Twitter Message Sparks Big Rescue Effort

(Jan. 30) – Thanks to a single Twitter message, an astounding emergency response network was built from scratch in the wake of Haiti's devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

The day after the 7.0 quake, 24-year-old Washington, D.C., resident Josh Nesbit felt an intense desire to help those in need. So he went to his computer and sent out the following message on the social networking site Twitter.

Reaching out to @FrontlineSMS users in #Haiti with hopes of establishing local SMS gateway for http://haiti.ushahidi.com

Though cryptic to some eyes, the meaning behind Nesbit's tweet was clear to others, and within hours he made a connection with Jean-Marc Castera, a Haitian network engineer for Digicel, the Caribbean's largest wireless carrier.

"The idea was to reach out to people to set up a gateway where people could share information," said Nesbit, the co-founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic, a nonprofit that utilizes Short Message Service (SMS) technology to improve medical care in developing nations. "But then I happened upon Jean-Marc, who had the idea for the short code."

Short codes are special telephone numbers used for SMS messages, and in the absence of any equivalent to 911 service in Haiti following the earthquake, Castera recognized their potential.

"A friend of mine told me about Josh and his team, their project and goals," Castera said via e-mail from Port-au-Prince. "I immediately realized how critical this could be to saving lives on the ground, so I got in touch with him on Twitter."

Castera, who now lives in Jamaica, said he went back to Haiti to help in any way he could and managed to secure a short code, 4636, where people could send text messages to report injuries or word of survivors trapped in the rubble.

"Jean-Marc is really a hero in all of this," Nesbit said. "He has held this whole thing on his shoulders many times."

For his part, Nesbit worked 20-plus-hour days from his Washington apartment, enlisting the help of companies like U.S. Google, Ushahidi and Instedd. On Jan. 16, the thrown-together collaborative effort had the emergency network up and running.

Radio stations and word of mouth publicized the number, and frantic text messages started pouring in.

One was from a bleeding woman who had gone into labor, Nesbit said. After texting 4636, her location was identified, and the Coast Guard arrived on scene in time to help deliver the baby. Other calls came from Port-au-Prince hospitals, some reporting fuel shortages, others announcing that they had beds free.

More than 3,000 miles away, two San Francisco companies, CrowdFlower and Samasource, helped recruit hundreds of translators across the globe so that incoming texts in Haiti's Creole dialect could be understood and sorted.

The Office of Innovation at the State Department also got involved, helping locate callers with GPS. When a person now texts 4636, his or her message and location are passed along to the Red Cross and the U.S. Coast Guard.

"It's hard not to be inspired by the level of cooperation between agencies, individuals, nonprofits, governments," Nesbit said. "It's been a bit surreal, to tell you the truth."

The idea for the emergency line is not dissimilar to the work Nesbit has done in Malawi, where FrontlineSMS:Medic has set up an SMS network to connect patients and health care workers to a rural clinic. Here is Nesbit delivering a speech in 2009 describing how something as simple as donating an old cell phone can make a big difference for public health:


"The power of cell phones is that they are already in the hands of so many people in the developing world," said Rose Donna, president of DataDyne, a Washington nonprofit that develops SMS applications for people in the developing world.

Donna said many Americans have a faulty perception that cell phones are too expensive for residents of poor countries, and cites the flood of Twitter and text messages that poured out of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, as proof. "People with limited resources have been using SMS for years. Why? Because it's cheaper than making a phone call."

Each day, 4636 receives 2,500 messages, Nesbit said. It takes from two to 10 minutes for them to be translated and forwarded. Though recent technological advances have made this kind of global rapid-response network possible, Nesbit said he hopes that governments around the world won't wait until the next catastrophe strikes before setting one up themselves.

"We intend communicate that message in the coming weeks," Nesbit said.