United online
By Erica Hill
CNN Headline News
(CNN) -- News organizations have spent a lot of time in Florida lately, covering one of the busiest hurricane seasons in recent memory. Reporters and crews are scattered all along the coast, bringing us incredible pictures and first-hand accounts of the storms and their force.
Still, we can't be everywhere at once. The lack of coverage in certain areas is frustrating for those with ties to the region, but I recently learned first-hand how the Internet is helping.
My fiancé's family has a condo just east of where Hurricane Ivan's eye passed. There were reporters in Pensacola, Florida, and Gulf Shores, Alabama, but no word coming out of the towns in between.
We immediately turned to the Pensacola News Journal's Web site for information, hoping for a glimpse of the area, and word on whether their building had survived. We didn't find photos right away, but we did find a wealth of information and an instant network.
The paper's online forums were just what we needed. Although most of the postings were from people like us looking for information -- most were out of state or even out of the country -- knowing others were out there was a comfort in itself.
I was fortunate enough to find some video of the condo at work. It was a quick fly-by, but enough to know the building was there. We immediately shared the news online.
Overnight, the forums at PensacolaNewsJournal.com seemed to take on a life of their own. Phil Burgess, the online manager for FloridaToday.com, helped get the forums online for the paper, following the success of similar forums launched for Hurricane Frances. He called the response "amazing."
"We launched [the forums] in Brevard County for FloridaToday.com and what we noticed was it grew into this almost self-serving location on the site," Burgess said.
The news out of Pensacola was no different.
The forums were launched there late Wednesday, before Ivan hit. In the first six hours, the forums received about 9,000 page views. Fast-forward 48 hours, and that area of the Web site was averaging some 1.2 million page views.
It was getting so much attention, Burgess told me, that the forums were moved to their own servers, to make sure they didn't crash. He told me the interaction between people was astounding. He told me stories of people checking on homes for those out of the area. One man checked on the parents of another forum user in Brevard County, and when he found them without electricity and water, took the elderly couple into his home.
Most of the people registered were from out of state. Burgess told me many were from the north, but they came from as far as India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and South America.
"This was their only source of information. It's such a powerful and quick medium; where else could you get that?" Burgess said. "It grew into this pipe and flow of communication going everywhere -- it was all about sharing information."
Sharing information can be tough when you lose all power and communication capabilities. Ivan hit Pensacola hard, so how did its paper stay online?
Burgess stayed in the paper's building the night Ivan came to call. Luckily, its servers are housed in Virginia.
All the updates were done from Pensacola until about 3 a.m. Thursday, when the storm surge started coming through. At that point, Burgess said they had to turn off the electricity. Without power, there was no way to update the site from Pensacola, but the paper did still have one phone line.
For four hours, they called in updates to colleagues at Florida Today in Brevard County, who were able to post the news.
One week after Ivan hit the Gulf Coast, the forums were still going strong, and you can expect the information-sharing to continue. Burgess told me there are no plans to remove them from either site. That's good news for those of us logging on.
The other bit of good news? Some people have been able to access the area where my in-laws-to-be have a condo. It wasn't easy to get there -- the road is gone -- but the first thing many of them did when they returned was log on to share what they saw with the forums.
No one wants another Ivan, but if you are looking for a silver lining, look no further than the incredible network of concerned neighbors uniting online.
