Twitter Feeds for Emergency Alerts & Preparedness Information

A friend has been bugging me to micro-blog on Twitter for some time now.  I resisted for a while as I find it difficult to keep up with updating my status and activities already on Facebook and LinkedIn.  I finally signed up to better be able to understand Twitter’s use in support of the Sahana Disaster Management Software project, which I am involved with as a member of its Project Management Committee and long-standing contributor.  Yesterday, I was playing around with a couple of plug-ins – twitterfeed pushes my blog posts automatically to my twitter feed (very cool); a Facebook plug-in pulls my twitter status to update my Facebook status (also very cool); and a third and final one – Pidgin-Twitter plug-in – makes my twitter feed readable on my Pidgin instant messaging client (unbelievably cool).  [Follow the instructions here on how to set this up].

Somewhere along the way, I noticed someone else was following ReliefWeb, which is an information service of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA).  So I started following the ReliefWeb twitter feed.  After a little research, I realized that a number of official sources of emergency and disaster information push information to their Twitter feeds.  I became obsessed.

I searched for “FEMA” and found a few official feeds.  I searched for “emergency” and found a bunch more.  “Redcross” led to a number of hits – one from the National Red Cross and a ton of local chapters.  Then the floodgates really started to open.  See, a lot of these twitter feeds from government and non-governmental organizations follow other “official” sources of emergency alerts and information.  I am up to a list of over 40 that I am now following – including one from BreakingNewsNY that pushes out up to 500 alerts per day about incidents in New York City – that is monitored by FDNY and other public safety agencies in the City.

Being better informed is absolutely a better way of Living Prepared™.

Integrated into my instant messaging client (Pidgin), I now have a scrolling feed of emergency and disaster preparedness public information notices, as well as emergency alerts and notifications.  It flashes when a new one comes in, and there is an audio alert as well (that can be turned off).  It’s the perfect solution for me as I’ve always struggled to have to check information websites (a pull system); and the e-mail notifications that I get (a push system) clog my e-mail folders (where they are filed automatically by rules).

A desktop applet has always been the solution, but most – whether a google desktop widget or simply adding a web-page to my desktop – I have always found lacking as either they remain in the background and I am unable to quickly view them on top of other applications – or they consume desktop space by occupying a bar perpetually on the right or left or top or bottom of my screen.  All dissatisfying solutions that I’ve done away with after a short while.  An instant messaging client solution is perfect for me.  It provides visual and auditory notification of new alerts and messages, which is useful when I am following a situation closely, but I can also turn down when I need to.

For outgoing updates, I have the following paths to update my twitter feed.  I can post to this blog, and it will update twitter.  I can also update my twitter status through a browser; through sending an instant message from Pidgin (it using gtalk – googletalk protocol/XMPP); through sending an e-mail to a twittermail address; through sending an SMS message from my smartphone; or through the browser on my Smartphone (whose homepage I set to my twitter homepage so I can pick up all my alerts).  I think that is pretty cool.

And by posting to Twitter, I am also updating my Facebook page; and you will also note that you can also view the Living Prepared™ and Globaliist twitter feeds through the widget on the right of this page.  In coming weeks, this site will be launching a number of feeds to help you be better informed about emergency and disaster preparedness – aggregated from official government and non-governmental sources.

This is the short version of this story; a longer one with step-by-step instructions will follow soon in a longer post, but I wanted to get this out to get you thinking about the possibilities.

Here is something you can help me with – I am looking to compile a list of relevant twitter, blogs and RSS feeds from governmental and non-governmental sources related to disaster preparedness, as well as alerts and warnings issued at actual time of an event (such as tornado warning, earthquake notifications, and hurricane tracking).  I’m going to organize these into separate RSS and twitter feeds that you will be able to subscribe to and follow.

In a few days, I will post a list of the feeds I have identified so far, and would be glad to receive lists of any others from you.

And I’ll do some quality control and weeding out before making any aggregated feed public.  There’s nothing worse than having an unqualified source mixed in and creating confusion.  All postings from Living Prepared™ will be clearly identified with the source – and you will always be able to look them up from this site.