How Social Media Is Helping Survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas | The New Yorker
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Smith has changed the link on her Instagram profile to a listing of approved Dorian aid groups, which includes a Bahamian nonprofit called the HeadKnowles Foundation. The organization was originally founded by Lia Head-Rigby and Gina Knowles as a Facebook group that resembled Angie’s List, where members posted recommendations for goods and service providers in the Bahamas such as caterers or masons. Eventually, HeadKnowles grew into a large network of small-business owners throughout the Bahamas. In 2015, after Hurricane Joaquin hit the country, the organization began collecting financial donations through crowdfunding and received so many supplies that they took over a furniture warehouse for a month.
“We had an assembly line organizing things into boxes; we had people weighing so that we would know which plane is coming,” Rhondi Treco, the thirty-eight-year-old associate director of HeadKnowles, said in a phone interview this week, where she sounded exhausted, and, at times, was on the brink of tears. “We would have people donate planes.” Treco told me that someone donated a DC-8 jet, an aircraft that can hold about a hundred thousand pounds worth of relief supplies.
With government officials and aid groups struggling to respond to massive storms, hurricane victims are turning to social media. During and after Hurricane Irma, in 2017, Facebook was instrumental in search-and-rescue efforts in St. Maarten, where people posted urgent requests for generators, water, and diapers. Patrick A. Scannell, a doctor and health scientist in St. Maarten, founded a group called Hurricane Disaster Contact & Aid - SXM, where people posted both missing-persons reports and calls for donations. The group received so many postings that it created a separate “Make St. Maarten Great Again (Donation)” page. “We decided pretty early along that those two purposes in that one group was getting in the way of rescuing missing people, so we decided to split it into two different groups,” Scannell told me in a telephone interview.
He said that he was amazed by how effective Facebook could be in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. After the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, he said, people used Facebook messenger to coördinate searches for loved ones who were potentially buried in the rubble. After Irma hit St. Maarten, he created Facebook albums that organized missing people by neighborhood. Since Dorian made landfall, a Facebook group called Dorian People Search Bahamas, accumulated nearly thirteen thousand members. A member posted a plea for information about whether a family in Abaco had survived the storm, naming each member. “Please say if you have seen them,” the person wrote. “Praying for their safety and the safety of all people trapped in this nightmare.” Twenty minutes later, another user replied, writing, “I saw Norma she is fine. I have heard Donnie is accounted for and alive.” Hundreds of similar threads appeared on Facebook.
Kimberly Mullings, a broadcast journalist living in Freeport, said that she used Twitter to guide search-and-rescue missions. “I was most useful inside, reading Twitter and then coördinating people outside on Jet Skis,” she said. So much debris filled the flood waters that only personal watercraft were small and agile enough to conduct rescues. “You couldn’t fight Category 5 winds,” Shawn Gabrielle Gomez, a twenty-five-year-old journalist and content producer at a Bahamian agency called Social Light Media, told me. “When the storm downgraded, that was the only chance.” Gomez, who has a large social-media following, worked with Mullings and retweeted rescue requests from survivors. She told me that in the Bahamas, Twitter is not used as much as Instagram and Facebook, but it proved vital after the storm. “I do social-media management, and I never thought in a million years we would use Twitter to save lives,” Gomez said.