Twitter twitter everywhere…this is what i witnessed in 12 hours from 2:00 AM IST on 28/02/2010 to 2:00 PM IST on 28/02/2010…
the earthquake in Chile that occured on 27/02/2010 and the follow up to the tsunami that threatened the larger chunk of the Pacific Islands was probably the world’s largest covered natural calamity; as i watched on twitter people tweeting live news, evacuation plans and advice grew insurmountably. Several hundred tweets per second and i had to hit the refresh button every few seconds to get all the updates. If you just want to have an idea about the enormity of support that people in Hawaii and Japan recieved just search for #Hawaii, #Hitsunami, #Pacific, #Japan or #Chile.
Post this event i feel twitter has now developed a social resposibility and has become a vital tool for people in the event of such a disaster. Also, what resulted in this whole scenario was that people in the affected areas who had no access to television/ radio but to phone reception were aware of what to do and what places to avoid. Also, in Hawai the situation looked pretty grim at the beginning with the civic authorities shutting down the sewage treatment plant and issuing a notice to people n0t to flush the toilets till further information was given. This was tweeted on a massive scale in twitter, but simultaneously people also had developed a sense of responsibilty asking fellow tweeters not to access evacuation plans as the servers were pretty jammed up in Hawaii.
Following the December 2005 tsunami which hit South-East Asia and crippled a dozen countries a well collaborated effort was put to develop a global tsunami warning system and this was put to test in yesterday’s conditions and proved to be a roaring success. It gave the civic authorities in Hawaii and Japan sufficient time to evacuate people to safer places.
The sequence of events in the past day also led me to dig up information regarding the tectonic plate movements and the major fault lines and this led me to believe that an earthquake of such cataclysmic proportions cannot occur independently; a few hours later there was news of another calamitous earthquake that occured on the North Western Province in Pakistan along the Afghan border measuring 6.2 on the richter scale.
Here are some links to the same:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake
http://www.thespec.com/News/BreakingNews/article/726926
Now that the Pacific is calming down i feel that twitter is something people can look upto in times of crisis for help immediately. This is because there are ordinary people like you and me out there who want to be safe and well and wish that you be the same too…
And the live streams from Ustream were a marvellous effort…Cheers…
God bless…
