Green Wombat

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 a 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.