HAZARD COMMUNICATION TOOLS AT THE ALASKA VOLCANO OBSERVATORY – FROM FAX TO FACEBOOK

One of the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s (AVO) primary responsibilities is to provide timely and accurate information on volcanic hazards and warnings of impending dangerous activity to local, state, and federal officials and the public. At AVO’s inception in 1988, staff communicated hazard information via phone calls, a recorded message line, media interviews, and the high-tech tool of the day – facsimile. Twenty-five years later, AVO still uses phones, media outlets, and fax, but the Internet has dramatically expanded our communication options.

AVO now uses a dynamic, database-driven website, Twitter, Facebook, and email listservs to distribute message products and a wide array of other volcano-related content. AVO’s formal text hazard message products are crafted within a database-driven graphical user interface (GUI), then automatically or manually distributed from the database to all other communication mediums.

Most of our target audience is reached via the AVO website – we record about 80,000 unique human visitors per month, even during times of no eruption. About 8,000 people have signed up for color code and alert level change emails via our Volcano Notification System (VNS), and about 13,300 receive our updates on Twitter. The AVO Facebook page has a modest ~2,800 likes, but because of the unique aspects of social media sharing, some images and updates on Facebook reach more than 100,000 people within hours. Facebook also provides a unique form of two-way communication between citizen observers of eruptions and AVO; we routinely receive useful observations and photographs of volcanic activity from people throughout the Aleutian arc.

Our entry into social media and other online information distribution efforts is relatively recent, but lessons learned so far include: (1) people want AVO messages delivered to them through the information media they already use, (2) each additional communication tool comes with variable personnel costs, first to program efficient ways to upload information, and then to monitor the site and craft messages specific to each audience, and (3) because social media outlets have a more casual quality than formal information channels and text products, we have created a clear policy document to guide AVO staff responsible for content.