FEMA’s newly updated app: A signal of its digital future
People wait in line to meet with FEMA officials in Coney Island, N.Y., on Nov. 2, 2012, after Hurricane Sandy. (Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is vying for some screen time on your smartphone.
The organization updated its free iOS and Android app Tuesday morning, adding a new feature that sends you push notifications for weather alerts for up to five different locations in the United States. Sourced from a feed provided by the National Weather Service, the tool is one in a slew of new digital initiatives the organization is using to quickly disseminate information after disaster strikes.
It works like this: The app allows you to sign up for alerts to five different areas in the United States, categorized by state and county. You’re not limited to your immediate vicinity, meaning you can monitor your extended family’s tornado-prone neighborhood or that property you own on the hurricane-prone coast of Florida. Whenever the National Weather Service posts a new alert, the app will automatically send a push notification to your phone’s home screen, with a short message warning you of the weather.
Swipe your finger on the notification, and your phone will open to a complete report of the situation. These alerts — composed in all caps with lots of ellipses — are not entirely reader-friendly, but they get the job done. More important, however, is an option to learn how you can best prepare for this disaster on the page’s “What to Do” section. Though this advice is not tailored to each individual type of natural disaster, it does explain the differences between alerts labeled “warning” and “watch” (in other words, it lets you know when you should actually be freaked out).
When you get a FEMA app alert, it sounds like any other normal notification on your phone — much easier to stomach than the blaring, high-pitched Wireless Emergency Alerts that sometimes flash on our screens to warn us of extra-dangerous storms or Amber Alerts.
According to Jason Lindesmith, FEMA’s social media and mobile lead, the agency’s decision to update the app was simply to remind people that it — and FEMA — exist.
“We have tens of thousands of people who have the app on their device, and it has been out for two and a half years, maybe longer than that,” he told Yahoo News. “The alert feature helps give people a reason to remember that they had the app on their phone in the first place. And gives them a recurring reason to open it.”
The organization is also looking to extend its reputation beyond its physical presence (or, in some cases, absence) at disaster scenes. FEMA public affairs director Rafael Lemaitre cites a recent study by the Pew Research Center that found 40 percent of Americans have used their smartphones to search for government information.
The push to expand its digital team and initiatives started in the fall of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, devastating New York and New Jersey. During the chaotic aftermath, Lemaitre said, rumors began to spread on social media that FEMA was running out of water. So it worked with the Red Cross to create a page that set the record straight.
A home destroyed during Hurricane Sandy in the Breezy Point section of New York. (Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
A few years later, FEMA has a big-screen TV mounted in its Washington, D.C., external affairs office, which tracks its website traffic and social media activity based on natural disasters. The team uses software like Crimson Hexagon, Hootsuite and other tools to ensure that FEMA is up to date on weather-related digital chatter.
“We can actually track almost in real time the number of people liking our Facebook page, or doing search requests for shelters,” Lindesmith said. “You do see spikes. After January, when there was the big storm in the Northeast, there was a spike in the number of people looking for shelters, so we were able to track that pretty closely just with the data coming in.”
In some cases, all it takes is a hashtag campaign for FEMA to discover an area of the country in need of disaster-preparedness schooling. During an annual initiative called the Great ShakeOut, states are encouraged to practice earthquake drills. According to David Watson, FEMA’s digital-engagement mobile platforms specialist, the West Coast enthusiastically embraced the hashtag on social media. Other potential disaster locations, like the states around the New Madrid fault line in Missouri, were significantly lacking Twitter engagement about the exercise.
Firefighters help a participant during the annual Great ShakeOut earthquake drill in 2014. (Photo: Nick Ut/AP)
“We were able to use that data in the following years in order to better target states solely based on how many people were using the hashtag while tweeting,” Watson told Yahoo News.
Ultimately, he hopes that the more people with knowledge of disasters, the less they’ll have to do when the unthinkable occurs.
“For more people, their mobile device can sometimes be their best resource for information in staying connected and staying safe when disaster strikes,” he said.
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