‘Social media could have saved more lives’

For the first 48 hours after a huge landslide wiped out his hometown of Aranayake and buried 220 families, Prabath Wedage was on his mobile phone constantly.

"I have not been off the phone for five minutes," said Wedage, who has been trying to coordinate consignments of relief supplies for 1,700 displaced people in 13 emergency shelters, including Rajagiri School, where he normally works.

In this devastated community – as in many disaster-hit places – the ubiquitous mobile phone and its social media apps are becoming a vital tool for relief and rescue workers, officials and families to share and gather information and keep in touch.

As Sri Lanka is hit with more disasters, from droughts to floods to landslides, making the most of the tools will be key curbing losses, experts say.

"We could have saved more lives if we had used these properly," Wedage said.

He noted that it was only after last week's landslide, which followed three days of incessant rain, that many residents begun to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share disaster-related information.

But government agencies dealing with disaster management also have been slow to adopt social media as a tool, experts say.

The country’s Disaster Management Centre, the main government agency dealing with disasters, does not have an active Facebook page or Twitter account. It relies on daily or twice-daily fax updates and press releases to media.

It has the capacity to send text messages to all mobile phone subscribers in the island, but has rarely used that facility, according to Pradeep Koddiplli, a spokesman for the centre.

The same is the case with the Meteorological Department, which has made its daily updates on its website more detailed, but is yet to get on to social media or use text messaging.

"We have looked into this, but we have to devise a mechanism that is tested and proven," said Lal Chandrapala, head of the Met Department.

For now, Wedage said, people looking for quick information during disasters "have to wait until a TV channel or a radio station broadcasts these updates, and that is too late to save any lives. We need live updates."

Others agencies, however, are already finding the value of turning to social media. As Sri Lanka was hit by 355 millimetres (14 inches) of rain last week, the Sri Lanka Red Cross (SLRC) relied heavily on its Twitter and Facebook platforms to get disaster-related information out.

In fact it was a SLRC tweet on May 19 that first alerted the nation to the enormity of the disaster. The tweet said 220 families were buried in the Aranayake landslide, while government officials balked at confirming a missing figure even 72 hours after the disaster.

The SLRC has also used social media to put out weather alerts, disaster warnings and relief and rescue information.

The organisation's aggressive push into social media is in part because of the lack of any other effective public warning system, said Mahieash Johnney, SLRC's communications manager.

"In Sri Lanka we do not have a proper dissemination mechanism to reach people when it comes to natural disasters," he said.