A tale of the Santa Rosa wildfire and social media's impact

"The day of the fire I was at school teaching. We were in the middle of a lesson when we saw the smoke rise over the hill"

Santa Rosa resident Kim Walls and her husband stayed behind after the fire started to try and clear items that would light close to their home.

Hearing about the fire

I work with fifth and sixth graders and those students who had phones were asking me to take out their phone and check on news. The students checked social media and called their parents for information. Later that night we were woken up by our neighbor telling us we needed to evacuate. After we began evacuation we were stuck in traffic using what little phone battery we had to check Facebook and various news sites to hear about the wind conditions.

Social media usage during the fires

After we had been evacuated from our house and finally had access to a place to recharge our phones batteries we checked Facebook and found pages created for the residents of Santa Rosa to tell their families and friends that they were safe. Due to the varying locations of the fires we had to check in on multiple pages, but it was nice to hear about other community members being safe. Calorie had an account on Facebook that I checked multiple times a day to learn about updates. We wanted to know when we would be able to return home, or if there would be a home to return to. Because I am a school teacher, myself and other teachers used this time to prepare for the damages that our students may be facing. There were email threads connecting us to facebook blogs and articles about grief counseling. Though I mainly used Facebook to learn most of my information I was aware that apps like Twitter were being used to generate awareness. We also saw a lot of donation pages on Facebook to help the residents who lost their homes and to assist in the fire efforts. Social media was a major key to finding out information that we would not have had access to, due to internet being very limited.

- Kim Walls Santa Rosa resident

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