From Texas to Jakarta, Warnings About Flood Warnings
Meet ex-Twitter flood-safety evangelist Jim Moffitt and an Indonesian innovator mapping realtime flood risk
Updated after the webcast - Even before humans began heating the climate, societies grappled with epic risk from rare but inevitable deluges. Monitoring and communication technology - including social media - have greatly boosted safety but, as the Texas tragedy reveals, deadly gaps persist.
I hope you spend time watching my conversation on flood warnings with Jim Moffitt, a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety, and Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, a realtime disaster mapping platform in Indonesia. We were also joined by flood-warning analyst Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the Columbia Climate School. Among many efforts, he led a four-year international project called Towards A Global Flood & Flash Flood Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observatory.
We explored the Peta Bencana success in using community-generated data to map unfolding floods and other natural hazards. After Elon Musk shut off free access to Twitter/X data that project shifted to Whatsapp and other social media. The impact of the abrupt cutoff of Twitter data was severe, she said:
We looked at other challenges in crossing last-mile warning gaps. Just as is the case with Trump’s budget and staff demolitions at FEMA and NOAA, Indonesia is dealing with flooding in a time of budget cuts, as Global Press just reported.
I asked Mahtani whether the Trump demolition of USAID has had an impact. It’s huge, she said. More on that down the line.
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How social media can matter
There was a time when Twitter, because its data were realtime and open, was widely used to link data flowing from stream gauges and the like directly to communities or organizations trying to watch for extreme conditions in realtime. Much of this capacity was due to Jim Moffitt’s work, as I explored here in 2022 (see post links below) and as Moffitt described in 2016 on Twitter’s blog. It’s worth stressing that the pilot project was in Texas!
In Jakarta, Mahtani’s organization has run a flood mapping app through which data flows two ways - with social media users helping generate accurate up-to-the-moment awareness of danger hot spots that also help agencies responsible for emergency preparedness. After Twitter data was closed off they switched to Whatsapp. I have to learn more about such uses of that huge app.
Here’s a great story on Mahtani and Peta Bencana: What governments can learn from Indonesia’s Disaster Map Foundation.
Here’s an excerpt from an explainer she wrote last year for Berdaya Media:
An essential component of Peta Bencana’s approach is accessibility. Rather than requiring users to download a separate app – which research shows is unlikely during a crisis – the platform integrates seamlessly with popular social media channels. By using social media, you can already be part of the solution.
The beauty of Peta Bencana is its simplicity. Here’s the process:
A resident posts about a flood or other disaster on social media with keywords like “flood. ”For instance, if someone tweets about a flood using the term "banjir" (Indonesian for “flood”), Peta Bencana’s bot automatically detects the keyword and prompts the user to confirm if they would like to submit a report.
A bot reaches out to confirm the location, severity, and details. This process guides users to verify their location, add photos, and provide descriptions.
After verification, the report pops up on Peta Bencana’s public map, accessible to everyone. What was previously a simple social media post is now a verified, geo-tagged report on the platform.
The bot has become Peta Bencana’s most valuable asset, allowing them to capture a wealth of information that residents are already sharing online.
Driven by the spirit of gotong royong – a uniquely Indonesian tradition of mutual aid and collaboration – Peta Bencana embodies the belief that every individual can and must contribute to disaster preparedness and recovery efforts. The platform strengthens community resilience by making critical data accessible to residents who may need to act immediately, often well before formal responders can arrive.
Imagine if Flash Flood Alley had such a system. Hopefully Texas and county elected officials, and maybe even the federal government, will see the value in such an investment.
A lost capacity when Twitter devolved to X
Here’s an example of one of the now-dead resources that had been available in the United States - the archived X account for the U.S. Geologicial Survey Texas FloodWatch project. If it had been up and running, would any lives have been saved? Hard to say of course. The data are all still available, just not producing tweets.
For more see my converstion with Jim Moffitt just after he quit Twitter:
One of my guests that day was the excellent science journalist Andrea Thompson, who’d written this article for Scientific American: Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety Managers Warn:
And here’s my post from November 2022 warning about the dangers posed by diminished Twitter utility and functionality:
I know this is a lot of information but so be it. Those of you from the New York City area may not have forgotten about the dozens who died in 2021 when the remains of Hurricane Ida disgorged astonishing deluges over the impervious cityscapes of Queens and Brooklyn. Here’s my highly relevant conversation with the Columbia flood-warning expert Andrew Kruczkiewicz: How Did Dozens Die from Hurricane Ida's Predicted Northeast Blow