Tornadoes in the Time of Twitter

It's now been two weeks since my hometown of Woodward, Oklahoma, was hit by a tornado. It was a weekend when - for the second time ever - the National Weather Service issued tornado warnings more than 24 hours in advance, this time for Oklahoma, Kansas, and other Plains states. Friday afternoon a tornado hit near Norman, and that was just the beginning. All day Saturday storms were moving through Oklahoma and Kansas; we had the Weather Channel on, and I kept seeing the parts of the map that included towns where I used to live. When I went to bed, it seemed like Woodward might have dodged the bullet in spite of multiple tornadoes being spotted in the county, but on Sunday morning when I got up, there was the news that Woodward had been hit.

It was just after midnight. Most of the town's tornado sirens had been taken out a lightning strike; I'm not sure if it was during that final storm or during one of the others earlier in the day. The tornado tracked along the northwestern edge of town, leveling some homes and damaging many more, and damaging some businesses, including the movie theater. Four of the six deaths were among residents of a trailer park.

Although the national media did cover the story, it was really local efforts, from the local newspaper and social media, that did the job. The Woodward News was providing updates by Twitter and posting photos on Facebook. Very soon after the tornado someone - or maybe a couple of people - from Joplin, Missouri, created Woodward Tornado Info on Facebook. It was rapidly handed off to Woodward natives Amber Wolanski and Lindsey Snider-Scotney, and became a community bulletin board to share up-to-the-minute information about needs, volunteer opportunities, scams, where do make cash donations, and more recently fundraisers. Matt Lehenbauer, Woodward's Emergency Management Director, told the Woodward News, "It has been an absolute godsend for recruiting volunteers...We've been able to rapidly fill needs in just a minute or an hour or 2. It's been phenomenal in recovery."   Mr. Lehenbauer said there were plans to have social media team to help with disasters in the future.  He's convinced it's valuable, but needs help to use it most effectively.  He told the Woodward News that the local emergency management team "may take volunteers who like to be on Facebook and are good with computers to help down the road."

Although the Governor of Oklahoma asked for Federal assistance, Woodward wasn't eligible for FEMA disaster relief (I think the criteria are that the destruction has to exceed what can be dealt with using local and state resources, and given what all has been done already I guess I see the point), but local businesses are eligible for loans from the Small Business Administration. Local banks and the Chamber of Commerce are collecting donations for the Woodward Tornado Relief Fund. Apache Corporation, an oil and gas company, donated $350,000 to upgrade the city's tornado warning system; there's been some other large corporate and personal donations as well. Larry Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers did a benefit concert in Woodward that raised more than $50,000, and Woodward Tornado Info is working on getting more musicians to come to Woodward for tornado relief events.

Woodward was hit by a tornado in 1947. That storm destroyed much of the town and killed around a hundred people. "Back in those days, the National Weather Service forbid their forecasters from using the word tornado in their forecasts, a practice that continued until 1950. The only weather alarms were sounded by rural telephone supervisors calling each other." When the 1947 tornado struck, it was the third day of a national telephone strike, and there had been picket lines in Woodward; after the storm, the local telephone operators returned to work in spite of the strike.

Even though the sirens didn't sound on April 15, the Oklahoma City television stations were broadcasting warnings, as were weather radios. Others in Woodward got telephone calls from family or friends. Now, the new sirens are getting installed, and the Woodward News and Woodward Tornado Info are doing a great job of sharing information. And the National Weather Service -- long over their reluctance to talk about tornadoes in forecasts -- have this spring been evaluating the use of even stronger warning language, with phrases like "mass devastation," "catastrophic," and "unsurvivable" being evaluated for use in warnings when needed.



(photo from City of Woodward)

Woodward will rebuild; it's a resilient community, and the city will recover, just like they did the last time. Even though I didn't live there all that long, I do think of Woodward as my hometown and I'm sorry I couldn't be there to help; I probably will not make it there until my 40th high school reunion in the fall. But I can write a check, so that's what I'll do. And if you want to, too, make it out to the Tornado Relief Fund.

Welcome to the 21st Century

Years ago I read a book by Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View, about scenario planning. The section that made the biggest impression on me was that planners at Royal Dutch Shell - using publicly available information - identified the possibility that the U.S.S.R. would collapse long before it did. Sometimes, we can identify a range of scenarios and come up with decent estimates of probability. But sometimes we can't, or at least we don't.

I don't know if any of the people whose job it is to think about these things really saw the Arab Spring coming. Gregory Gause wrote about this in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in an article with the self-explanatory title, "Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring." He says that they missed it because no one had been paying attention to the military. "Most scholars assumed that no daylight existed between the ruling regimes and their military and security services." International donors have pressured the non-oil-producing states to modernize their economies. "Some Middle East specialists thought that economic liberalization could establish new bases of support for Arab authoritarians and encourage the economic growth necessary to grapple with the challenges of growing populations...Meanwhile, Western governments pushed the idea that economic reform represented a step toward political reform." Of course, saying so does not make it true.

Looking for this issue yesterday afternoon, I found the January/February issue, with the cover story, "The Political Power of Social Media," by Clay Shirky. He makes the case that one of the most important roles that social media play in promoting democracy ultimately will be in facilitating the development of civil society. "Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss the issues presented to the public." In the long run, it's more important that a country's citizens can talk to each other than that they have access to Google and The New York Times. "Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation."

Last week I went to a very interesting presentation on Cuba. While I've been following events in the Middle East and North Africa, I didn't know much about Cuba, so I learned a lot. There is a little progress on the civil society front, and the Ladies in White have continued to march each Sunday since the arrests of dissidents in 2003 (although I've read since that their founder, Laura Pollan, recently died, so the future of that group may be uncertain). And there are now lots of cell phones in Cuba, and some freedom of communication even if the government doesn't like it. The speaker talked about the blogger, Yoani Sanchez, who has bravely written about life and politics in Cuba.  But the most interesting thing to me in his presentation was the observation that everyone in charge in Cuba is old - they are all in their 70s and 80s. Every time someone younger starts to become prominent, they get removed from their position - there's a phrase for it in Cuba, which means staying home in your pajamas. So, one way or another, change will come to Cuba.   The speaker would not let himself be drawn into speculation about what that future might be like. In the meantime, if you want to know about Cuba present, read Yoani Sanchez's blog. Her most recent post is about unmasking the people who monitor telecommunications in Cuba.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. Internet security company made the devices that the government of Syria is using to block access to the Internet. In the meantime, the government crackdown against the demonstrators continues. The U.N. estimates that more than 3,000 people - most of them civilians - have died since the uprising began in March.