NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 62

Most people

living in North America know the months
between June and September as summer;
many who work in the Forest Service know
them better as wildfire season.

In Marlita Reddy-Hjelmfelt's household, however, the season
has a different, and much longer, moniker. "My husband calls
it 'put-dinner-in-front-of-Mar-and-take-it-away-cold time,'"
laughs Reddy-Hjelmfelt.
When major wildfires strike certain portions of the
Western United States-a good bet during fire season-
Reddy-Hjelmfelt will spend up to 12 bleary-eyed hours each
day on her home computer in New Mexico searching through
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites for any leads
that could help first responders on the ground. Any hunger
pangs from missed dinners usually take a back seat.
Since 2013, Reddy-Hjelmfelt has led what's known as a
virtual operations support team, or VOST, for Type 1 Incident
Management teams in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest
regions of the United States. Her team of between five and
25 volunteers devote large portions of their free time each
summer to sifting through thousands of social media posts
that emanate from the affected areas; they are, in effect, the
digital eyes and ears for incident command.

VOST

Activity definitions
according to the
Federal Emergency
Management Agency
62 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

Becasue the work is conducted online, VOST members can
be located anywhere in the world; the teams that ReddyHjelmfelt works with include members in New Zealand,
Canada, Honduras, and the UK. That approach comes with a
few advantages, including the ability of the group, by virtue
of its members' farflung time zones, to provide round-theclock social media monitoring of a particular incident.
The general term for this work is social monitoring, a
concept that has grown steadily since about 2010. Many
forward-thinking disaster managers now see this digital
sleuthing as critical to their on-the-ground efforts, regardless
of the type of disaster they are facing.
"People are on social media talking, organizing, and
reporting on what they see, and nowadays it's pretty well
understood among emergency managers that you're either in
that conversation or you're not," said Jeff Phillips, the former
head of response and recovery for the state of New Mexico,
and the man widely credited for inventing the VOST concept
(see "Origin Story," page 65).

» Activates at the request of an authority
having jurisdiction (AHJ)

» Amplifies or disseminates public
information at the request of the AHJ

» Assesses and evaluates where and how a
community is sharing information online
during a crisis

» Filters online content and develops
"listening reports" that include a mission
overview, trend analysis, and summary
of mission-based results at regular time
intervals requested by the AHJ

» Monitors available and public web-based
communications on social media and news
organization websites to identify crisis
needs, damage assessment, and community
sentiment surrounding emergency events

» Develops web-based platforms for regional
response at the request of the emergency
Source: FEMA
response organization
NFPA Journal - July/August 2019

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