Following a 2007 school shooting at Virginia Tech, St. John University of Manhattan, New York, installed a new emergency broadcast system designed to send students messages across a multitude of social networks and IM clients alerting them to dangerous situations which occur on campus.
James Pellow, St. John’s chief operating officer, told the New York Times “everything from bullhorns to texting was considered” in addressing the school’s security needs. Luckily, the decision came just in time.
After installing the system on campus that summer, a gunman walked onto campus only months later as school administrators debated sending a test message that day. The mock run soon turned into the official first test of St. John’s high-tech security alert system, which delivered over 10,000 instant messages to students across campus. The system was later praised by then Gov. Elliot Spitzer and New York state legislators.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Louisiana, Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 2005, the U.S. Department of Commerce assessed IM use as a life-saving success for the National Weather Service.
In a service assessment released in June 2006, officials said a Huntsville, Ala. weather forecast office began providing backup for an office in Jackson, Miss., when overloaded phone circuits and damage to phone lines across the region limited communications with residents in Mississippi.
However, resilient in meeting the NWS mission to protect lives and property, officials said, Jackson forecasters were able to use a maintained satellite Internet connection to send IMs to local media partners regarding Katrina information as the office coordinated forecasting with the Huntsville office.
In the face of hurricane forecasting since 2006, officials have been encouraged to use IM as a means of communicating, especially as phone operations are likely to be knocked out in catastrophic weather.
Across the region in New Orleans, reporters at the Times-Picayune also utilized IM to help save lives over their website, which was continuously updated during the storm when resources were available. NOLA.com editor Jon Conley told the USC Online Journalism Review without IM communications, some readers may not have survived.
”Anybody who didn’t have instant messenger before the storm started, they are on instant messenger now,” Conley said.
Messages would come in from across the country with family in New Orleans, asking for help for a man “at this address and he's in the upstairs bedroom of his place.” As a result, the Times-Picayune was a source of information for emergency service officials as to how and where to direct rescue services. In the end, the paper’s online presence, served well by IM and email communications, helped save lives during Katrina.
Despite damage to phone infrastructure, Conley assessed the proliferation of IM and text-enabled cell phones ultimately may be a communications medium of first choice in future disasters.
“We figured out that even in the poorest part of town, people have a cell phone. And it's a text-enabled cell phone. And they were sending out text messages to friends or family, and they were putting it in our forums or sending it in emails to us,” he said. “They're saying now that the body counts won't be as bad as they thought and I know at least some of that is that people figured out how to…use this kludge to save people's lives.”
