West Seattle snow aftermath: “NOT back to normal” (yet)
(SW Sullivan looking east from California SW [map], one of many slushy side streets)
The temperature’s in the 40s, rain is falling, snow is receding. And yet, normalcy does not instantly return, as noted via Facebook by Talani from Stor-More Self-Storage (WSB sponsor) on steep SW Yancy east of Avalon (map):
I think it’s important for our neighbors to know that everything is NOT back to normal…I know people are driving again on the main streets, and that we are seeing more blacktop than we have in 2 weeks, but we still have dangerous conditions on side streets, in parking lots and on the Stor-More property. The places a lot of residents, seniors, handicapped and others want to go, they still cannot get to. We are still snowed in on Yancy, because while we can get out of our driveway and up a street, we cannot go to places we want to go to, and park in their lot. Armed with only one shovel, it’s impossible for us and others to get every last place that has snow and ice, when we have 3 huge buildings…the result is that tenants are arriving very confident because our driveway is blacktop between 2 mountains of snow, but they are getting stuck on the property and we are having to push their vehicles with our hands to keep them from crashing into other vehicles on property. Still snow!!!
Talani also notes that while the U.S. Postal Service has braved conditions every day to get mail to Stor-More, which has public mailboxes (including the WSB business box), UPS and FedEx haven’t made it there in a week, even though some of their customers have been told the packages were delivered.
(WSB editorial-esque aside ensues:) This is what we are seeing as the central problem for how multiple large businesses and government agencies served citizens during Snowmare ’08 — not so much which actions they did or didn’t execute, in terms of delivering, plowing, etc., as the failure to communicate clearly, quickly, reliably, SPECIFICALLY< about what is or is not being done, when it will be done, and WHERE it will be done.
Sadly, this was the same problem during the last weather-related crisis in our area -- the power outages following the December 2006 windstorm. We were without power for almost 4 days; some in West Seattle were power-less for a week. People managed to cope -- but were desperate for information on "when are the crews coming to my neighborhood?" The uncertainty often seemed to take a heavier toll than the outage's actual side effects. As much as knowledge is power, a knowledge deficit is not only powerlessness, but also brings stress.
Of course we must say, yet again, that we are WELL aware many good people in these large businesses and government agencies worked themselves to a frazzle to do the best they could. Snowplow drivers, mail carriers, city and county media-relations people trying to gather and share the latest general information, and answer questions from all us media types, small and large, police officers and firefighters slogging their way to incidents big and small.
The point isn't that nobody tried. The point is that at a different level, beyond the people-power on the street, technology exists now to get SPECIFIC, REAL-TIME information to people - so that the uncertainty can be lessened. This was NOT a crisis that destroyed infrastructure; the power stayed on, the servers ran, the computers worked, the cell towers stayed up, the phones worked. But they did not deliver SPECIFIC, REAL-TIME information, reliably, to the people desperate for it.
We hope that the IT people and the customer-service people will have serious post-mortems that result in real action plans. Why weren't the "bus trackers" accurate? What do you need to put on a bus to figure out where it is, and how can you crunch code to translate that information into something customer-accessible showing just how far behind schedule Route X is running and how far off its route it really is?
For snowplows and power crews -- certainly they are dispatched from somewhere, by somebody keeping track of where they are now, and where they are going next. Can that information be multipurposed so that customers - who the city claims it puts first - will have a better idea of how soon, if at all, they will get help getting out of their streets?
This will require true brainstorming sessions, the "no bad ideas" kind. We fear the discussion could get bogged down in concern over whether certain corporate/government computer systems will work well with each other. Don't get caught up in that. Similar problems have hampered old-media organizations (including at least two megacorporations where we worked) in their efforts to leap into the new-media world. Use the same out-of-the-box tools us civilians use. State/county/local government did use Twitter, for example, to some degree, during Snowmare ’08 — unfortunately not with many specifics — mostly to send out the news-release links, or generalized lines (the experimental Twitter account “sdotsnow” was last heard from on Christmas Eve, with “Primary roads are wet with some slush. Secondary arterials the focus through the night. Temps helping with work”). Seattle Police are using WordPress (same open-source content-management system that is the underpinning of WSB and millions of other blog-format websites) to power the almost-blog-like SPDBlotter site.
We don’t have the solutions but we did want to point out that from our standpoint, watching WSB’ers use the comments sections of our snow-coverage posts to share specifics about bus-route realities and UPS-truck sightings (among many other things), the communication methodology and comprehensiveness are what require the real work after everyone has recovered from this — much more so than “salt vs. sand” or “articulated buses vs. standard.”
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