In addition to the human story, the latter fourth of the article has a lot of interesting/worrying detail about the systems and failures involved. A couple of e

In addition to the human story, the latter fourth of the article has a lot of interesting/worrying detail about the systems and failures involved. A couple of examples: - Lack of interoperable comms was obvious after Sept. 11 and continues to be an ongoing problem with fighting over radio spectrum. Or even agencies just being hostile and uncooperative with each other. - Attributing deaths to a disaster can involve arbitrarily narrow criteria. 36 deaths in Harris County are considered storm-related because the victims drowned. But the county recorded ~2500 deaths overall in August, 200 more than in July, and an outlier compared to past Augusts. The growing use of social media as an ad-hoc emergency system when 911 is overwhelmed is really interesting, if worrying. Facebook posts and streaming video are invaluable for people to communicate with their loved ones (e.g. Wayne streaming video to his friends/family showing that the water levels as stopped rising). But given that individual agencies had trouble filtering duplicates and tracking call status (e.g. dispatchers personally text fire captains in an attempt to get priority attention), I can only imagine the problem being much harder across the open web. The story notes that agencies weren't "prepared to respond to distress signals posted on the public's technologies of choice: Facebook and Twitter". But I can't imagine what it would take to truly prepare for that. You'd have to have a full-time and well-trained social media staff akin to what big companies have for customer service, e.g. what airlines have, and this would be in addition to your 911 phone dispatchers. And then there's the problem of reconciling duplicates when someone, quite understandably, is repeatedly pinging you from as many social networks as they have in the belief that it increases chances of getting noticed. At least with traditional phone calls, there's more of a one-to-one relationship between phone numbers and people. OTOH, if the bandwidth could handle it, being able to communicate with dispatchers via FB Live/Facetime/Periscope/Skype could be incredibly valuable in avoiding the kind of miscommunication detailed in this story. For me, one of the most troubling aspects of this story is how Wayne Dailey acted how I probably would have: being patient and reasonable, understanding that the dispatchers are overwhelmed, wanting to avoid making things worse by freaking out. Based on the reporting, though, it seems had Wayne been more pushy, more relentlessly belligerent -- emergency workers would have grasped the actual severity of his situation. Even when he got through, it seems dispatchers dropped the ball on passing along his info, leading him to think he was in the rescue queue. Meanwhile, someone else in his neighborhood gets a helicopter evac because they have a friend who knows the district Congressman who has a line to a federal agency. Can't blame that neighbor for trying everything and anything to save their loved one. But it's worrying to think that every-person-for-themselves might be the optimal survival strategy as opposed to organized triage. (disclosure: the author is a former colleague)