Carrington, North Dakota, is not the first place you’d look for a volunteer in the Hurricane Harvey search and rescue effort. A rural town with only about 2,000 people, it’s not the first place you’d look for anything. It is also more than a 20-hour drive to the flood-ravaged Houston. However, working for the Standby Task Force, a digital humanitarian group, I participated in the recovery by sending data to the U.S. Coast Guard to enhance their Houston and Port Arthur rescue.
The Standby Task Force was formed in 2010 to provide volunteer online digital responses to humanitarian crises, local emergencies and other issues of local or global concern. They have responded to several disasters such as the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014 and Haiti’s Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
The task force provides first responders actionable information by monitoring tweets and other digital resources. This is where its large volunteer network comes in. More than 1,800 task force volunteers in 100 countries can monitor social media for rescue-relevant information. For the Hurricane Harvey deployment, that meant uploading addresses where someone had requested a rescue via social media. Other members of the task force took the addresses from the media monitoring team and assigned them a GPS coordinate. The data table was then mapped, and disseminated to crews on the ground.
All of the data went into a google document that every volunteer could edit. It is imperative that each volunteer is quickly trained. An untrained volunteer could accidentally delete a chunk of data, forcing the team to reload a back-up. I spent my first few hours watching, afraid of messing something up.
This immense job of volunteer training fell to the coordinators and core team members of the Standby Task Force. They had already put together a couple of training slide shows, but it was their constant presence in a chat room that was most important.
One of my goals when I became a digital nomad was to use my ability to work remotely to create more opportunities to engage in service work. I was immediately frustrated when I realized it wouldn’t be fiscally responsible to drive to Texas, and that I’d miss the Red Cross training orientations no matter how quickly I left. That’s when I received notice that the Standby Task Force was activating.
As someone who works remotely and is also interested in working in emergency management and disaster relief, I had stumbled across the Standby Task Force online a few weeks ago. It seemed like an interesting project and I sent in my contact information as a volunteer. By the time I got the activation email I had all but forgotten about them. But I immediately drove to the nearest Wifi I could find.
While the task force helped in search and rescue without getting wet, it was clear that it was still a stressful deployment for many volunteers. Some media monitors would get fed up after diving into long shifts of reading countless cries for help. When I was working geolocation I would glance at Google’s street view and sadly realize that the city looks nothing like that anymore.
This emotional exhaustion might manifest as a snap comment in chat, or a volunteer simply bowing out. But one of the advantages of digital humanitarianism is that with volunteers across the globe, there were often fresh faces waking up as exhausted volunteers logged off.
During deployment it was tough to see if our cross map efforts accomplished much. The resolved column next to most of the 1000 plus rescue entries was marked unknown. I sometimes felt we were plugging away at a spreadsheet for no reason.
Early on September 1st, a message from the Joint Informtion Center in Houston came through:
“Pilots referenced the information to help them decide which neighborhoods they should saturate when they weren’t busy helping critical survivors at known locations.
“It helped us to get a more real-time estimate of the number of people in areas with severe flooding that needed an immediate response,” said an HH-65 pilot out of New Orleans.”
Next Steps
The Harvey deployment for the Standby Task Force ended as the relief efforts now focus on clean-up and rebuilding. There are digital humanitarians working on those efforts as well. For example, Crisis Clean up has put together this map (select Hurricane Harvey from the drop down menu) to help resolve clean-up requests.
The great thing about digital humanitarian efforts is that anyone can do them anytime. Whether you’re parked on a canyon across the country or located across the globe, if you have an Internet connection, you can be of service.
To join the Standby Task Force for the next deployment check out their application here. But there are numerous other volunteer efforts for a digital nomad. The Humanitarian Open Street Map Team uses satellite images to create maps for organizations doing relief work in poorly mapped parts of the world.
My location has changed from Carrington, North Dakota, and changes frequently. But my desire to help people in crisis never does. In this digital age there is no reason to be a passive observer of disaster. The ability to help is only a click away.
