The devastating San Francisco Bay oil spill brought out thousands of
volunteers over the weekend eager to help clean up miles of beaches and
shoreline contaminated with toxic bunker fuel and rescue hundreds of
petroleum-coated birds. If ever there was a disaster area suited to
exploit Internet technology to crowdsource an army of green berets and
deploy them where they’re needed most, it’s this Twittering, Google
map-mashing epicenter of Web 2.0, right?
Not quite. The masses may be wired but California authorities’
disaster response was strictly 1.0, as Green Wombat discovered when he
showed up at a meeting on Saturday called by the state Department of
Fish and Game to brief would-be volunteers about the oil spill from the
Cosco Busan. The container ship hit the Bay Bridge last Wednesday,
dumping 58,000 gallons of heavy oil into the water. A couple hundred
people crammed a room at the Richmond Marina in the East Bay, spilling
outside into the drizzling rain. As the crowd peppered officials with
questions about how they could get to work — a few yards away a dull
oily sheen streaked the harbor — DFG representatives patiently
explained that volunteers must first receive training before they can
be allowed to handle wildlife or clean beaches covered in a hazardous
substance.
"We have to get information from you to place you," said a
representative from the DFG’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response
as paper forms were handed out for volunteers to fill in. They soon ran
out of forms — more than 500 people had shown up at another volunteer
meeting held a few hours earlier in San Francisco. Many members of the
audience, BlackBerries and Treos in hand, stared in disbelief. Paper?
"I’m from Autodesk (ADSK) in Marin and we have 1,500 people that want
to get to work on the cleanup," said one woman. "Can’t you just put up
a PDF on your site so we can download it?" Said another volunteer:
Can’t we just send you an e-mail?"
To be fair, state officials were overwhelmed by the response from
Bay Area residents. ("An oil spill in San Francisco is so different
than any other place for one reason: the people," one DFG official said
at the meeting. "People here are passionate about where they live.")
And by Sunday morning, the oil response unit’s site
had posted a Yahoo (YHOO) e-mail address (coscobusanspill@yahoo.com) so
volunteers could send in their contact details. Still, if you wanted to
report sightings of injured wildlife or contaminated shoreline, you had
to spend a lot of time hitting redial to try to get through jammed
phone lines.
The
authorities’ old-media disaster response strategy of relying on
newspapers and television to broadcast one-way messages to a population
accustomed to Internet interactivity is missing an opportunity to
coordinate a faster and better targeted cleanup operation. For
instance, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
residents of the coastal hamlet of Bolinas north of San Francisco were
left on their own as they struggled to place a boom across the mouth of
the Bolinas Lagoon to keep oil out of the environmentally sensitive
Marin County estuary, home to a hundred bird species and a colony of
harbor seals.
Now imagine if an Internet database of volunteers and their
locations was mashed up with a Google (GOOG) map of oil-threatened
areas. Would-be volunteers could go online to see where assistance was
needed near them or they could be notified by e-mail or text message.
Extra bodies and equipment might have helped avoid what Green Wombat
found when he and his son visited the eastern shore of Bolinas Lagoon
on Sunday: globs of thick purple-black oil dotting the rocks while a
dozen endangered California brown pelicans floated off a nearby sandbar
where seals bask during low tide. (Photo at right.)
An online map mashup or wiki page would have also helped wildlife rescuers
collect old sheets and towels and other materials needed to clean
oil-soaked birds as well as coordinate volunteers to provide support to
cleanup crews. As it was, Green Wombat happened to hear a volunteer at
the Richmond meeting mention that you could drop off sheets at the
Berkeley Marina, where rescued birds were being collected. Stopping by
the marina on Sunday, we found another ad hoc group of volunteers
helping along the shoreline cordoned off with yellow police tape.
This is not to say creating a Web 2.0 emergency response system
would be easy — particularly when it means integrating such an
operation with government agencies. But it sounds like an opportunity
for some established Internet company or entrepreneur. In the meantime,
Bay Area residents, environmental groups and local governments are
organizing themselves online, turning to — where else? — Facebook to
set up oil spill clearinghouses to exchange information and coordinate
haz mat training sessions for volunteers.
Green Wombat 
Enough is enough of this disgusting mess…
http://greenpieceblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/oil-spills-on-2-coasts.html
The PR machine employed by the oil industry has convinced us that they are the perpetual victim while they make record profits. WE are the victims of an industry that receives our tax subsidies and our tax breaks while innovative technologies that could create jobs and improve American manufacturing are ignored.
Amazing. It doesn’t suprirse me anymore to see our Federal Govt act as they were in 1950.
Another great example of ineptude from the Bush Adminstration.
Exxon make $40 billions per year for the last 5 years but we can not have a stand-by support system to protect the bay for a few millions.
It’s probably hard to believe for the large segment of our Bay Area population who are either techies or work for a techie company on the cutting edge, that outside our little world a lot of people and organizations are still years and decades behind in utilizing technology. Think about how the best and brightest when they graduate from college, how many of they go looking to work for the government or public service organization?
I volunteered for a government agency several years ago, and I was aghast that the people did not even know how to use Microsoft Word. Even in non-technology companies including in life sciences, health care, and financial services, I have experienced first-hand or heard from peers working there, that they for no reason resort to operating with and printing out reams and reams of paper that could be stacked from floor to ceiling, even when it was originally e-mail or other computerized format.
So the question is who has the aptitute and is going to handle implementing all of these changes in communication technology?
Oil Spill: Networked Volunteers and Failing to plan for the connected age.
Here is a great riff on the failure of the state planners to be prepared for mass network of volunteers. It is the same situation we are going to see play out again and again in disasters, pandemics and campaigns.
I am really happy to read all these comments. Surely the oil industry must be forced to develop a protocol to deal with spills. If not by government then by us. And why are will still driving fossil fuel boats and cars?….see “Who killed the electric car?” movie. Yes, all container ships and any boat’s fuel tank should be double hulled and waterproof
I am really happy to read all these comments. Surely the oil industry must be forced to develop a protocol to deal with spills. If not by government then by us. And why are will still driving fossil fuel boats and cars?….see “Who killed the electric car?” movie. Yes, all container ships and any boat’s fuel tank should be double hulled and waterproof
Good enough for government work…
Do you drive from SF to Bolinas a lot? Ouch.
So as far as government goes, for whatever reasons — a big never-ending workload, not much skin in the game, too many flourescent lights and meetings and hierarchy, not enough reward for risk-taking, “bureaucracy” — government at most levels don’t move very quickly. To an extent this is good, but they should be on the web bandwagon by now. Only really rich cities seem to have great web capabilities.
This is definitely an opp. for nonprofits, individuals, entrepreneurs.
So would be:
100% recycled wvo-based biodiesel carshare (doesn’t exist anywhere in bay area, i tried hard to find it!)
public toilet/payphone/water fountain listings w/ google map mashup and phone browsaability/sms for those emergency runs (I have to buy coffee again??)
I would reply on my own about the lack of coordination and the government’s ineptitude, but I think fellow Sierra Club member Norman Laforce says it best:
“While not defending DFG, please remember that beginning with Dukemejian and even under Davis, DFG was gutted as an agency and is a ghost organization. It has 6 people to handle issues statewide.
I think the big mistake would be to blame the people and not focus on the systemic inadequacies of Department of Fish and Game (DFG) created by the financial gutting of the agency. People should be held accountable, but we need to focus our work on the real problem: The unwillingness of Governors and Legislators to properly fund the agency and its mission.
Remember also, that at the federal level we have had Republican administrations going back to Reagan who view Government as the problem. It is no wonder that the agencies respond with no response. The culture and mindset of the agencies and the personnel who were hired since Bush took over, do not view their role as to serve the public, so why should they do anything!! We need to focus on this cultural deficiency.”