NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 64

pCRISIS MAP Using social monitoring, aid
groups can create detailed maps to show
where resources are most needed on the
ground. Above, the island of Dominica after
Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.

handle response to the chaotic situation, which can often stretch for weeks.
Quickly gaining the community's trust
is critical, he said. If missteps are made
early, or the public outreach is seen as
dismissive or aloof, it's easy for things to
go sideways and for residents to develop
an "us versus them" mindset toward
responders, which makes the process of
recovery extremely difficult, he said.
To make sure that doesn't happen,
Pitassi has worked closely with ReddyHjelmfelt's VOST over the past few fire
seasons. "I'm a stranger from outside on
an incident management team, traveling
to a place that I probably didn't even
know existed two days ago," Pitassi said.
"When we are dealing with communities

64 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

in crisis, every bit of information
we put out is either going to build
trust between responders and the
community, or it is going to destroy
trust. It is incumbent for me and my
team to build a relationship with
that community, and understand
what their fears are. I see the VOST as
the intelligence arm of the
PIO shop that allows me to
do that."
Pitassi will typically activate the VOST early in the
process, before he even
boards a plane to travel to an
incident. When that happens,
Reddy-Hjelmfelt pings her
social monitoring volunteers,
and a schedule is created
to ensure round-the-clock
social monitoring coverage.
They immediately begin
monitoring social media
accounts from the impacted
area, building knowledge
about the local political,
cultural, and business landscapes, including who the
local online influencers and
community leaders are. They
learn important key words
or hashtags used in an area,
what the local media landscape looks like, and a variety
of additional site-specific
details that they feed to the PIO team
before it even arrives onsite.
Early in the process, ReddyHjelmfelt consults with Pitassi to define
the scope of the deployment and what
the role of the VOST should be. Sometimes, depending on the situation, the
PIO might ask the team to monitor
everything related to the incident and
its response. In other cases, the PIO may
only want the VOST to monitor specific
keywords or hashtags (such as #AZfire,
#WoodburyFire, evacuation, fire, and
smoke), or traffic emanating from a
specific location, or simply to focus on
spreading or amplifying official statements by retweeting and liking.
Using this instruction, the VOST
leader creates an incident workbook,
which is a Google spreadsheet template tailored to keep track of the
intelligence being gathered, as well as

each team member's responsibilities.
Throughout a disaster deployment,
the VOST provides Pitassi's team with
nightly reports on all the relevant
online activity gathered throughout the
day. Pitassi reviews the information,
and tweaks his public messaging as
needed to address rumors or concerns,
or to touch on points that may have
been misunderstood or confused in
previous community meetings.
"It's that minute-by-minute intelligence gathering and vetting that makes
a VOST so valuable," he said. "As the
VOST is pulling in all that information,
I am dispatching my staff and my other
resources to go out in community and
address those rumors and concerns
head on. What that does is build trust."
When the VOST catches something
in social media with potentially serious
ramifications, the PIO is notified immediately. For instance, on an incident last
year, a high-ranking government official
in Texas began disseminating inaccurate information that an evacuation
order had been given to a town in New
Mexico, even though it had not. "The
VOST caught it, sent me a screen grab,
and in less than 30 minutes after the
post went up I was on the phone with
the New Mexico Secretary of Homeland
Security. He had a good relationship
with the official in Texas and they had
a reverse message in a couple of hours,"
Pitassi said. "By our timeline that is a
really quick response for dealing with
misinformation."
Most of the time, however, the online
chatter isn't from high-ranking government officials, but from everyday
citizens trying to make sense of the
unfolding disaster and how it's impacting their lives. It can take a trained eye
to filter out what's potentially important
from what isn't, and sometimes even
PIOs can miss the distinction, ReddyHjelmfelt said.
On a recent VOST deployment,
Reddy-Hjelmfelt noticed a Facebook

STANDBY TASK FORCE; GETT Y IMAGES

burn across thousands of acres and
large populations of people need to be
evacuated.
As PIO, Pitassi has the daunting
task of serving as the primary liaison between the usually bewildered
residents and the hundreds of out-oftowners who have shown up to try and
NFPA Journal - July/August 2019

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