How effectively did the Internet deliver information to people during a major disaster?

Many people have questioned the usefulness of information posted on the Web during and after a disaster because people who most need the information are unlikely to have access to it. However, at least in our case, reports from our field faculty do not support that concern.

North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service maintains a Disaster Response Information Web site that received more than 16,500 hits during the month of September 1999. The most active day during this period was September 15, 1999, the day before Hurricane Floyd hit the North Carolina coast. People anticipated that they may not have power or access to their computers, so they prepared before the storm hit. While I can’t say how other organizations and individuals used the information, I do know how our field faculty used it. Before the storm hit, they printed and copied the disaster information, so they could distribute it after the storm to people who needed it.

Of course, no one anticipated the flooding that came with Hurricane Floyd, and our disaster information posted on the Web did not address flooding problems to the extent needed to meet this disaster. Faculty at the university quickly developed informational materials on health and safety issues and posted them over e-mail and on the Web for our field faculty. The challenge was in getting this new information to the field faculty in the counties hardest hit by the flooding.

NCCES lost three county offices due to the flooding. Field faculty in these offices lost their files, computers, and all hard copies of the information they had prepared to distribute. When I asked them if they had found the information on the Internet useful, I was surprised by their enthusiastic response. Everything was lost in their offices, but they knew how to access the information they needed on the Internet through their home computers or from a neighboring county office. Also, field faculty in surrounding counties printed the information from the Web and provided it to our faculty who no longer had offices. They copied the information and began distributing it to the people in their counties who needed it. The traditional methods of distribution through newspapers, radio, and TV were not available, so our field faculty hand delivered the information to shelters and Red Cross trucks. They set up distribution sites at home repair stores and other places where flood survivors were likely to come.

Our field faculty particularly liked the Special Hurricane Floyd Edition of Ask the Specialist because it consolidated a lot of valuable information in one place that they could copy and distribute. This Ask the Specialist edition was only a small part of NCCES’s disaster response, however. The Hurricane relief efforts of our organization went far beyond providing information over the Internet, and these efforts continue to this day. It will take eastern North Carolina years to clean up the mess left in Hurricane Floyd’s wake, and Extension will be there to help North Carolinians see it through.

Not really. Our disaster relief information on the Internet was successful because we have a grass roots network of county offices and field faculty who took the information from the Web, copied it, and distributed it to people who needed it, but who would not have been able to access it.

My purpose in creating "Ask the Specialist" in 1996 was very simple. As Web Master for our departmental home page, I wanted to give people a reason to come back to our home page, and a regular Question and Answer column seemed like a good way to accomplish that goal. It achieves that goal, but it also provides other benefits. First, it helps us fulfill the mission of the Cooperative Extension Service of "helping people put knowledge to work." Second, it creates a depository of information that avoids recreating the wheel every time the same questions are asked. Finally, it provides our field faculty with information they can use in their local newsletters, newspaper columns, and radio spots, multiplying the impact of the information beyond Internet use.

The statistics for the site indicate that we had nearly 7,000 "hits" in the past year, and nearly 5,000 successful user sessions. While most of the hits come from the United States, the site also get hits from all over the world. We occasionally get questions from people in other countries with questions that relate to North Carolina. For example, we had a question from someone in Brazil who was considering moving to the United States, and he wanted to know about the standard of living in North Carolina. I’ve also had questions from an Armenian law student and a teacher from the Netherlands.

Am I surprised by the usage level? I suppose so. After all, we haven’t done much to market the site, and I guess I’m surprised that so many people have found it, especially people from other countries.

Some of the more memorable questions have involved the following fact scenarios:

• A father who was concerned that his son’s soccer coach was a pedophile, and he wanted guidance on how to investigate it.
• A grandmother who was concerned that her son was being denied his visitation rights with his son in violation of a court order.
• A person who had sewage seeping up from the ground in her rental home, and her landlord was refusing to clean it up.
• A person who had purchased a computer from a North Carolina company over the Internet, and he had never received it.
• A person concerned about the damage being done to his property by his neighbor’s free-roaming pig.

These questions aren’t easy to answer, especially with the limited information that is usually given to us in the question. We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we try to provide information about the issues involved, possible options, and how to locate people or agencies who can help the person.

While many of the people e-mail us their thanks for providing information, we don’t often receive updates about whether their problems were resolved. One exception, however, involved a question from a mother who was concerned about her little boy’s "behavior problem" in school. Our Child Development Specialist, Dr. Karen DeBord, suggested that they screen the child for a hearing problem, which turned out to be the cause of the child’s problems in school. As a result, the parents decided to push their child forward from kindergarten to first grade, with tutoring. The parents also worked closely with the school, and the teacher’s attitude towards their son changed for the better. The mother e-mailed Dr. DeBord to thank her, and to tell her how her response had changed their lives.

I’m not sure when the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service’s home page was originally posted. I would guess in 1994 or ‘95. Our departmental home page, the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS), was posted in 1996. Our Department Head at the time, Dr. Marilyn Corbin (currently at Penn State), pushed for its development because she saw that the Internet was the future. She appointed me as Chair of the Home Page Committee in 1995, and I spent a year trying to figure it out. Back then, there wasn’t much published about how to create or design a Web site, so I learned the hard way. Once I learned what the Internet was capable of doing, I was hooked. It revolutionized the way we deliver information to our field faculty and to clientele.

For land-grant universities, like NC State University, providing community information is part of our mission. The North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service (NCCES) links NC State University to the citizens of North Carolina, making it the people’s university. My appointment to the university is 100% Extension. My department, Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) is also 100% Extension, so I may be a bit biased on the subject. However, I think that it is critical for universities to be relevant to the taxpayers who support them. Research is meaningless to average citizens, unless they can see how the research findings help them in their daily lives. Since NCCES’s inception 85 years ago, the lives of North Carolinians have been improved because NC State faculty with Extension appointments, in conjunction with our field faculty, have been able to translate research findings into ways people can understand and use. Studies show that NCCES has a high credibility rating among the people who rely upon our educational services. We take pride in providing unbiased, research-based information that allows people to make informed decisions. Unlike so many other organizations that are selling products or services, we aren’t selling anything, so people trust us. Our primary focus is to educate the general public, and hopefully in the process to help them improve their lives.

Websites discussed in this article: