Atlanta flood monitored through social media

By Bo Emerson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wendy Siegel said she received a surprising note from her 14-year-old who logged on to Facebook to let her know water was leaking into his Cobb County public school and flooding the parking lot.

“They did end up coming home safely,” said Siegel. “I was glad when he got home”

Atlantans communicated by traditional means during Monday’s flooding, but many traded information, photos and videos through such social media as Twitter and Facebook .

“In an emergency situations you find the social networks you’ve been building up on a daily basis, that sometimes seem like a waste of time, suddenly become very useful,” said Amy Bruckman, associate professor of interactive media at Georgia Tech. “Person to person you can learn more about what’s really going on in an ongoing situation much faster than you can from professional media.”

Walter Akana, a Decatur career coach, kept up-to-date on Monday’s flooding by watching photos from around the city online and on his cellphone.

“From a practical advantage, people use Twitter as a just-in-time emergency response system,” he said

Some of those photos and videos were from Tessa Horehled. “I put 30 or 40 photos up on my Twitter stream yesterday,” said Horehled, of North Atlanta, an online marketing consultant who writes an entertainment blog called Drive A Faster Car. Twitter updates helped her neighbors determine whether to attempt the drive home in Monday’s disastrous traffic, and kept them alert to power outages and water main breaks, she said.

Twitter updates came from private citizens and from such officials sources as Georgia Power and the Federal Emergency Response Network.

Horehled and others began using a “hashtag” — #atlflood — in their Twitter feeds that identified flood-related “Tweets.” This made searching for updates easier. The convention was similar to the #atlgas hashtag that helped Atlanta drivers find low-cost gas during the summer of 2008, when prices exploded.

Older forms of "social media" also helped Atlantans cope with Monday’s crisis.

Driving home from Marietta to Woodstock, Jim Millsap kept his ham radio on, and received updates on road closings from his fellow amateur radio fans. “Eventually I got home, with the help of the radio,” said Millsap, a dispatcher for the Dish Network. “Just in our county we have 520 ham radio operators.”

Aileen Dodd contributed to this story.