanced over the years, Carvin says he and his team did hit a few snags.

There were some things that we would have loved to have added to the site but had no facility for doing it. For example, the Emergency Management Agency in Texas was putting out situation reports in a pdf file that was not structured in a predictable way, and so there was no way we could come up with a way to automatically go through the pdf and convert it into RSS or XML and make it available.

Even on the Internet, it seems hindsight is always 20/20.

Carvin says much of his team is currently resting, but Ike is looming, which means they will probably be very busy again soon.

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On the Web:

The Hurricane Information Center – Home page

twitter – StormWire

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