Disaster Maps

Facebook has a feature called Disaster Maps and Safety Check. Does the church need to do a better job of targeting disasters and responding to them?

We watched it unfold in real time on our television screens. Hurricane Katrina had just slammed into the Gulf Coast. Cameras mounted on helicopters showed the desperate plight of those caught in the floodwaters. Some had fled to their rooftops because there was nowhere else to go.

Words painted on bedsheets signaled their despair: “Send Help.”

In a massive disaster like Katrina, one of the greatest challenges for aid agencies is finding displaced people who need to be rescued. Ordinary phone lines are down, and the few cell towers still operating are overwhelmed with voice calls. It would take days for 911 operators to listen to and log thousands of individual distress calls. Even when voice calls do get through, the survivors placing them are often on the move. For rescue workers, knowing yesterday’s — or even the last hour’s — location is of little use.

 

But voice calls are not the only communications carried over cell towers. Many...