When Disaster Strikes: Community Forums

by Danny Wirken

You're a young mother in New Orleans when the levee breaks. With no time to evacuate, you and your three children take refuge on the roof of a neighbour's house, hoping to be rescued quickly. You're not; eventually, after 24 hours, a Coast Guard helicopter comes by, gives you some clean water, and offers to take your two younger children, though they don't have room for you and your teenager. You send them up, and three days later are evacuated yourself, with no clue where your two year old son and five year old daughter have been taken. The possibilities include shelters from Houston, Texas, to Boston, Massachusetts – a range of over 2000 miles and 200 shelters. With no money and no car, how do you locate your children? And how do you endure the frantic feeling of panic and emptiness when you don't have your children where you can ensure they are taken care of?You are the British mother of a student at New Orleans University. On August 31, you turn on the television and see the destruction of the city unfolding before your eyes as the city floods, stranding tens of thousands of people and killing many hundreds. You call your daughter on her cell phone and get no response; you know, of course, that the hurricane knocked out the cell phone towers, and there is no phone service in the city. Even if you buy a plane ticket and fly out that day, how do you find her?Your cousins have taken their father, your brother, on holiday to Phuket, Thailand, during Christmas 2004. You watch in horror the day after Christmas as a tsunami erases much of that coast from the map, killing hundreds of thousands in a disaster few could have imagined. How can you possibly find your family members?Communication: The Key to KnowingThe biggest problem with disasters, after the rescue of victims in imminent danger, is always communication. How can you find the ones you love? The Red Cross, though they want to help, have their hands full rescuing those in trouble and feeding and clothing and caring for those who desperately need their help. The rescue services in the area of the disaster are doing the same thing. Telephone lines and cell phone service is typically down, knocked down, destroyed, or washed away. But in the most recent crises, there has been a difference. Satellite-linked laptop computers were brought into the affected areas in the earliest stages by the Red Cross and other rescue organizations. Instead of dealing with the logistics nightmare of communicating massive amounts of communication by physically sending information in or calling it in when phone service was made available, online services were made use of, and volunteers and others filled in databases and gave victims access to whatever email services they had.An even better tool was found by the time of the New Orleans flood – online forums, where people could publicly post information from both victims and those seeking information about their loved ones. Suddenly, an avalanche of information was available online at forums. Not only were people finding one another, but volunteers were finding that a great way to find agencies that need their help was to seek them out in online forums.And soon, people were able to ask questions: what was it like to be caught in the filthy floodwaters of New Orleans for three days? Did murders really happen in the Superdome? When the tsunami came, why didn't people just run away? Did it really wipe out entire towns? What about the fishing communities?And they got real answers from people who had been there. Horrifying answers. Those answers inspired people to help, either with cash or with volunteer work. Others started talking about what happened, what could be done to change things so that these disasters never happen again. Still others opened their homes to victims of the disasters.It is grassroots community service and politics at its purest: those who want to know, receiving information from others who know all too well.Community Forums as Social ActivismOnline community forums with a focus on social service are cropping up everywhere, helping people to meet, disseminating information in an orderly fashion, and encouraging people to give cash and physical assistance to those who are suffering simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyone can register to participate in an online community forum. And anyone who needs help can ask for assistance at an online forum; if they don't get a person personally offering to help, they'll find information about how to access government and aid services.But community forums are, as the name implies, online communities. They run on the people who register, who volunteer to be active and who help others by posting information and spreading the word outside the forum in blogs and other publicly accessible resources. Communities without people in them are nothing.For this reason, it falls to people like you and me to make community forums work. At the very least, register and look at what is there. You may find a place where you can share a little bit of information; or you may find a need that you are positioned perfectly to fill. For instance, community forums inspired military housing companies to offer some of their empty units to hurricane victims, and hundreds of children were motivated to run their own charitable drives to send supplies and money to the victims of the earthquake in Kashmir. The next time disaster strikes, while you're watching the images on television as the tragedy unfolds, log on and see if you can find community forums for the disaster. It's a way you can look for ways you can help, instead of wringing your hands because there is nothing you can do.Whether it's finding the right charity to donate money or goods to, or to call to offer your assistance, or looking for more direct ways you can help by arranging places for victims to stay, an online forum will be able to direct you. In essence, online forums help you help others. What more could you ask for from the Internet?

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