How the social web saved a life during the Haiti earthquakes

On the day the earthquake hit, well-known Haitian radio personality Carel Pedre was driving his car along the streets of the capital when the ground started shaking violently. Houses were tossed into the air and walls came tumbling down.

As a trained journalist, Pedre’s intuitive reaction was to jump out of his car, take photos with his iPhone and try to post them on the web. He took six photographs of houses that had collapsed and streets that had been ripped apart but, because the earthquake had knocked out cellphone towers, he couldn’t post any of the pictures.

Pedre, along with all the other inhabitants of the city, were shocked into panicked action. Pedre’s first priority was to find out what had happened to his family. He was particularly worried about his one-year-old daughter. As the traffic gridlocked there was no way he could get to his home. Pedre parked his car at the Radio One station and ran two miles to his house and found his family was safe.

He returned to the station to find that it somehow still had internet access and he was able to post the first pictures of the calamity onto Twitter and contact friends and family in the outside world using Facebook. As soon as the news of the disaster filtered out of the country, foreign news organisations began trawling social media sites and quickly found Pedre.

He was surprised to learn just how interested the rest of the world was in the Haitian earthquake. Major networks from all corners of the globe were soon calling him for interviews about the magnitude of the disaster. Some used telephones while others were able to make Skype connections.

As rescue teams began to assess the extent of the disaster, people in Haiti and from other countries were desperate to find out about their loved ones. Pedre focussed his attention on supplying the type of information people and emergency rescue teams were looking for. He used Twitter and Facebook to inform relatives about who had survived and who still needed attention.

In one particular incident he heard about a boy who had been trapped for 16 days under a pile of rubble. Pedre used Google Earth to locate the boy and then used Facebook to guide a rescue team to him. His knowledge of social media and his expertise in using what was available helped save at least one life and certainly helped alleviate the misery of many others.