    [Senate Hearing 112-390]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 112-390

                       UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF SOCIAL
          MEDIA AS A COMMUNICATION TOOL IN THE AFTERMATH OF DISASTERS

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

     AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                                     of the

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                             HOMELAND SECURITY AND
                              GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                          ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                  MAY 5, 2011

                                   __________

            Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov/

           Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
                            and Governmental Affairs

                      U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

    67-635 PDF                WASHINGTON : 2012
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
    Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC
    area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104  Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC
    20402-0001

            COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                   JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
    CARL LEVIN, Michigan                 SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
    DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii              TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
    THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           SCOTT P. BROWN, Massachusetts
    MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas              JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
    MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana          RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
    CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri           JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
    JON TESTER, Montana                  ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
    MARK BEGICH, Alaska                  RAND PAUL, Kentucky

                      Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
          Nicholas A. Rossi, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                      Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
                 Joyce Ward Publications Clerk and GPO Detailee

     AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                       MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas, Chairman
    DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii              RAND PAUL, Kentucky
    MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana          SCOTT P. BROWN, Massachusetts
    JON TESTER, Montana                  RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
                         Donny Williams, Staff Director
                         Amanda Fox, Professional Staff
                  Justin Stevens, Minority Professional Staff
                           Kelsey Stroud, Chief Clerk

                                C O N T E N T S

                                     ------
    Opening statement:
                                                                       Page
        Senator Pryor................................................     1
        Senator Brown................................................     2

                                   WITNESSES

                             THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2011

    Hon. W. Craig Fugate, Administrator, Federal Emergency Management
      Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security...................     3
    Renee Preslar, Public Information Officer, Arkansas Department of
      Emergency Management...........................................    12
    Suzy DeFrancis, Chief Public Affairs Officer, American Red Cross.    13
    Shona L. Brown, Senior Vice President, Google.org................    15
    Heather Blanchard, Co-Founder, CrisisCommons.....................    17

                         Alphabetical List of Witnesses

    Blanchard, Heather:
        Testimony....................................................    17
        Prepared statement with attachment...........................    58
    Brown, Shona L.:
        Testimony....................................................    15
        Prepared statement...........................................    53
    DeFrancis, Suzy:
        Testimony....................................................    13
        Prepared statement...........................................    47
    Fugate, W. Craig.:
        Testimony....................................................     3
        Prepared statement...........................................    35
    Preslar, Renee:
        Testimony....................................................    12
        Prepared statement...........................................    42

                                    APPENDIX

    Chart referenced by Senator Pryor................................    92
    Chart referenced by Senator Pryor................................    93
    Chart referenced by Senator Pryor................................    94
    Questions and responses for the Record from:
        Mr. Fugate...................................................    95
        Ms. Preslar..................................................    98
        Ms. DeFrancis................................................    99
        Ms. Brown....................................................   101
        Ms. Blanchard................................................   109

                          UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF
                        SOCIAL MEDIA AS A COMMUNICATIONS
                       TOOL IN THE AFTERMATH OF DISASTERS

                                  ----------

                             THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2011

                                       U.S. Senate,
                 Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery
                             and Intergovernmental Affairs,
                        of the Committee on Homeland Security
                                      and Governmental Affairs,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:05 a.m., in
    Room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Mark L.
    Pryor, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Pryor and Brown.

                   OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PRYOR

        Senator Pryor. I want to welcome everyone to the
    Subcommittee. I want to thank you all for being here, and all
    of our witnesses for being here, and all the interested
    parties. I also want to thank Senator Brown for being here
    today, and I look forward to his service in this slot. It may
    be temporary, but we certainly appreciate you and all that you
    are doing. It has been a pleasure working with you and your
    staff on this hearing.
        Let me start by just saying that we have two panels today,
    very qualified witnesses. I certainly want to thank Director
    Fugate for being here. As busy as he is around the country
    right now, his time is very precious, and he has been generous
    with his time and always helpful to this Committee and
    Subcommittee and helpful to the Senate. So thank you for being
    here, and all the other witnesses as well, all the ones who are
    involved in various disasters around the country. We really
    appreciate all that you all have done and appreciate you being
    here today.
        Last week, a series of severe storms swept across the
    Southern United States causing immense damage and a historic
    loss of life. The storm system spurred powerful thunderstorms,
    tornadoes, and flooding, and it was the second deadliest day of
    tornado activity in U.S. history, killing 341 people in seven
    States, including an unimaginable 249 in Alabama. At least
    those are the latest figures I have. Fourteen people lost their
    lives as a result of the storm in the State of Arkansas, and I
    want to offer my most sincere condolences to the families of
    those impacted or killed during those storms. I hope that your
    families are comforted through this very difficult time.
        Today the Subcommittee has been joined by very insightful
    guests to talk about the increasingly important role that
    social media networks play during disaster response and
    recovery efforts. From search and rescue to family
    reunification, to safety updates, to communicating vital
    shelter information, to other critical or life-saving
    information, and to all around situational awareness, social
    media is becoming a tool that people are coming to rely on and
    to use heavily during emergencies.
        In July 2010, the American Red Cross conducted a survey--
    and they are here today, and they will probably talk about this
    in more detail, but they conducted a survey of over 1,000
    people about their use of social media sites in emergency
    situations. The results of the survey were striking: 82 percent
    of the participants used some form of social media at least
    once a day, and nearly half of those use it every day or nearly
    every day. The survey found that if they needed help and could
    not reach 911, one in five would try to contact responders
    through a digital means such as e-mail, Web sites, or social
    media.
        If Web users knew of someone else who needed help, 44
    percent would ask other people in their social network to
    contact authorities. Three out of four respondents would expect
    help to arrive in an hour if a call for help was delivered over
    the Internet; 35 percent would post a request for help directly
    on a response agency's Facebook page, and 28 percent would send
    a direct Twitter message to responders.
        More than half of the respondents said they would use
    social media to let loved ones know that they were safe. Their
    survey also said that respondents with children in households
    are more likely to use social media, 81 percent, versus 67
    percent with those who do not have a child in the house.
        As we work continuously to improve our efforts to respond
    to and to recover from disasters, it is important that we find
    new and creative ways to communicate information to those
    facing the often chaotic circumstances that surround
    emergencies and disasters. I want to thank all of our witnesses
    for appearing today and contributing to an important
    conversation that I am certain will lead to more effective
    tools that will save lives and make delivery of assistance more
    efficient in the future. Senator Brown.

                   OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BROWN

        Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
    opportunity to serve with you on this Subcommittee today, and
    as you referenced, my thoughts and prayers go out to those in
    Alabama and the Southeast who are dealing with the loss of
    their loved ones and homes this past week.
        Clearly, there is no better time to discuss what we are
    discussing today. I know our witnesses will provide useful
    insight into the tools and technology that may assist in better
    response to the recoveries and, unfortunately, future disasters
    that may be forthcoming.
        I actually had an opportunity to go to Google and other
    types of social media companies to understand what they do and
    how they do it, and we have met here on Capitol Hill with the
    Facebook folks and others. And having kids, I understand how
    they have adjusted and adapted and really learned a lot quicker
    than me or other members of my family in using social media and
    related technology. And I have used it quite a bit myself in
    the last couple of years. So I think it is important to
    understand how it is being used and what the opportunities for
    future use are and how we can actually use this when we have
    natural disasters and other types of situations that we need to
    get out reliable, important, sometimes life-saving information.
    I think it is another tool in the toolbox, so to speak, and I
    am looking forward to the testimony of everybody, and I
    appreciate everybody appearing today.
        Thank you.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you.
        Our first witness is the Honorable W. Craig Fugate,
    Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency
    (FEMA). He was appointed on May 13, 2009, to serve as
    Administrator based on his highly distinguished career in
    emergency management. He will discuss FEMA's short-term and
    long-term goals for enhanced use of social media tools, and I
    know that Director Fugate has just come off the road. He has
    been down in many places, and he may tell us about some of that
    as well.
        We do have a timing system today, and we will do 5 minutes
    on your opening, and all of your written testimony will be put
    in the record. Mr. Fugate.

     TESTIMONY OF HON. W. CRAIG FUGATE,\1\ ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL
       EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
                                SECURITY

        Mr. Fugate. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
    Brown. I think Senator Brown said it best. When we talk about
    social media, we need to understand it is another tool in our
    toolbox. But it is by no means the only way in which we need to
    be able to communicate with the public, both in warning and
    learning situations, but as well as communicating with them.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Fugate appears in the appendix on
    page 35.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        But I think social media offers a new challenge to us.
    Previously, we have had the ability to communicate at the
    public, whether it is radio, TV, Web pages, even billboards
    that are going up across much of the Southeast where these
    tornadoes struck, inserts into bills and other things. But our
    ability to communicate with the public and have two-way
    conversations has always been limited.
        As we have seen in numerous disasters in recent years, we
    oftentimes have taken the approach in government of creating
    systems that people have to adapt to how we communicate. We do
    not always adapt to how they are communicating. And as we have
    seen, people began using these tools differently, many of
    which--or, in fact, almost everything that we use that we call
    social media was never designed with disasters in mind. But
    they became increasingly tools of how people were communicating
    day to day and sharing information with families and loved ones
    that began providing a role in a disaster in ways that for us
    in government we did not innovate this. We did not create it;
    we did not direct it. But we began observing it.
        I think for us at the Federal Emergency Management Agency
    as well as my peers at the State and local levels, as well as
    the volunteer agencies and other groups that are active in
    disaster response, we began to see a whole new group of
    volunteers emerge with skill sets of being able to apply this
    technology in real-time situations without necessarily a
    direction from a central location, but more of a term that is
    oftentimes used of crowdsourcing, many people working on
    similar problems, sharing information, oftentimes getting to
    better solutions.
        Mr. Chairman, it has caused me to realize that in some ways
    social media, and particularly volunteers and groups in the
    industry that are involved in this, I like to put it this way:
    We need to innovate faster than the speed of government. And
    they are doing it. And so instead of trying to make systems fit
    us, make the public fit how we communicate. We at FEMA are
    trying to meet that need and figuring out how to apply this.
        At this point if somebody says Craig, what is the
    performance matrix? What is the measurement of success? How are
    you doing this?, I would say we are still experimenting. We are
    still really just trying to understand how these tools could be
    applied.
        Mr. Chairman, most of the times when we come into these
    meetings, the first thing you do is turn off your cell phones,
    hide them and get them out of sight, but I am going to bring
    mine out because here is what I want to communicate in the
    short time I have.
        In most disasters, when you are displaced from your home,
    you no longer have access to your computer. You may not have
    WiFi access. But in many disasters, including being on the
    ground in Haiti where we had folks there within a day of the
    earthquake--I was down there a week later--the one thing that
    was working were mobile devices. And it is this that I think we
    in the Federal Government need to understand, that we are
    moving more and more away from a Web-based capacity to a mobile
    environment.
        So one of the things we did at FEMA was to start moving our
    information into mobile formats. We have a mobile Web page,
    m.fema.gov, because when you are a disaster survivor, you do
    not need pretty pictures, you do not need our org chart, and
    you certainly do not need all of our programs. You need
    information that will be low bandwidth, that you can go to a
    phone and get things you need.
        We designed our registration so that you could access it by
    your smartphone. But we are also learning that the public has
    tremendous information in disaster areas that oftentimes we
    have taken the approach that it was not official or not usable
    because it did not come from the traditional forms of
    communication.
        Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that we should look at these
    as data points, as sensors, that individually may not provide
    us the best information, but collectively oftentimes are the
    earliest and best reports of the severity of an impact and are
    telling us stories faster than any assessment team or any
    ability to get into an area. We have seen this in Haiti. We saw
    this in Japan, Christchurch, and even in the tornadoes across
    the South--pictures, stories, updates giving us information.
        I think we need to take the approach in the Federal
    Government that the public is a resource and not a liability
    and learn how to listen. But we also need to recognize that we
    are in a mobile environment, and the Federal Government needs
    to focus more upon developing the data to support our citizens
    in a way that they can use in a disaster rather than making
    them fit our traditional models.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Senator Pryor. I think those are points very well made and
    well taken.
        Because Arkansas has had so many tornadoes, storm events,
    and floods in the last couple of weeks--and, again, you guys
    have been great about being down there and being on the spot,
    being onsite and helping people--I have been giving out that
    Web site that you are talking about, the disasterassistance.gov
    Web site, and your toll-free number. And pretty much everything
    I have done this week when I talk to Arkansas media, I have
    been giving that out and encouraging them to do that, because I
    think that it is just--people just communicate that way today,
    and you guys can provide such great tools for people to access
    immediately, and it just is really a game changer. So I
    appreciate you all being on top of that.
        At FEMA, do you all have people in office that are doing
    your social media focus here? Or is this just part of your
    overall effort, or do you have to have folks that actually
    focus on this?
        Mr. Fugate. We do have dedicated staff that are working on
    what we call digital engagement. Initially, when I got to FEMA,
    the Web page, using things like YouTube to post update videos,
    and beginning to do partnerships with Facebook where we would
    do joint Facebook pages per disaster with the State to share
    information to the public.
        When I got there, one of the things that I asked early on
    was to begin tweeting, which I had done in the State of
    Florida, so I now tweet ``@CraigatFEMA.'' I actually do my own
    tweets. So many people keep asking me, Who does your tweets? I
    am, like, I do not have staff to tweet, I tweet. And I do not
    tweet about me; I tweet about things that I think are
    interesting.
        A lot of the people that I communicate with are my peers
    and practitioners. It is actually interesting. Not only is this
    useful in disasters, but it is helping build a community in the
    emergency management that traditionally had to go to course or
    conferences to see and hear across the Nation ideas. There are
    things that, when you get into the nomenclature of all of these
    terms, concept of what a hashtag is in Twitter, what it is, it
    is something that you build into a message that you can link on
    that can take---everybody who uses that tag can link everybody
    else's messages together, so very early emergence in the
    emergency management community that are asking these very
    questions about social media applications is a pound sign,
    social media emergency management (SMEM). That is not led by
    FEMA, but we have staff that participate.
        But this is the conversation taking place with local
    emergency managers, States, volunteers, researchers, the
    private sector, and we have never had those kind of--we never
    saw that interaction outside of conference settings or courses,
    which was limited.
        So we have a centrally directed effort, but it also is
    underlying some key principles, is give information all the way
    from high bandwidth to low bandwidth to in-person. We cannot
    forget there are people who do not use social media. But
    communicate and provide tools the way people are communicating
    and using those tools, not limit them to what is just easy for
    us to administer.
        Senator Pryor. All right. You may not have this available,
    but do you have examples of how social media has actually saved
    lives?
        Mr. Fugate. There are examples. I think you are going to
    have some people in the next hearing that will talk about this.
    But some of the examples in Haiti where the wireless
    infrastructure came back on rather quickly, as people were
    trapped in debris and rubble and you did not have a centralized
    government system to receive those calls because of extreme
    damages to both the government of Haiti and to the United
    Nations, people were able to get out text messages that were
    being received by people outside the area. They were able to
    figure out where those people were, approximately, based upon
    the towers and went back and worked with the cell providers.
    And I think you are going to hear stories about how a lot of
    volunteers and people with a lot of technology experience were
    able to start mapping and providing data in a way that it
    allowed the United Nations (U.N.) and other forces from the
    United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to
    get Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Teams and other resources
    where needed. And that was just one example in a country that
    many of us were kind of taken aback on the devastation, but
    also the resiliency of the Haitians themselves and how much
    mobile technology had actually been integrated into their
    country prior to the earthquake.
        Senator Pryor. And I think back to Hurricane Katrina, and I
    think about all those folks in the Superdome and other places,
    and I guess--was the wireless network up and running at that
    point? You may not know this, but was it up and running in
    those early days?
        Mr. Fugate. Mr. Chairman, I really do not know, but it is
    something that--one of the things we have learned in my
    experience in 2004 and 2005--and I do not know if we have any
    of the wireless operators that could provide this information.
    But it has been my observation that the industry learned from
    those events and how it worked very hard to get in additional
    resources to both bring back up wireless but also increase
    capacity. We saw this in the tornadoes where they brought in
    additional equipment and worked to get cell coverage back up,
    get wireless back up. And because of that, we have seen--and,
    again, I kind of look at Haiti as a lesson learned. We actually
    were assuming until Haiti that wireless communications in areas
    of devastation would be unreliable and we really would not need
    to plan for it. Haiti taught me that the industry has learned
    and is becoming more resilient, and oftentimes it will probably
    be for many people in the public the first communication that
    comes back up is going to be the wireless services.
        Senator Pryor. Right. We have a chart here--the second
    chart,\1\ Don, if you do not mind--and it shows Internet usage
    after four major events, and Haiti is one of those. Then you
    mentioned Christchurch, New Zealand;  Chile; and Japan. And as
    I understand that chart, the peaks are the top Internet usage,
    and the valleys are usually at night when folks were sleeping.
    But you see that they keep using the Internet, and it is a
    great way to communicate with folks. And like you said, a lot
    of folks are out of their homes at this point, or they may not
    have electricity or whatever. They may not have access to their
    stationary device, but their mobile device they certainly can
    utilize. So I am glad that FEMA is on top of that trend and is
    really leading the way in that trend to try to communicate in
    that way, two-way communication, you are hearing from people,
    but also you are communicating back to people what they know.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The chart referenced by Senator Pryor appears in the appendix
    on page 93.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        So in some ways, it sounds like social media is the
    emergency manager's dream because it is such a tool that is so
    widespread in so many people's hands. Is that fair to say?
        Mr. Fugate. Mr. Chairman, some of my peers now equate the
    wireless combined with social media as a revolution in
    emergency management as powerful as wireless was to original
    public safety radio systems, except now this is far more
    reaching in the ability to communicate with the public. And so
    as we see this, again, I think our role here at FEMA is to keep
    up with the public and not necessarily fall back into what I
    call innovation at the speed of government, but really look to
    the technology industry, and as Senator Brown said, I have had
    the opportunity to go to Google, I have been to Facebook, I
    have been to Twitter, and really looking into their insights of
    how we better utilize the private sector as part of the team
    and not try to re-create things that they do better than us,
    but use those tools to better communicate and listen to the
    public as we deal with disasters.
        Senator Pryor. Is it your impression that during a disaster
    the public will find you using social media? Or do they know
    where to go?
        Mr. Fugate. No, sir. Again, those people that have had
    disasters do not, and so this is why we work so hard. And I
    appreciate every time--this is pretty much the drill, is to get
    people to register with FEMA, get the information out there. So
    it is always for us important to get people to know where they
    can get that information. Part of this is working with the
    States, things like joint Facebook pages. But I think, by and
    large, most people are not thinking about FEMA, and that is why
    trying to build systems that are government-specific tend to
    fail. It is our ability to use the tools they are using and
    then direct them to things they are used to using. I mean, if
    you think about it, when we tell people to go to a Web page
    that is our typical Federal Web page, it is not easy to find
    the information in a disaster. That is why we built the mobile
    page so that when you send them there, it is strictly about
    disaster information that they need, not, the traditional way
    that we oftentimes put information on a Web page.
        Senator Pryor. Great. As you are going through this over
    the next few weeks, I hope you will keep the Subcommittee
    posted on how many folks are using your page and how that is
    going.
        Mr. Fugate. We have that, and we will provide that back to
    staff. You can actually see some of the data of who is using
    the mobile page, who is using Web pages, versus the traditional
    calling into the 1-800 number.
        Senator Pryor. That would be great. Senator Brown.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I appreciate the fact that you have been trying to push out
    their home page Web page information, and when I was preparing
    for the hearing and seeing how we could help, our office could
    help, we are going to actually do the same thing. We are going
    to put it on our official site in the event of an emergency who
    you can contact, how you can do it through the various social
    media or the traditional as well as the new ones, and on our
    Facebook--I mean, I think I have 250,000--we are going to do
    the same thing there because I think it is so important to get
    the information out, because when you are having that natural
    disaster, you are not thinking about you want to just get in
    touch with somebody, and you are going to use any mechanism,
    any phone, land line, shortwave radio, whatever, to help your
    family and help the people that you care deeply about.
        So this hearing and being here as the Ranking Member
    triggered me to work with my office to develop a plan as to how
    we can, in fact, get that information out. I would encourage
    all of us as elected officials to do the same thing.
        I noted that the Washington Post stated that people
    frantically text 911 in an emergency, apparently, and they are
    unaware that their texts actually go nowhere because in all but
    a few cases it has not been modernized to actually receive the
    messages. And people have a lot of faith in 911. I mean, you
    hear the commercials. We hear regularly, we honor young
    children regularly for calling 911. But now they text 911.
        What are the biggest challenges actually to bringing the
    emergency services like 911 into the 21st century in your
    opinion?
        Mr. Fugate. This is a project that the Federal
    Communications Commission (FCC) is heavily engaged in called
    Next Generation 911, and it is a recognition that as technology
    has continued to evolve, it has evolved faster than the
    original 911 system design. When 911 was originally created, we
    used rotary dial phones. It was an analog technology. Over
    time, we have added the ability to give the address and the
    location and phone number that people were calling from. But
    then cell phones started to occur, and all of a sudden we
    realized that all of those phone lines were hardmapped; cell
    phones are not. And so the industry and the FCC worked to be
    able to map cell phones, so if you could not tell people where
    you were but you were calling for an emergency, they could find
    you with your cell phones.
        But now we have, as you point out, people that are using
    text messages. As the Red Cross survey says, when people text
    or update or tweet for help, they expect there to be an answer.
    And this is something that Next Generation 911 is looking to
    address.
        Most likely the first part of that will be text messaging
    because it would be very similar to a traditional 911 call from
    a cell phone. The other types of social media are going to take
    more time, but I think it is a recognition that the FCC--that
    we need to do that to get that help, but also what it could
    provide to the responders. And I think in looking at what is
    done in Europe and other places, oftentimes they have the
    capability to take live video feeds from people on the scene
    and give it to the responders as they are en route.
        Part of our challenges are 911 was--essentially the
    architecture and the equipment and the investment was based
    upon rotary phones and push-button phone technology. And now as
    the FCC looks at Next Generation 911, how do we incorporate the
    new technologies and not limit ourselves to just the voice
    calls?
        Senator Brown. And that is a good segue into my next
    question, approximately a $9 billion price tag to actually
    implement those potential changes in a time when we are in a
    fiscal emergency and dealing with a lot of issues. With Senator
    Carper, I am on a Subcommittee that deals with fraud, waste,
    and abuse, trying to zero in on all that stuff. Is there a way
    not to reinvent the wheel and work with companies like Google
    and Facebook and Twitter, wherever the social media? I know
    these entities did not reinvent the wheel and did not start at
    the base level and then have to spend a tremendous amount of
    money and maybe incorporate a lot of what is already out there
    so we can just, add on and potentially save dollars. Is that
    possible?
        Mr. Fugate. Having served at the county level where I was
    actually responsible for the 911 system, and knowing that
    history of primarily the wired telecodes, as the providers of
    both the technology and equipment, I think this will be one of
    the challenges as we move forward to Next Generation 911, is to
    incorporate the other technology players and do that in a way
    that builds a system that we can continue to enhance without
    necessarily limiting ourselves to just what we know now.
        When we look at the architecture of these systems and we
    look at where we were and where we are going, it was--we still
    call them ``public safety answering points.'' It is not a
    network. It is you dial a phone, it goes to a dispatch center,
    and then they operate the call from there. And I think a
    network-based approach like we are looking at with public radio
    for public safety, looking at network-based radio systems, is
    the direction that Next Generation 911, and that will open up,
    I think, a lot more of the technology companies. But I think
    you are correct in that this has to be done not just what the
    immediate needs are, but also building a system that we are
    going to be able to adapt to new technologies that we may--
    nobody knew about Twitter 5 years ago.
        Senator Brown. Right.
        Mr. Fugate. And so in looking at systems that oftentimes
    take decades of capitalization to build is how do we build a
    system----
        Senator Brown. That is adaptable, yes.
        Mr. Fugate [continuing]. That allows us to adapt to the new
    technology.
        Senator Brown. I know with the storms and everything that
    has happened recently in Alabama and around the Southeast, when
    telephone and cellular service is interrupted, what are the
    Federal Government's efforts to set up mobile cell towers,
    charging stations, Internet hotspots in disaster zones? And is
    this part of an SOP in times of major events? Do you have
    working partnerships with any of the mobile companies to do
    these sorts of things?
        Mr. Fugate. Yes, sir. This was something that I have been
    pushing for a long time. Our primary focus with our Federal
    communication assets has been to get the public safety
    responders back on the air, and so that will continue to be the
    priority. But I have also asked my staff to work with the
    industry that I agree with you, I think it is just as important
    that we get connectivity back to the public. And you brought up
    something that I asked our team about, and we are working with
    industry. We had oftentimes brought in phone banks into areas
    of devastation so that people could start making phone calls.
    We have asked and are working on--and I believe I had a report
    this morning that Verizon is starting this process--is to get
    cell phone chargers out there.
        Senator Brown. Right.
        Mr. Fugate. So that people can charge their communication
    devices. And, again, I think this is--oftentimes we tend to be
    reactive, but, again, it points out the need for looking at how
    the public communicates in recognizing that, yes, phone banks
    are good, but, hey, also cell phone chargers for the variety of
    cell phones is also something that is just as much needed.
        Senator Brown. Just a final thought. I would think that
    would want to be part of FEMA's, mobile response, a lot of
    the--whether it is the cell charger units or whatever. So I
    would just--I am sure they are considering it.
        Mr. Fugate. We are definitely going to be adding that to
    the toolkit, and it is being implemented as we speak now
    throughout many of these areas.
        Senator Brown. Thanks for what you are doing. I appreciate
    it.
        Senator Pryor. Director Fugate, before you run, I just have
    one or two followups.
        I am going to get you to put Slide 1 back up.
        One thing you will see on this Slide 1,\1\ it is great
    information, but 69 percent of people out there think that
    emergency response agencies should regularly monitor their Web
    sites and social media sites so that you all can respond
    promptly. I guess the question is: Are we building an
    expectation here that we cannot meet? And are we monitoring
    these as we should? Some of this may be State-by-State or even
    city-by-city issues. But do you want to respond to that?
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The chart referenced by Senator Pryor appears in the appendix
    on page 92.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Mr. Fugate. Yes, sir, Senator. This is one of the questions
    that in some cases people are saying should we be doing this
    because we may create a false expectation. I think, again, as
    we do this, we are really trying to figure out how is the best
    way to direct people to the best information, which oftentimes
    is their local emergency managers and then their State
    emergency managers, and then what information we provide from
    FEMA. But we do agree that if you are going to post a blog, we
    do moderate our comments; we do not necessarily--what we do is
    we just make sure that whatever comments there are not
    offensive. But we do not self-censor any criticism. We post it.
    So the only moderating we do is to make sure there is not
    offensive material, but we will post the good and the bad and
    the ugly. And then as we see stuff, we will respond to it.
        But we also really need to make it clear that in many cases
    it is very difficult to have one-on-one conversations. In many
    cases we are listening to what the community is telling us. And
    we may not be able to directly respond one on one. So this is
    the concern and one of the reasons why we make it very clear.
    If this is an emergency, contact 911, contact your local
    responders. If this is information or opinions or what you are
    seeing, we want to look at it. But we may not be able to
    respond to each one of those postings.
        And so these are kind of the challenges. I said, we have to
    be able to listen to the community, but we may not be able to
    have that conversation one on one. Yet in one event I actually
    did. We had a tropical cyclone in the Central Pacific bearing
    down on American Samoa. I was updating and tweeting out that
    the forecast, which most people would think would come from the
    National Hurricane Center, actually had come from the Central
    Pacific Hurricane Center in Hawaii. I had a person tweet back
    to me that he was on the island and these were the conditions.
    And I sent back and I said, ``Thanks for the updates. Can you
    keep sending them?'' So we kept using--and we were using the
    hashtag of the name of the storm, so he kept giving me updates.
        And so in real time I had a person that was down there in
    American Samoa giving me updates about the tropical cyclone.
    Then it was kind of a--it was almost humorous, but it gave a
    good sense of what was going on.
        Midway through the back end of the storm, he begins
    tweeting the Chicago Bears/Green Bay game because he was a
    Packers fan, and I realized that if he is getting information
    about the game and that was his new concern, maybe the storm
    was not so bad, and it turned out that fortunately it was
    minimal damage.
        That is a rare example, but it is also very telling of the
    power of looking at the public as part of the team and a
    resource and doing a better job of figuring out how to
    communicate with them. Again, all I was doing was trying to get
    information out about where the storm forecasts were coming
    from because this is not something many people were familiar
    with. But it is just one anecdotal example of how the public
    can oftentimes tell us more about what is going on than even
    our official sources.
        Senator Pryor. Right. That is great and thank you for that.
    Senator Brown, did you have anything else?
        Senator Brown. No, Mr. Chairman.
        Senator Pryor. Director Fugate, thank you for being here
    today. We probably have some more questions for the record that
    we will submit, but thank you very much for being here. I know
    you have to hurry back to do your job, but thank you very much
    for being here.
        Mr. Fugate. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you, Senator
    Brown.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, sir.
        Senator Pryor. As Director Fugate is leaving, we will go
    ahead and set up the table for the next panel.
        We will go ahead and set up the witness table for the next
    panel, and I will go ahead and do a general introduction of
    folks as we go through this, as they are getting squared away.
        Our first witness will be Renee Preslar, public information
    officer for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management
    (ADEM), and she has had her hands full over the last couple of
    weeks, and she has been a vital resource in managing
    communications in some of Arkansas's worst disasters. So thank
    you for being here today.
        And, second, we will have Suzy DeFrancis, chief public
    affairs officer of the American Red Cross. We appreciate you
    being here, and you guys have been very, very busy around the
    Nation, particularly in the South, but other places as well,
    and we really appreciate your time today.
        Next we will have Shona Brown. Thank you for being here.
    She is Senior Vice President of Google.org, and she has
    spearheaded Google's people operations and business operations
    groups since 2003. She will share some of her experiences with
    us today, and we appreciate that.
        Then we will have Heather Blanchard, the co-founder of
    CrisisCommons. She has helped establish CrisisCommons, seeking
    to connect people and organizations using technology to
    innovate crisis management and global development. She will
    detail her experiences with recent disasters as well as
    emerging trends in the use of social media in emergency
    response.
        So, again, I want to thank you all for being here. Ms.
    Blanchard, I understand your mother is in the audience as well.
    Is that true? Good. Thank you, Mom, for being here. We
    appreciate that very much.
        What I would like to do is if we could do 5-minute opening
    statements and try to keep those to 5 minutes as best as
    possible, and then we will ask a few questions.
        Renee, do you want to go first? Thank you.

      TESTIMONY OF RENEE PRESLAR,\1\ PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICER,
              ARKANSAS DEPARTMENT OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

        Ms. Preslar. First of all, thank you guys so much for
    letting us come. I know all of us have been a little bit busy
    with the storms that have come through the Nation, but we feel
    like this was extremely important to kind of go through and
    explain what we do not only from the State's perspective but
    also from the local perspective, so we can hopefully move
    forward with the social media presence in disasters.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Preslar appears in the appendix
    on page 42.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Arkansas have been using social media pretty much since
    2008. We started a little bit with Facebook, but it was not
    just because it was something new and we thought this was
    amazing, it was something new we could do. It was because we
    physically saw documentation where our communities were coming
    together on these social sites in the wake of disasters, and we
    realized that, you know what? That was a venue and a media and
    an audience that we were not reaching directly because we were
    using our traditional sources, our print, our television, our
    radio stations. But using online, with the exception of our Web
    site, as a media outlet and as a tool we just had not done yet.
    And so we saw that was a vital resource, so we began with
    Facebook and used it on a preparedness stance before disasters,
    talking about what you can do. You can get a kit, you can make
    a plan, you can get prepared. You can stay informed with all
    the information that is going on.
        And we used it a little bit also as a mitigation aspect of
    disasters, too, simply to show people different projects that
    they could do to protect themselves in wakes of disasters.
        And then after the storms, the severe storms, the tornadoes
    that came through the positions, we had the tornadoes on
    February 5, and then we dealt with a lot of flooding in May and
    March and April and then December I think again. And then we
    had more tornadoes that seemed--and we saw where there was a
    need for us to transition from the preparedness and the
    mitigation side over to response and recovery on the social
    sites. So socially we began putting out messages on Facebook
    and on Twitter talking about these specific areas need to take
    cover. We worked directly with the National Weather Service.
    They were not on any social sites at that time. So the
    information that we were receiving from them, we would go ahead
    and pass along information, too.
        In the State of Arkansas, the way that the locals can get
    the sirens, tornado sirens, things of that nature, it is
    governed by the local individual jurisdictions. So some
    jurisdictions use tornado sirens. Some use reverse 911 and
    things of that nature. But we wanted to make sure that people
    had an ability to get information from wherever they were
    going, and that is what we started using, because you might not
    be in your home listening to the television or you might have
    satellite television and so during severe weather the TV goes
    out, and so you need to have an additional outlet to get that
    information.
        So we decided that we would go to them and use that as a
    tool to go ahead and take care of them making sure that they
    still got their emergency information taken care of.
        In the recovery process it works fantastically because in
    some areas--all across the State we are dependent upon locals
    to get our information, the local emergency managers. But when
    they are dealing with life-saving resources, we go to those
    local communities that are individuals on Facebook and social
    media sites to get disaster information so we can then again
    take it to those emergency managers in their communities to
    make sure that they can get the resources that they need.
        Senator Pryor. Ms. DeFrancis.

     TESTIMONY OF SUZY DEFRANCIS,\1\ CHIEF PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER,
                           AMERICAN RED CROSS

        Ms. DeFrancis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and as you said,
    the recent deadly storms across much of the South and Midwest,
    including your home State, really underscore the timeliness and
    importance of this hearing.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. DeFrancis appears in the appendix
    on page 47.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        As you know, the mission of the American Red Cross is to
    help people prevent and prepare for and respond to disasters.
    But today I want to talk about how social media is enabling the
    public to play a much bigger role in helping us with that
    mission.
        I want to draw your attention, as has been referenced, to a
    gap that exists today between the public's use of social media
    in a disaster and the ability of disaster response
    organizations and relief agencies to act on that information in
    a timely fashion. And, finally, I want to offer some thoughts
    about how we can begin to close that gap.
        The American Red Cross is a 130-year-old organization, and
    tools we use to respond have evolved over the years. But
    perhaps the most exciting innovations are social technologies
    because they allow us to listen and engage with the public as
    never before.
        We saw this with our fundraising efforts during Haiti. When
    we rolled out our mobile giving campaign, ``Text `Haiti' to
    90999,'' it was people on social media who really took it
    viral. In the first 48 hours, there were 2.3 million re-tweets
    of our text number as people sent it to their networks of
    followers. And before long, we had raised $32 million via text,
    $10 at a time, and 41 percent of our text donors were under the
    age of 34.
        We saw the same phenomenon with Japan. The earthquake
    happened at 2:47 a.m. east coast time, and before most of us
    even got into the office, our text number was trending on
    Twitter. Social media communities were way ahead of us in
    trying to give out ways to help.
        But new technologies are not just helping us fundraise.
    They are becoming part of our operational DNA. In Haiti, we
    sent out 4 million text messages to the Haitians about the
    symptoms of cholera and how to prevent it and treat it. Here at
    home we have built a dynamic shelter map with the help of
    Google to update our shelter information. We not only have this
    on our Web site, but we have built an iPhone app so people can
    find a shelter on their mobile phone.
        And we are also helping families connect in those first
    hours after disaster strikes through our Safe and Well Web site
    where people can post their whereabouts and update their
    Facebook and Twitter status.
        We are training Red Cross volunteers who deploy to disaster
    to use their smartphones and social media to let people know
    where they can go to find shelter, food, and other services.
    And, really exciting, we are creating a new digital volunteer
    role where volunteers can help us monitor, authenticate, and
    route incoming disaster requests without ever leaving their
    homes.
        We know that in a crisis--and it has been said--people turn
    to the communication tools they are familiar with every day,
    and disaster response and relief agencies must do the same. You
    referenced our survey, Mr. Chairman, and we found that more Web
    users get emergency information from social media than from a
    NOAA weather radio, a government Web site, or an emergency text
    message system. Not only are they looking for and seeking
    information, they are sharing it. One in five social media
    users report posting eyewitness accounts of emergency events.
    If someone else is in need, they are enlisting their social
    networks to help or using Facebook and Twitter to notify
    response agencies. And, they expect us to be listening.
        As you said, 69 percent said that emergency responders
    should be monitoring social media sites, and 74 percent expect
    help to come less than an hour after they tweet or post on
    Facebook. These are extremely high expectations, but,
    unfortunately, today they do not match reality. Most disaster
    responders are still not staffed to monitor or respond to the
    flood of incoming requests during major events.
        At the Red Cross, we experienced a heart-breaking situation
    after the earthquake in Haiti. We began receiving tweets from
    people trapped under collapsed buildings. We did not have a
    good way to handle those pleas for help. We had to go through
    the messages manually and try to route them through the State
    Department and other places, and in some cases we were too
    late. These are life-or-death situations, and we must find ways
    to respond more quickly.
        While we will not solve these issues today, we are making
    progress in collaboration with our partners, as was just
    demonstrated in Alabama. People affected by the tornado were
    posting needs to an online gathering point. Working with an
    organization called ``Tweak the Tweet,'' as well as with FEMA
    and CrisisCommons, we were able to share that information with
    the Alabama State Emergency Operations Center (EOC). For the
    first time, we were able to connect crisis social data with
    decision makers who can act on it.
        I believe you can help us continue to find ways to link up
    social data with response. We also believe, as you discussed
    with the Administrator, that the Federal Government does have a
    role in helping with the Next Generation 911. We agree that the
    first and best choice for anyone in an emergency is to call
    911. However, 911 should be compatible with text and social
    media.
        If I can leave you with one thought, it is this: Social
    media is enabling real citizens to play a role in helping their
    neighbors down the street, across the country, and around the
    world. What we do to help that process will literally save
    lives and help ensure that our country is as prepared as
    possible to handle any disaster.
        Thank you again for your leadership on this issue, and I am
    happy to answer any questions you may have.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you.
        And now, Ms. Brown, I understand you have a video that you
    want to show. Is that right?
        Ms. Brown. Yes, I would like to start with a short video,
    please.
        Senator Pryor. OK. That is fine. If you want to start with
    a short video, that is great. Are we cued up on that? Sure, go
    ahead. [Videotape played.]

        TESTIMONY OF SHONA L. BROWN,\1\ SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,
                               GOOGLE.ORG

        Ms. Brown. Chairman Pryor and Ranking Member Brown, thanks
    for inviting me here today and for your attention to this
    important issue. I would like to apologize for my voice. I am
    the picture of California health. I oversee Google's efforts to
    use the power of technology to deliver critical crisis-related
    information, and this includes the team that develops tools
    like Google Person Finder, which helps loved ones reconnect
    during emergencies.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Shona appears in the appendix on
    page 53.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Our thoughts are with the communities that have just been
    hit by devastating tornadoes, as has already been mentioned,
    and across the United States which took the lives of, it looks
    like, over 300 people--a stark reminder of the important role
    of relief organizations. I am here today because we believe
    technology can make their jobs easier.
        In the aftermath of last week's tornadoes, we supported the
    Red Cross, as already mentioned, by providing maps that located
    nearby shelters. We updated satellite imagery for first
    responders, and we directed local users searching for
    ``tornado'' or ``twister'' to the maps through an enhanced
    search result.
        We are not experts in crisis response, and we play a modest
    role compared to the relief organizations and agencies. But our
    experiences over the past few years have given us a unique
    vantage point. In fact, in just the last 4 months, we responded
    to more crises than we did in all of last year. Based on this
    experience, I will outline three reasons why simple standard
    and open Internet-based technologies are critical tools for
    emergency responders and affected populations. I will also
    suggest how the government can support these tools.
        First, I would just like to tell you about a father who
    used one of these tools to find his son in Japan. Tom
    Stormonth's son, Liam, was teaching at a school in Sendai,
    Japan, when the earthquake struck. Tom was unable to reach his
    son by phone because the networks were damaged and overloaded.
    So he turned to Google Person Finder. He posted a picture of
    his son and asked what any worried parent would: ``If anyone
    has seen him, please let me know he is still OK.''
        A few hours later, someone responded and said that Liam had
    taken refuge at a local elementary school. A few hours after
    that, Liam responded to his father's message saying, ``Alive
    and well.'' And not long after that, Tom was able to use the
    Internet-based Skype application to video-chat with his son.
        So what makes the Internet so useful following natural
    disasters and such a comfort to people like Tom? First, the
    Internet often remains available when other networks fail. In
    Japan, when other communications systems were unstable, the
    Internet was uninterrupted. Because of this we were able to get
    Person Finder up in Japan in only 90 minutes.
        Second, during emergencies people tend to turn, as has been
    mentioned, to simple, standard, and open Internet services that
    they know well. After the earthquake in Haiti, we sent a team
    to Port-au-Prince to better understand how relief organizations
    were using Google tools. Our team was embedded in a refugee
    camp with the 82d Airborne, and one of the officers explained
    that soldiers use Google Maps to plan patrol routes for the
    area because they use tools they are used to.
        Finally, the Internet scales and promotes openness. After
    the earthquake in Haiti, we found there were 14 individual
    missing person databases. They were not integrated, and they
    all ran on different infrastructures. We saw an important
    opportunity to leverage the power of crowdsourcing to create
    one common database, pushing and pulling feeds from all 14
    databases. That idea became Person Finder.
        The response has been overwhelming. Person Finder managed
    more than 600,000 records following the earthquake in Japan,
    and there were more than 36 million page views within the first
    48 hours alone.
        Google has the infrastructure to handle that volume with
    ease, and the Internet remains stable, allowing people to
    connect. Before Person Finder, Tom Stormonth would have had to
    go to multiple Web sites and check and re-check in order to try
    to find news on his son.
        In addition, long before the recent flooding in Pakistan,
    two Pakistani Web developers noticed that available maps of
    their country were incomplete and inadequate, so they used
    Google MapMaker to add and update geographical information for
    millions of people to see in Google Maps and Google Earth. When
    20 percent of Pakistan was underwater, we shared our MapMaker
    base data with UNOSAT, the UN's primary mapping agency, to help
    them plan their recovery efforts. Similarly, our friends at
    Open Street Map created the most complete map of Haiti's roads
    ever made by getting the Haitians to volunteer their knowledge.
        What can government do to support these kinds of tools? It
    can adopt simple, open, and standard ways of publishing and
    disseminating emergency information. Divergent standards make
    it much more difficult to collaborate and respond quickly in
    situations when speed is of the essence.
        For example, we have lost valuable time trying to gather
    and translate into open standards information kept in arcane
    formats on government Web sites. Also, critical information is
    sometimes spread across multiple Web sites. And in other cases,
    important data is not even online at all, but stuck on a
    spreadsheet stored on somebody's desktop computer.
        In particular, alerting systems that leverage the Common
    Alerting Protocol (CAP), standard could quickly inform users of
    impending crises such as tornadoes or tsunamis as well as
    everyday problems like transit delays. If alerts are
    implemented in an open fashion, governments can provide trusted
    information, and private actors like Google and others can
    publish updates that are easily accessible to people when they
    search for information on their computers or their smartphones.
    This work can be coordinated with a commercial mobile alert
    system, for example, so that people have the same opportunity
    to receive alerts through telecommunications providers or
    Internet providers.
        I would like to conclude by thanking Chairman Pryor and
    Senator Brown and this Subcommittee for holding this hearing
    today. We play a modest role, but we are committed to working
    to help users and relief workers instantly find the information
    they need during emergencies.
        Thank you.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you. Ms. Blanchard.

      TESTIMONY OF HEATHER BLANCHARD,\1\ CO-FOUNDER, CRISISCOMMONS

        Ms. Blanchard. Good morning, Chairman Pryor, Ranking Member
    Brown, and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee. My name
    is Heather Blanchard, and I am the co-founder of CrisisCommons,
    a volunteer technology community (VTC) that connects people and
    organizations who use open data and technology to innovate
    crisis management and global development. Before this position,
    I spent 7 years at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
    including the position of Deputy Director of the Ready
    Campaign. On behalf of our community, it is a true honor to
    testify before you today.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Blanchard appears in the appendix
    on page 58.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        When a crisis occurs, it is not emergency responders who
    are first on the scene. It is everyday people who use everyday
    resources like their mobile phone and social networks to share
    what they know. This could be a road blocked by a tree after a
    storm or creating a map of where they see wildfires. Today
    there are many volunteers who leverage technology, like
    CrisisCommons, that can direct technical capacity, harness open
    data and collaborative tools to help first responders and
    communities make sense from the deluge of information that
    occurs in a crisis. We believe that information at the right
    time and right place can help response authorities and citizens
    make better decisions especially in a crisis.
        Since the spring of 2009, CrisisCommons has been an open
    forum to explore how information, including social media, can
    help in a crisis. Our community has supported organizations and
    citizens in the response to the Haiti and Japan earthquakes,
    Tennessee floods, and last week's historic tornadoes which
    impacted the southeast. Just to share an example, during the
    blizzard which paralyzed Chicago this year, our volunteers
    through CrisisCampChicago in collaboration with Humanity Road
    supported the Chicago Tribune Snow Map to assure that public
    requests for assistance were routed to 311 and other local
    authorities.
        One challenge that we often see is that government agencies
    simplify the use of social media as a public affairs function
    when, in fact, during a crisis access to citizen-generated
    information is an operational necessity. As an example, this
    year during our support for the National Level Exercise, the
    situational awareness work group that we participated in
    struggled to define how social media information would be
    coordinated from an operational perspective as there is not a
    resourced function which connects open data, including social
    media, and leverages potential surge capacity from communities
    like CrisisCommons. We would like to recommend to the Committee
    that government create an operational liaison function which
    connects volunteer technology communities to our response
    systems at the Federal, State, and local levels and be
    resourced for support during steady State and in crisis events.
    We recommend that current emergency management doctrine be
    revised to include the capacity to harness technology volunteer
    expertise and collaborative systems.
        Another challenge we have observed is that in local
    Emergency Operations Centers the connection between social
    media information and operations is largely absent. We were
    shocked to find that some centers lacked high bandwidth
    Internet, technical skills, or collaborative tools. We were
    also dismayed to find that many agencies have stringent
    security policies blocking their workforce from using social
    media tools for operational purposes. Without this capability,
    emergency managers could be missing critical information in
    their operational picture. We recommend that emergency
    management infrastructure be fully modernized. We also
    recommend that policy and incident management doctrine be
    modified to allow emergency management personnel to engage
    outside of their own organizational networks to take advantage
    of social media tools and capabilities.
        As you can see, emergency management may not be prepared to
    utilize social media tools and data to augment their operations
    and to inform their mission priorities. When there is a crisis,
    emergency management continuously find themselves overwhelmed
    with information. We recommend that resources be devoted toward
    helping emergency managers with data preparedness and
    filtering, increasing the level of digital literacy of the
    emergency management workforce, and empowering their ability to
    connect with technology support.
        In looking at the government's role in this ecosystem, the
    days of agencies passively sitting on the social media
    sidelines from behind the firewall are over. The time has come
    to evolve to a more open and participatory crisis management
    model. We believe that the Federal Government has a leadership
    role to play, but, again, we feel that institutional support is
    needed to move us to the next level. To emphasize we recommend
    the following:
        Create an operational liaison function to coordinate with
    volunteer technology communities;
        Revise policy and incident management doctrine to
    incorporate social media and other technology capabilities;
        Invest in modernization of emergency management
    infrastructure and collaborative tools;
        Support data preparedness and filtering, increasing the
    level of digital literacy of the emergency management workforce
    and, again, empowering their ability to connect with technology
    support.
        In spite of these challenges, we know of many emergency
    managers who are pushing the envelope every day, sometimes at
    their own professional risk, to apply social media tools and
    data in their work. We are supportive of the enlightened
    leadership that Administrator Fugate displays every day. He has
    opened the door to discussion and experimentation that we see
    today. However, individuals cannot change institutional
    challenges by example. Today we are asking for your help to
    support the needed enhancements that emergency management needs
    to fully utilize social media information and providing
    connectivity to communities who can support their efforts just
    like CrisisCommons.
        Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify before
    you today, and I look forward to answering any questions you
    may have.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you. I want to thank the panelists.
        Senator Brown needs to slip out here in just a few minutes,
    but he wanted to ask a few questions before he goes. Take as
    long as you want.
        Senator Brown. Thank you for that courtesy, Mr. Chairman.
    Thank you.
        When introducing the first question, it should be noted
    that two of our four witnesses are actually public affairs
    officers, and with that, my question is: How do we start
    utilizing the tools that we are talking about beyond simply
    public engagement but to actually informing them of operations
    and actually respond, in fact, to what is happening? Ms.
    DeFrancis is probably the best one.
        Ms. DeFrancis. Thank you. You are right, we are public
    affairs. That is where social media sits today. We have a very
    small crew, two people. If I could introduce Wendy Harman, who
    is our director of social media and does a fantastic job.
        What Wendy and her team are now trying to do is get social
    media into our own disaster operations center right there at
    headquarters to make sure that the people who are actually
    setting up shelters and all that are getting this information
    and are integrating it. We now have Twitter feeds going on in
    our disaster operations center to pay attention to this. This
    is important.
        As I mentioned with what happened in Alabama, there are the
    first beginnings of being able to take this data--and I got to
    tell you, it does not come in a neat kind of easy-to-read
    format. It comes in a lot of places, different hashtags and
    symbols, and it is hard to read. But working with CrisisCommons
    and other groups, we are trying to understand what are the
    needs of these emergency operations centers.
        In Alabama, they told us to put it clearly: food, water,
    shelter; organize them that way so we can read them quickly and
    figure out how to act on them.
        So I think, like we said, it is trying to make it part of
    operational DNA. It is far more than just listening to people.
    It is really gleaning that information, putting it in a really
    simple format so that emergency responders, who are very busy
    at that time, can act on it.
        And there are also issues of authenticating it and
    verifying it, but it is more, I think, getting it clear to them
    how to use it.
        Senator Brown. It must be interesting, too, the language
    that is used.
        Ms. DeFrancis. When we first took in the CrisisCommons data
    in Alabama to the emergency operations center, they said it
    looks like a spaceship. [Laughter.]
        Senator Brown. Because I know when my own kids send me
    stuff, I have to call them and say, ``What did you just say?''
        Ms. DeFrancis. Exactly.
        Senator Brown. That being said, where is the potential for
    more innovation in this area? And what are some examples, if
    any, of some of the more exciting innovations in this area that
    have actually taken place so far? Either one. Anybody. It is
    really for either/or.
        Ms. Preslar. OK. There are a lot of places to go, but the
    first and foremost thing we have to remember is that disasters
    are local. Disasters do not necessarily happen at the Federal
    level. They do not even happen at the State level. We are not
    first responders. It is those people on the ground, our local
    emergency management offices and things like that. And so I
    think where the new technology needs to come in is to where we
    need the government to work with these social companies to
    create something that our first responders can utilize on a
    ground zero level. Oftentimes, speaking for Arkansas directly,
    a lot of the emergency managers in the areas are a one-person
    staff, and then they rely on their amounts of volunteers that
    come in and help during those times. But we need something to
    where they do not necessarily have to have that person that is
    sitting there 24/7 monitoring the social status of what is
    going on in these different areas. It needs to be able to work
    somehow with the companies, because like we had talked before,
    it was not created for disasters. And now that we see that it
    is being able to be used and used effectively in emergency
    response systems, we need to be able to work with those
    companies to see how we can utilize and kind of narrow it down
    so we can incorporate it at that local level first and then
    move up from there.
        Senator Brown. And, Ms. Brown, if I could ask you a
    question, I know--and I appreciate the video and everything
    Google is doing. The impact of disaster response and the
    dedicated crisis response team that you have, is this a full-
    time group within Google?
        No. Press it again.
        Ms. Brown. I am failing Microphone 101, obviously.
        Senator Brown. That is OK.
        Ms. Brown. Yes, we have a dedicated team that is based in
    Mountain View and New York. However, it is important to note
    that when a crisis occurs, it actually brings together, in
    addition to that team, a lot of Googlers who otherwise have
    other jobs. For example, in Japan, we are fortunate to have an
    office there, and so it was not difficult to have a lot of
    people drop their current activities and literally live in the
    office day and night, certainly for the first 4 or 5 days. So
    we supplement that core permanent team as needed with resources
    around the world. But it is a permanent team based in the
    United States.
        Senator Brown. Was there any specific philosophy or reason
    for Google to set up that dedicated team that you saw a need
    and you wanted to go in and zero in or you wanted to be a
    leader in the area? And with that, do you see an expanding
    capacity and dedication of additional resources in this area in
    the future?
        Ms. Brown. In terms of why it entered the area, I mean,
    quite simply it was an area consistent with Google.org's
    philosophy of an opportunity for us to take some of our
    technology and deploy it for social good. We did not spin the
    roulette wheel and pick crisis response, but it looked like
    something where, quite frankly, information and communications
    are critical, just, of course, as food and water are after a
    disaster. And we seemed very well positioned to help around
    communications and information.
        In terms of increasing our resources, it has grown over the
    last couple of years. Actually over the last year, since Haiti,
    we realized the power of it, and at the moment the team is
    continuing to respond to natural disasters and continuing to
    focus on making the tools more applicable and scalable.
        So, for example, when there is not a disaster happening--
    which has been small windows of opportunity this year,
    unfortunately. But when there is not one, they are actually
    working on, OK, what sorts of data might we aggregate ahead of
    time so we could respond faster and so on.
        Senator Brown. Thank you.
        Ms. DeFrancis, is there any area where you may need
    Congress' help in legislation to streamline, consolidate, make
    better, more efficient, anything like that, that you or anyone
    else maybe can think of?
        Ms. DeFrancis. Senator, if I could respond just quickly to
    your last question about innovation, one of the things we are
    learning--I mean, none of these tools were available back
    during Hurricane Katrina--Twitter or Facebook. And so here we
    are 5 years later. Then we think, well, what is the next 5
    years? So I would say whatever solutions that we all are
    working towards, we need to be careful not to tie it to one
    particular application or technology because they are changing
    so rapidly.
        I think in terms of the help we need, I think just holding
    this hearing is really great because it raises the prominence
    of these issues so that people begin to think about them, begin
    to work around them. We are having great success working in
    collaboration with FEMA and other government entities. As
    Heather said, Administrator Fugate has been terrific in that
    regard. We are working with all of these groups here, Senator,
    and Twitter and Facebook, and I think there is kind of a crowd
    mentality that comes together with this medium. And so I am not
    sure that I think government should jump into the middle of it
    or try to interfere with what is happening. But I think that
    there are places where probably government is needed to provide
    the resources, and we mentioned the emergency 911 as one of
    those examples and bringing together wireless companies to do
    that.
        Obviously at the Red Cross we will need to continue to
    invest in new technology. We want to get this where it is not
    just a manual thing, where we have to have people monitoring
    every second, but where it begins to become a stream that is
    automatic, that goes into the right places in these operations
    centers. We will have to invest in training----
        Senator Brown. Can I just ask kind of a followup to that?
        Ms. DeFrancis. Yes.
        Senator Brown. Not to interrupt, but is there a point where
    it is too much information? It seems like it is overload. You
    have a crisis. Everyone wants to do the right social thing to
    help and be helpful. At what point, though, is it, like, OK, we
    get it? How do you draw that line?
        Ms. DeFrancis. Yes, Senator, I think it can be
    overwhelming, and that is why we are trying to find the common
    standards and ways in which we can feed this information so it
    just does not all come in at once in different ways. I think
    Heather is working on that. Heather, I do not know if you want
    to address that aspect.
        Ms. Blanchard. Sure. I think that when we talk about
    information overload, what we are really talking about is a
    lack of filters. You really need to be able to look at the body
    of information. It is kind of like a river, if you will, and
    the river is flowing. And during a disaster, the river is
    overflowing. And what you really need is filters.
        And a lot of times those filters really operate based on
    data standards, and data standards is something that is really
    important in this area. And the question is, like in an
    operations center, who is sitting in the seat that is creating
    the filters for that information? And so being able to kind of
    have that eye for the kind of information that needs to come in
    to be able to augment the operational picture to better make
    decisions for the people that--from the incident manager all
    the way up to Craig Fugate. And I think that there is a common
    misperception is that--there is a term called ``common
    operating picture,'' and in a way, like what you really want is
    a user-defined operating picture, because what an incident
    manager needs to see on the front lines is very different than
    what Craig Fugate needs to see. But they need to be able to
    have access to the same pool of data. So open data is really
    important. It is really the backbone of what we are talking
    about. And social media is information that becomes points of
    data. So if you have a tweet and that tweet has--you turn your
    geolocation on your phone, well, that tweet can be mapped now.
    But a lot of times people when they tweet, they do not have
    their geolocation on their phone, so we cannot say, OK, here is
    a damaged building unless they give you context to say it. But
    if they did not give you any context and they have their
    geolocation on, we can automatically pull that into a map, and
    that gives emergency managers better information.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this
    hearing. I appreciate the opportunity to participate.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, everybody.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you for being here today. See you
    Monday.
        Thank you all for all your testimony. Let me dive in with a
    few questions. I actually have about 10 pages of questions. I
    am not going to worry about---- [Laughter.]
        But I do have several questions, and in the interest of
    time, I may submit some for the record. I do not really know
    where to start, so, Ms. DeFrancis, let me just start with the
    Red Cross. Something you said in your testimony--everything
    that you all said caught my ear, but something you said in your
    testimony that caught my ear is in Haiti the Red Cross sent out
    4 million texts to people, which I think is a great tool and a
    great resource. I am curious about how you got all those phone
    numbers to text, and also I am curious about do you have that
    capability in the United States with various privacy concerns,
    et cetera.
        Ms. DeFrancis. Thank you for that question. In Haiti, cell
    phone use is incredible. I think it is like 90 percent of the
    people in Haiti have cell phones. And as they were going into
    these camps and tent areas, we were registering them. We
    actually piloted a program to see if we could actually give
    money to families through their cell phones so that they would
    go to a particular place, a disbursement place, and get money
    right into their hands so that they could provide for the needs
    of their families.
        So there we had people going into tent communities where
    they were registering, and that is how we were getting those
    cell phone numbers and were then able to push out the right
    information.
        To be perfectly honest with you, Senator, I do not know
    that we have that capability right now here in the United
    States. It is certainly something that we are looking at. I
    know that certainly emergency management agencies are looking
    at that. But, when a crisis strikes, the first thing you grab
    is your cell phone or your car keys. And so to be able to have
    that ability to push that information out would be terrific,
    and maybe that is an area that we can all work together on.
        Like I say, I know government is working on some of the
    things, but we at the Red Cross do not have all those phone
    numbers by any stretch.
        Senator Pryor. Did you have any success with your pilot
    project about texting people some sort of voucher or a code
    where they could then go get money?
        Ms. DeFrancis. Yes.
        Senator Pryor. Did that work?
        Ms. DeFrancis. It worked in the pilot phase. For a number
    of reasons, the Haitian Government decided, at the end of the
    day, that was not the best thing to do. But we certainly think
    that it will work in future operations because most people are
    familiar with where to go to a bank or something. You will get
    a code through your cell phone, you will be able to take it to
    the bank, and, immediately, the bank can verify that and give
    the money to you. So it is a very fast way to do it, and there
    is kind of a synergy here between people who are now texting to
    give money to help people and people using their cell phones
    now to be able to take that and get that immediate help.
        Senator Pryor. All right. You mentioned in your testimony
    also the Alabama experience where you guys have had a lot of
    success there using social media, and it seems to be working
    well and it seems to be fairly well integrated. What steps do
    you have to do to set that up? Or does it just happen
    spontaneously?
        Ms. DeFrancis. Heather is probably more the expert on this,
    but it happens pretty spontaneously. What happened was that a
    personality in Birmingham set up, kind of, a Web site and said,
    ``Hey, send me all of your needs.'' He was a radio personality
    right?
        Ms. Blanchard. Yes.
        Ms. DeFrancis. And so people began to text all their needs.
    And they are everything. They are everything from, ``I need
    baby food, diapers,'' things like that. Someone needs tree
    removal at their home. Others, shelter, a church is setting up
    a shelter, they need volunteers, they need, diapers, these
    kinds of things. And all these needs started pouring in. And,
    so what the emergency operations center said was, ``Can you
    begin to put those into a more orderly catalogue so we can
    digest it and then get the help?'' But, really, these things
    grow up organically, and people are looking at that site to
    say, ``Maybe I can go run some diapers over to that site. I am
    nearby.'' And that is great. We want to encourage that. That is
    really neighbors helping neighbors.
        Senator Pryor. Ms. Blanchard, did you want to comment on
    that?
        Ms. Blanchard. Sure. Part of the project really, the
    genesis of it, the Red Cross had come to us, and also Humanity
    Road is a nonprofit that utilizes technology to also be able to
    take information and be able to help people in crisis. There
    were two projects, one, again, with the emergency operations
    center and the other was Tuscaloosa News. Tuscaloosa News
    actually launched a Crowdmap, which is basically an open
    platform where you can actually take pieces of public
    information like Twitter, and it can go on a map. And so we
    heard of that project and this project, and what we wanted to
    do is merge the projects. And so now we have probably about 50
    volunteers associated with another organization called the
    Standby Task Force. And these people are all over the world,
    and they are basically combing the Internet right now as we
    speak to find needs that people are saying in Alabama. And so
    they are taking that information and they are cataloguing it
    and they are putting it on the Crowdmap that Tuscaloosa news
    had generated. Crowdmap is a product of Ushahidi, and Ushahidi
    is an open mapping platform, and that is the platform you saw
    that was deployed during Haiti. It was also deployed during the
    Japan crisis that we just saw earlier this year.
        Part of what we see is that a lot of times a Crowdmap is
    deployed, but Crowdmap may not be exactly the right tool
    because you really need a full instance of a Ushahidi platform
    because you are dealing with a lot of load, a lot of
    information, a lot of customization that needs to happen behind
    the scenes.
        And so we recommended to the Tuscaloosa News and to the Red
    Cross, hey, let us get together and see if we can kind of put
    this in a platform that will really be able to work long term.
    And so right now we have volunteers working basically around
    the clock, and we are actually reaching out to local
    universities to see if they want to host the platform long term
    to make sure that we have local grassroots engagement on it.
        So what the platform seeks to do is it seeks to pull in all
    the needs that people are talking about, and the local EOC is
    going to look at those needs. The people that are planning in
    the planning section, and they are going to be able to say, OK,
    we are planning that these folks over here--we have feeding
    stations in this town, but we are seeing on Twitter that people
    need food. We want to make sure that we are closing the divide,
    closing the gap. And so in a way they are using it to double-
    check their planning and operations, which is really
    fascinating.
        So we are really happy to support the Red Cross, and we are
    also really happy to support Tuscaloosa News, and we are really
    hoping to be able to help them over the next coming days.
        Senator Pryor. Is it fair to say that in what you are
    doing, the larger the disaster, the larger the need? Because
    with the larger disaster, there is more devastation and more of
    the sort of local systems go down and more people are impacted.
    Is that fair to say?
        Ms. Blanchard. It is fair to say, but I will give you
    something that is really great to see. In a way, the biggest
    the disaster, the more that people really want to help. And
    sometimes there are really large disasters all over the world
    that people do not even know about. And so what has really been
    amazing is that we have seen this rise of what we call the
    crisis crowd. So a lot of times people talk about the wisdom of
    the crowds and people being able to use crowdsourcing.
        What we have seen and really what Haiti demonstrated was
    this massive ability for people all around the world to connect
    to each other using basically the global platform of the
    Internet and being able to work on common projects. Like
    missing persons, that is a really great example. Missing
    persons that became--after Hurricane Katrina, the community of
    volunteers got together and created actually their own
    technical standard because there was no technical standard that
    was available. And so they actually felt, well, no one is
    creating it, we are going to create it. So that is what created
    the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) Standard, and we
    would be more than happy to submit more information about that.
    And that evolved--during Haiti, that evolved into basically a
    lot of technology volunteers that had experience during
    Hurricane Katrina came together and said, hey, there is a data
    standard that is already available, and Google was able to take
    that data standard and actually create their missing persons
    database based on that.
        And so now for CrisisCommons, what we are trying to do is
    that later this month we are actually holding a missing persons
    data summit in Paris to be able to kind of work further on
    privacy issues, being able to figure out how people can be able
    to better utilize this information.
        So there are lots of different pieces, but the crisis crowd
    during every crisis really wants to respond, and what we really
    want to kind of look to see is like how can we make the
    response smarter. How can we make, getting information to a map
    for local needs quicker? How can we have--for example, during
    Alabama, you were talking about categories. What if we had
    predetermined categories? We do not need to even think about
    it. We just go. And so that information, that river of
    information could go ahead and flow into a map and be able to
    really automatically provide information that is critical to
    emergency management.
        Ms. DeFrancis. And, Senator, could I just also add, on the
    local front, though--you talked about major disasters. As you
    probably know, at the Red Cross most of the disasters we
    respond to are house fires, and they do not get a whole lot of
    coverage. But what we are discovering, through our chapters,
    who are also now tweeting and using Facebook, is that we are
    able to bring the local community--make them aware that this
    has happened down the street, and that these are neighbors of
    theirs who need help.
        And so I think it does not just have relevance for the big
    ones that get all the media attention, but it also has
    relevance for the everyday emergencies people go through.
        Senator Pryor. Right. So, Ms. Blanchard, let me ask you--I
    want to talk about the mission persons program or application
    that you offer. How does someone in Tuscaloosa find out about
    the availability of missing persons--or someone in Utah, for
    that matter, wanting to find someone to make sure they are OK
    in Tuscaloosa, how do they know that is out there? How do they
    know that exists?
        Ms. Blanchard. So there is actually--coming from--being at
    DHS for over 7 years, I really kind of got familiar with the
    emergency management protocols, and during disasters in the
    United States, the Red Cross is the lead for missing persons,
    and we really seek to support that. But there are other efforts
    such as Google's missing person finder, which is great, because
    that really condenses the amount of missing persons databases
    that currently are created.
        So when there is a crisis, a lot of people create well-
    meaning technology tools, like missing persons databases. And
    what Google did during Haiti was able to collapse those down
    basically into just one that was able to really be propagated
    all over the Internet, which was really helpful. But I think
    that when you talk about if you have a missing persons--if you
    have a family member that is missing, the American Red Cross is
    the place, and the Safe and Well is what FEMA asks people to go
    toward. And we want to support the local response efforts.
        Senator Pryor. And, Ms. Brown, tell us about the need for
    universal data formatting. I mean, I think I understand that,
    but tell me sort of in layman's terms what that means.
        Ms. Brown. Is that working? There we go. Good with
    databases. Bad with microphones.
        So PFIF, which is the standard that Heather was referring
    to, was, as she described, created out of the genesis of the
    Haiti experience and is a standard that we are continuing to
    iterate on today. But the concept is essentially that if you
    receive data, rather than as Suzy was describing it is a
    spaceship and all sorts of different order, it would be an
    order with a field name that you would understand. So everybody
    would call something ``first name'' as opposed to ``family
    name'' or ``F name'' or something. And so that would mean that
    when data was coming in, it could be interpreted, and you can
    have actually different databases easily talking to each other.
    That is the premise.
        Ms. Blanchard. Yes.
        Ms. Brown. So if everybody made the word ``data''
    compatible with PFIF, then the speed with which everyone could
    talk to each other during a crisis and, therefore, as an end
    result the speed with which someone could be looking for
    something and be able to look into a whole bunch of different
    data sets rather than just one silo here and one there would be
    dramatically increased.
        So that is the basic idea of the data standard.
        Senator Pryor. And so are most people on the same data
    standard? Or are they all over the board?
        Ms. Brown. No, not most, but increasingly there are.
        Do you want to comment, Heather?
        Ms. Blanchard. Yes, we are very much promoting the active
    use of the PFIF Standard, also with basically data
    interoperability.
        Senator Pryor. Right.
        Ms. Blanchard. Making sure that different databases can
    talk to each other. And today, like, that is definitely able to
    happen.
        Senator Pryor. OK.
        Ms. DeFrancis. And, Senator, could I just add? We are not
    the Missing Persons Bureau, but during a disaster we do
    obviously register people in our shelters, and then we take
    them to our Safe and Well Web site and make sure they post
    there.
        But what we are really about with all these technologies is
    kind of like Craig Fugate said, let us not try to fit people
    into our systems, let us try to work with the other systems.
    That is why we became compatible now with Facebook and Twitter.
    We are working with Google on People Finder. Because whatever
    is the easiest way for that person, that is the way we want to
    go. It is not proprietary Red Cross, Safe and Well. It is not
    proprietary. But can we all work together so we get this data
    together and get help?
        Ms. Brown. And just to your question about who is using it,
    I mean, for example, in Japan, we did find that many
    organizations did use this standard, particularly the police,
    and so when you are talking about missing people. But you need
    more organizations using the same--you need all these
    organizations that identify people to be using the same
    standard for it to work perfectly, and we have a ways to go.
        Ms. Blanchard. And the great thing is that everyone here is
    actually--we have monthly calls on missing persons data, and so
    we have been trying to create some kind of continuous
    improvement processes on that. So we are sharing information,
    and we are looking at the standard, and we are hoping to be
    able to contribute something meaningful to it.
        Senator Pryor. Ms. Preslar, let me ask you a question about
    Arkansas and the specific experience you have had in the last
    few weeks in our State with all of our storms.
        Do you feel like that our citizenry and the various
    government entities are using the social media effectively? Do
    you feel like we are sort of following this trend that some of
    these other folks have talked about?
        Ms. Preslar. It is very diversified across the State. You
    will find in the urbanized or the areas closer to the urban--
    central Arkansas, there is a large group of people that
    actually do utilize this. In northwest Arkansas, there is a
    large group. There are some in the northeast centered around
    Jonesboro and then some around Texarkana. And then everywhere
    else across the State, Fort Smith included, it is just kind of
    scattered. People may use it, people may not. But I think that
    also has to do with the fact that you see the areas that it is
    followed around right now. It is also the areas that have a
    large media center. You have the television stations and things
    that are localized around there, so you have people that they
    can follow.
        I think that is why I stated earlier, when we talked about
    getting groups of people or getting companies together to
    decide how we can actually use this for emergency management in
    mind will help the local areas, because when you have smaller
    counties that do not much less have a budget, much less, an
    actual county government Web site, social media provides them
    that opportunity not just to do things during the response and
    the recovery phase, because before you can do that, they have
    to know where you can go to get that kind of information, and
    that is where the preparedness phase steps in, is that when you
    have your local emergency managers utilizing this stuff in
    advance of a particular disaster, during that disaster people
    know where to go to ahead of time, and that is why it is so
    important that we go ahead and work on that obviously ahead of
    time to make sure that we can get that together, we can get
    that set in place. And I think that you would see a lot more
    involvement once the individual emergency managers at the
    county level that do not obviously have a budget much less,
    full-time status are able to do this without any, Web training
    or Web experience or know how to do any type of HTML coding.
    They can pretty much enter things into specific sites via a
    blog that is already laid out for them or a Facebook account
    that is already laid out, where they can just put in the
    information and they do not have to worry about how that
    information actually gets to where it is going.
        Senator Pryor. Right. And you are at ADEM.
        Ms. Preslar. Yes.
        Senator Pryor. The Arkansas Department of Emergency
    Management. Do they have a designated person for social media?
    Is that you?
        Ms. Preslar. ``Designated'' is very loosely defined.
        Senator Pryor. Right.
        Ms. Preslar. Yes, I am the one that does it, but it is not
    my sole responsibility. It does fall under the public affairs
    staff of the side of things where it belongs, and there are two
    of us on staff, and I am the one who handles the social media
    things. In fact, actually tomorrow we are training additional
    staff to be able to make sure that it is timely and it is
    congruent and that we are not just involved in social media
    when I am awake. [Laughter.]
        We are trying to make sure it follows the timeframe, and we
    are actually doing some of that training tomorrow. So we do
    have someone that does take care of that stuff, but it is
    important for it to be done on all aspects and all levels. In
    the State's Emergency Operations Center, I will sit in and I
    will monitor things as they come in, and then I will go out and
    directly talk to the people that are positioned in the EOC that
    deal with the counties on a first-name basis to where, if I see
    something is coming through for Prairie County or I am getting
    reports that roads are flooded and they are concerned about an
    evacuation, I will go to that event manager that is in the EOC
    that is going to be discussing things with the Prairie County
    emergency manager to make sure, OK, is this true, is this going
    to happen? Because like we said before, the emergency managers
    are so consumed with their life-saving responsibilities, which
    is where they need to be, but they do not necessarily have the
    time to come back to the State and say, OK, this is going on
    now, and this is going on now, and this is going on now. So to
    be able to have that additional side where we see what the
    citizens are saying or maybe what the citizens are receiving,
    we can say, OK, they are actively getting the message, and they
    are getting the message effectively. OK, this area does not
    seem to be getting the message that the county wants to
    display, so we need to figure out how else we can best get this
    information to that local community.
        Ms. DeFrancis. We saw that a lot in Alabama, sir, where
    people would say, ``I am in this particular area''--I think it
    was Hackleburg--and ``We do not have any food, we do not have
    any water.'' Well, they did. They just did not know where it
    was. So social media allowed us to put out to them. ``Well, no,
    go to the corner of X and Y and that is where you will find
    it.''
        Senator Pryor. It seems to me that also something we have
    not talked a lot about today is the local media, especially the
    local TV stations in our State, and probably the newspapers and
    radio as well. But the local TV, because we have had such bad
    storms, say they pretty much would just discontinue their
    normal programming just do weather all the time as these
    terrible storms are rolling through. But it seemed like they
    were getting a lot of social media information as they were
    covering this.
        Ms. Preslar. Absolutely.
        Senator Pryor. I think that helps bring awareness to some
    of this as well.
        Ms. Preslar. Like I said before, we use it as a tool not
    only to get information out to our public, to the citizens of
    Arkansas, but also to get information out to that media
    standpoint. On a public affairs side of things, especially in a
    disaster, by the time that you put out that initial press
    release, it is already old information. It is already delayed,
    and you have already got the new information that came in while
    you were going through the sector to get the original one
    approved.
        The way the media puts the expectations of all
    responsibilities in getting information out, social media
    allows us to put out a simple statement within roughly 15
    minutes of something happening. Even if that is simply stating,
    the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management and the State
    of Arkansas has activated its State Emergency Operations
    Center; we are monitoring what is going on; as we get
    information, we will give it to you. It lets citizens know and
    taxpayers know, OK, the State is not doing nothing, they are
    doing something, and we know that now. Whereas, before, they
    had to wait an hour or 2 hours to get that potential
    information. And even though the message does not really
    change, it justifies and I think it validates the fact that
    they know that people are doing something about what is going
    on .
        Ms. DeFrancis. We actually have observed that if something
    is on Twitter or trending on Twitter for about 24 to 48 hours,
    the next jump it will make is to CNN. So it is definitely
    happening, both mediums.
        Senator Pryor. Right. Let me ask a Federal, State, local
    government question, and that is on budget. Does social media
    cost money? Is this adding to your overhead?
        Ms. Preslar. Not at this time. But at the same time, in me
    saying that, we are very limited in what we actually do at the
    moment. It could justifiably cost money. When you talk about
    the opportunities that there are out there for, the mapping
    purposes--and mapping is excellent, especially when we were
    just so recently talking about a potential New Madrid
    earthquake. An earthquake of that level, of that intensity that
    could happen, being able to map things like that through social
    media would provide instant information and a source of
    information--roads, bridges, gas lines, fires, things of that
    nature--where it might--we are discussing still how are we
    actually going to get into these affected areas. But if people
    are able to have that capability inside, that would affect it.
        Obviously a lot of these things can cost money. Actually,
    analyzing what is coming in and using analytics to determine,
    OK, which of your messages are being effective, which of your
    messages are not being effective, and how do you need to rework
    the ones that are, are not being out to the audiences that you
    need. It can cost money. At this time, we have not spent a dime
    on it, but we have always got places that we can go to make it
    improve where we currently stand. But at the same time, without
    spending a dime, I think that we have very effectively used
    what we have been able to take care of.
        Senator Pryor. Right. Ms. DeFrancis, let me ask you--I am
    going to put up Slide 3 here, which is a pie chart,\1\ and it
    is about your survey. I would like to know a little bit more
    about the survey. As I understand it, you asked 1,000 people
    around the country. How did this work?
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The chart referenced by Senator Pryor appears in the appendix
    on page 94.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Ms. DeFrancis. Yes, as I told you, during Haiti this was
    the first time we were sort of stunned by the fact that we were
    getting tweets from people trapped under collapsed buildings,
    and we had no way to answer them. So we decided we wanted to
    convene a summit on all of this, which we did last August. But
    in advance of the summit, we wanted to be informed as to how
    much the public really is using social media, and so that was
    the genesis of the survey. We surveyed about 1,058 Web users,
    so these are people who are already pretty well on the Web. But
    I think, like you said, we are seeing a huge--we would love to
    do the survey again each year and see where this is going,
    because we expect that it is growing and that more and more
    people are turning to it.
        We are also seeing demographically, obviously, we are
    seeing younger people using it more. But as they get older,
    then it will become more the way that people operate.
        So it was very useful in giving us a baseline, if you will,
    for how social media is becoming such an important player in
    the disaster space.
        Senator Pryor. Good. That is helpful.
        I actually do have a lot more questions, but in the
    interest of time, I think what I will do is submit those for
    the record. But I would like to finish with one just general
    question, which kind of goes back to the mission of this
    Subcommittee, and that is, I would like to get your thoughts on
    what, if anything, the Federal Government can do to help make
    the use of social media more effective, more available, more
    accurate, just a better tool for all of us to use before,
    during, and after these events. And your answer could be the
    government needs to just stay out of the way and let this just
    happen. If that is the answer, then that is a fine answer. But
    I am curious about your thoughts on what, if anything, the
    government can do or should do better.
        Ms. Blanchard, do you want to start?
        Ms. Blanchard. Sure. I actually think that government can
    do a lot, and I think that the private sector has definitely a
    huge role to play, but I think government always takes a really
    great leadership position. The government has different types
    of mechanisms such as advisory councils. FEMA has a national
    advisory council. It would be really great to see a technology
    committee on that. In addition, to inventory the resources that
    could be brought to bear, to support local and State
    authorities. For example, being able to provide imagery, aerial
    and satellite imagery, during disasters so you can do remote
    disaster assessments, and you can actually harness technology
    volunteers to be able to do that. So just being able to
    inventory a lot of those assets.
        The other thing is that the Federal Government does data
    really well, NASA and NOAA, the Weather Service, I mean, there
    are some really great agencies that work with data all day
    long. In a way, being able to share their lessons learned just
    as it is applied to emergency management I think would be
    really helpful.
        Again, data standards is always something I know that FEMA
    is working on. A couple of crisis data standards, that would be
    helpful.
        Guidance, I think it would be also helpful, and then, of
    course, looking at the grants, because, we definitely want to
    build capacity so you do not have kind of a--it is great that
    you have one super star person, but you really need--in a way,
    it is not the technology tool. It is the data behind it, and it
    is the people that are behind, being able to coordinate that
    information across not only public affairs but also in an
    operational sense.
        Senator Pryor. Ms. Brown.
        Ms. Brown. Thanks for the question. I will keep it simple,
    which is to say I think that if the Federal Government were to
    encourage all of its agencies and bodies to use tools that are
    simple and standard and open, that would really be helpful in
    all the ways that it can do that.
        For example, NOAA as well as USGS have been using in their
    alerting mechanisms the Common Alerting Protocol and that is
    terrific. And if everyone used the same protocol as per our
    earlier discussion, then our ability to be helpful to the
    government on aggregating for alert purposes would be immensely
    enhanced. So that is one example, but there are many. And
    simply encouraging that behavior in all the ways that it can
    would be most useful.
        Thanks.
        Senator Pryor. Ms. DeFrancis.
        Ms. DeFrancis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We struggled with
    social media at the Red Cross when we first broached it because
    we did not know how we could control it. I guess in a way it is
    a medium that you cannot easily control. As we discussed here
    today, it is very organic. It is people/citizen input coming
    in. So I am not sure that we would see government stepping in
    to set standards or come up with hashtags or things like that,
    because it seems to be a much more fluid type of medium.
        I do think that by drawing attention to the issues here, I
    do think there will be resource issues, particularly, as Renee
    was talking about, with local and State governments who are
    trying to staff emergency operations centers and have the
    technology and have people trained. There may be issues there
    of how can they afford that, and certainly we have already
    discussed that with the new Next Generation 911 there are
    issues there, too, because even if the FCC were to say here are
    the rules, you still have to resource local and State
    governments that have their own 911 systems. So there may be a
    role for grants as well in this area.
        But I think what you have done today by convening the
    various organizations and groups and drawing attention to this
    problem and this opportunity is really important.
        Senator Pryor. Thank you. Ms. Preslar.
        Ms. Preslar. I have said it several times already about the
    importance, and I cannot stress it enough we would like the
    Federal Government to work with these private companies on how
    social media platforms can be created to allow the responders
    to utilize it in an operations standpoint, and then from that
    have toolkits that those local emergency managers would be able
    to use fairly easily, and then the guidelines--because it
    always gets back to guidelines and regulations, but allow those
    to be flexible enough to allow the new technology to work
    instead of having to continuously go back and edit legislation
    and guidelines as the new technology becomes available, just
    allow it to be able to be flexible enough in the beginning that
    it can go ahead and integrate into the system.
        Senator Pryor. Great. I want to thank you all for being
    here, and like I said, we are going to have some more questions
    for the record. We had a couple members that could not make it
    today.
        We do want to thank you all for being here, and we are
    going to leave the record open for 2 weeks, and again, thank
    you for changing your schedules and making time to be here. And
    if you have ideas as you all continue to do what you do, please
    do not hesitate to let us know because it helps us understand
    what is going on out there, and, maybe we can prod the Federal
    Government to do better in some areas and to allocate more time
    and attention and resources to this.
        So, again, thank you for your time, and I appreciate all
    that you do, not just here today but all that you do around the
    country to help save lives and put this country back together
    after a disaster. Thank you.
        [Whereupon, at 11:47 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

                                A P P E N D I X

                                  ----------