LESLIE
If with Monchique The need was felt, with Leslie the public impact was worthy of a hurricane. Exactly one year after a tragedy, the central part of the country caught up with Hurricane Leslie and it was clearly noticed that the Civil Protection had loopholes communication with the population. On the first activation of the T accountVOSTPT witter, the numbers of followers and views showed the importance of structure.
As reported by the media, the VOST volunteers “They were tweeting all night to inform the Portuguese.” and more than digital, we were able to have a real impact on collaboration with the population, whether in virtual terms, such as coordinating efforts with the GNR Twitter account, and via our back-office information management system, to operationally follow up on warnings but also on the ground, sending a volunteer to respond to a specific situation on the spot and contacting the authorities to resolve other cases.
With Leslie, everything exploded: On Twitter, we grew from 400 to 4000 followers in the space of a week and on the weekend of Leslie, the Twitter account got 1.8 million views. The description of everything that happened in those days is narrated by Marco Maia as follows:
“It was still in October that the leaves fell and until then the concept of VOST did not exist in Portugal, that the country was caught with pants in hand, With a near-hurricane coming in! Initially it would hit the archipelago of Madeira, then the Algarve region, and then panic: “Landfall would take place in the capital!!!“from this small but sunny nation. Nothing more wrong. Already from Thursday to Friday, like old Restelo, but on the contrary, we had a certainty: Leslie was going to be serious, and it wouldn't be serious for the sides of Lisbon. It would be yes, to the center, to be more exact, in Figueira da Foz and surrounding areas.
From the evening of the 12th of October we followed Leslie minute by minute, and saw our number of followers grow from 400 to over 4000 in less than 12 hours. In the aspect of weather monitoring, we have done our best to maintain the quality and resourcefulness in updating weather conditions either through the analyses we produce, or through official communications from the entity that follows this type of weather events in the North Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center in Miami, USA. This monitoring, or meteorological follow-up, was carried out from the first hours. In practical terms, we were publishing weather charts or satellite images, not forgetting or removing from the equation the IPMA radar images, which would show the storm already progressing to the continental territory (and which always prove to be an excellent Nowcasting tool) More people joined us to help us with the collection and validation of information, and little sleep, in an unorganized shift system. In the meantime, Hurricane Leslie would move into a post-tropical storm, and our team grew to six.
While official predictions pointed first to the possibility of Leslie completely failing the national territory, and then to the landfall being between Sines and Lisbon, our Amateur Meteorologists They saw and reviewed models, and on October 13, 2018 at 1:29 p.m., we went ahead with this information:
A few hours later it became clear to us that the area of Figueira da Foz would be the most battered by now, storm Leslie, and we informed those who followed us of this:
In between we tried to use humor to inform people of the severity of the adverse weather phenomenon (AWF) that awaited us, but always with all the responsibility that we always impose on ourselves. From the moment it became clear to everyone that landfall would reach the center of the country, our mission unfolded in two: identifying situations in order to pass this information on to the authorities and entities with responsibilities on the ground, and continuing to monitor the evolution of the storm in order to inform our followers of the expected path of the storm. The method used was the same as we had used in Monchique but this time counting on the information coming from many more people on the ground, some of whom became our volunteers after this activation.
We can say that Leslie was our proof of fire and the results speak for themselves: More than 1.800.000 views of our profile during those days, the inclusion of the information we were collecting on the main news channels, and the exponential growth in the number of followers on Twitter. More than figures the fact that we may have helped some people to have news of their relatives, and that we acquired the level of credibility enough for entities such as GNR to count on us as partners during this event that ravaged our country, was for us proof that we were doing well what we had proposed:
Collect information, validate, inform, and help.
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At the end of this activation we were invited to be part of the network VOST Europe
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