As wildfires ravage Colorado, social media is proving useful to response and rescue efforts. Two Colorado Springs residents created a Twitter app that amasses Tweets with the hashtages #WaldoCanyonFire, #WaldoFire, #WaldoCanyon, and #ColoradoSprings. It filters and separates official Tweets from citizen-posted ones. The purpose of this program is to get emergency information out a quickly as possible. It will help calm citizens and let them know about things such as road closings and rescue efforts.
The American Red Cross is also coordinating efforts digitally, using their social media response system which they instated in March. The system monitors data on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, which helps quicken rescue response time. It also provides victims with the locations of the nearest shelters.
Many Colorado citizens have found both resource useful during this crisis and more emergency response teams will most likely adopt similar practices.
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