Author: Jim

The obituaries keep coming in. John Solomon has died. After valiantly battling leukemia, he succumbed on Monday, November 1, 2010. He will be missed.

I met John online. He started a blog called In Case of Emergency, Read Blog to help with research for a book he was doing on personal preparedness. His and my blog had the same title; both being focused, to some extent, on preparedness issues, it was inevitable that we’d meet.

I grew to love his posts. I said so frequently.

I grew to admire his zeal. I strive to replicate it, though worry that no one can.

I never met John. He never knew my real name. I worry that cheapened our relationship. Who wants to be friends with a character from an old Clash song?

If I know anything about John Solomon, it was that he loved his family and he loved his work. In my mind, the indelible image of John is a fuzzy profile picture of him in his CERT gear, arm around his daughter.

I’m crying for a man I never knew, and who never knew me.

But I know his passion and I feel the same. I envy, “his willingness to offer candid assessments of where we stood as a country as far as preparedness, and … his honest feedback about … FEMA,” as no less than FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said in an official statement on Tuesday.

I know the world is poorer for having lost John, but is the world poorer for not knowing Jim Garrow? I’m not vain enough to think that I’ve had the same impact as John did, but I am pragmatic enough to know that my old blog would never change the world.

I’m not saying what I’m going to say in some misguided attempt to replace John. I could never do that, and truthfully, I have no desire to do that. I hate to tie the two statements together, but the first has lead me to the second.

I said before that I envied John’s passion. More specifically, I envy John’s passions. His dual passions, preparedness and family. His ability to do both, be both. I want that.

My kids can’t be proud of the work that I’ve done. My kids can’t be proud of someone who is cowed because someone someday might disagree with something he’s written.

I’m proud of the content of that blog. I stand by it all. All.

My kids should know what their Dad does, because I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t know how much time I’ve got (not that I’m planning to go anywhere). Life is too short.

I have blogged under the pseudonym Jimmy Jazz. I wrote for more than three years on the first and only regularly updated public health preparedness blog, In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. Because of my work there I met people that I had no reasonable expectation of knowing. I’ve met Jerome Hauer, Peter Sandman, Gerald Baron, and a host of amazing people from states and cities and counties across the country. I met John Solomon. And not one of them knew who I really was. Life is too short.

That said, I’m closing that blog.

I needed a fresh start. I needed a new direction. Hopefully this will be that direction, that new start.

Thank you to all of my old readers and my new readers for everything you’ve done with me. Thank you, John, for helping me to be a better man.

Airports around the globe had a few hours of worry today. Here in public health, we really don’t have a role in that type of situation (though initial reports did mention radiological material might have been involved), but it’s good to know what’s going on so if we get media calls or someone asks our executive, it won’t be a complete surprise and we come off looking out-of-touch. In a potentially bad situation, everything came out very well — no explosives, no one hurt, get to practice our media monitoring and we look good to the executive.

So, what did we do?

Well, I first found out about the situation on Twitter. One of the local TV stations had a couple of “developing” type tweets about something going on at the airport. I checked with some of our official internal channels and found that this might actually be something. I alerted my bosses and was advised to maintain situational awareness. I was able to manage that through a combination of official and unofficial channels. The official ones, for obvious reasons, I can’t tell you about. The unofficial ones, the ones that really helped develop the overall story for updates to our executive, I’ll describe in detail for you.

The tools. First, two screens. There’s simply too much information for just one screen. Since I don’t have two screens, I used a laptop next to my monitor. One on monitor, I had two browser windows open with internal tools.On the other monitor, Twitter and websites. I had one browser window open to a national media list on Twitter for official news releases. I had another browser window open to TweetGrid. TweetGrid is a great little website that allows you to run concurrent, live searches on Twitter. First, you pick how many searches you want to run (I’ve found that I can’t do more than the 2×3 grid), then type your search terms (or hashtags) into the boxes on your screen. Each box will then update, in real-time, with tweets that include your search terms. The key here isn’t to find one nugget of wisdom in these streaming tweets, but to pick up on things that are just happened. If a half-dozen people report on something (not RT’ing the same message), it’s something to investigate further. If one of the tweets is from a national news outlet, take it with more credence. This takes some getting used to, but really helps in picking out new topics. As new topics presented themselves, I would look on the national and local news websites that I also had open. As I found new search terms, I would swap out older, less useful search terms (at one point, I got rid of bomb threat and added Portland, due to the suspicious device found in Maine).

In the past, I advocated using a tool like Netvibes (or CrisisWire) as a dashboard for situational awareness, but today I found it too difficult to set up day of.

Using the best of social media, mass media and official, internal reports, I was able to provide real-time updates to my PIO, boss and executive on a rapidly expanding incident that had the potential to grow into something that could affect our department. I know that this reads like a paean to Twitter, but I found that it gave me unprecedented insight into what was happening around the globe and in my own backyard — even more than my official channels, at times.

So much is written about how Twitter is a great tool for broadcasting emergency messages, or for developing relationships with one’s stakeholders (both of which we here in Philadelphia have experienced); rarely, though, does anyone mention what a great tool it is for obtaining situational awareness. And that’s a mistake, because while not everyone uses Twitter to receive messages, a whole bunch of people use Twitter to send messages. Messages with information we need. Are you paying attention?