A Wildfire Sheds Light: Social Media, Infrastructure for Mutual Aid

This is Part 5 of a multi-part series that explores the ongoing impacts of the Marshall Fire through interviews with survivors and analysis of the role of climate change and alternatives to recovery such as mutual aid.

Photo by Skinner Myers

Part 5 dives into the need for accurate, up-to-date information during disaster

It’s difficult to overestimate social media’s role in public safety during a disaster, particularly given the inadequacies of many government alert systems, which tend to operate on an opt-in basis. What’s more, in the case of the Marshall Fire, the system failed to provide notice to many who did subscribe. Almost no one I spoke with found out about the fire from an evacuation notice. Henry Wong’s household, for instance, learned of the evacuation order as they were already driving away to escape the smoke. 

It may be obvious that people today rely on social media to communicate and exchange support, but there are new details to unpack as the technology, and the climate, changes. Case in point: the recent acquisition and transformation of Twitter by an inexperienced billionaire with  — shall we say — questionable values shows the fragility and ephemerality of the profit-driven social media ecosystem.  Mutual aid can and does take shape on social media, but an entire platform can be transformed or ruined on a CEO’s whim.

What if these communications systems, which have the capacity to sustain global and local interaction, were publicly owned and operated, or even designed primarily for the purpose of mutual care? As researchers have demonstrated, and as people of color and other marginalized folks living in primarily white and well-off areas know all too well, apps like Nextdoor and Facebook support a range of activities, not all of them benign. 

During and after the fire social media became, for many, one thing only: a lifeline. Marshall survivor Fallon Voorheis-Mathews said, “the fire has brought us together as a community.” Without social media, this would not have happened to the same extent. It would have been very difficult to maintain the broad yet detailed communication people needed to accomplish these connections and help one another. 

Social media has been a pivotal source of emotional support as a space for sharing and processing. Kathe Perez said, “My postings on Facebook continued for some weeks. The public catharsis helped in ways that it’s difficult to describe.” 

Social media use among neighbors is always significant in Louisville and Superior even in the best of times. During the nearly two years since so many residents were dispersed by the fire, neighbors in Fallon’s part of Louisville have gotten to know each other quite well using preexisting social media networks. Their private Facebook group, “80027–OhOh27–The Original OhOh27,” existed long before the fire and probably predates the Nextdoor app as well.  The OhOh27 provides a place to talk about anything relevant to the neighborhood, such as comparing notes about noise from the airport, sharing advice and referrals, and posting photos of hiking — a favorite pastime in the area. One guy likes to contribute to the neighborhood vibe by posting jokes every day. When the fire arrived, many residents turned immediately to the OhOh27 for information and advice.

Such networks became essential in circulating information in the face of the exploitative insurance industry and FEMA’s scanty assistance. Fallon echoed the perspective shared by almost everyone I spoke with: “FEMA’s a joke. It doesn’t give anything to anyone who has insurance, even if they are underinsured.”  For those who qualify, FEMA provides up to $40,000, barely a year’s living wage for a single person in Boulder County. This is an example of why, according to Dean Spade, the “local and decentralized nature of mutual aid is essential, and we can see this in disaster response especially, where FEMA is generally useless on the ground, whereas local mutual aid projects made of people who know their neighbors and know the place are more effective. It is a mistake to characterize practices based in local knowledge and local control as ‘small scale’ when people are doing them all over and sharing knowledge and resources across large distances.” 

As of the overnight destruction brought by the Marshall Fire, many homeowners’ American dreams are now underwater, to borrow a common financial metaphor, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite every precaution, one underinsured survivor’s home shot immediately to minus $100,000 right after the fire. Currently, their house is valued at approximately minus $300,000 — and falling.

For Fallon, as for the many other homeowners who got burned on insurance, the fire was “a very humbling experience. I was doing pretty well, but I don’t have an extra three hundred grand lying around!”

There is little in place to regulate the price gouging. Many who lost their homes cannot afford to sell and must therefore rebuild, at high cost and very slowly. It also means that instead of using pockets of coverage available to replace furniture or other household items including clothing, they must spend it on construction. Out of necessity, many residents of Louisville now have professional-level expertise on insurance, because even though they had “done everything right” and updated every aspect of their policies before the fire, their coverage wasn’t even close to being enough. Social media has provided channels for circulating this hardbought knowledge for the benefit of others in the neighborhood. 

As the fire was burning, many residents learned more from one another through social media than they could from county systems and the news. It was through Facebook that Carole Billingham learned that the nearby Costco was being evacuated, and that’s when she and her husband realized that they should leave too. Once evacuated, Carole also kept in close contact with several neighboring households using a group chat. One of her neighbors on the circle had a webcam active, which was reassuring because as long as the camera was still receiving electricity, the houses were still standing. 

Jennifer Ho, a professor in ethnic studies at CU Boulder, emphasized that she was aided by social media every step of the way toward safety: “One of the things I fear and mourn about Twitter’s potential demise is the way that I and others in emergency situations and crises have been able to get information — in many cases that can be lifesaving. The day of the Marshall Fire I took a photo from my deck of the smoke I could see in the West and posted it to Twitter. I then followed others tweeting and eventually followed the hashtag #MarshallFire. As the smoke plume grew bigger and as I was seeing tweets from people in Louisville post about evacuating.”  

She continued: “I mused on Twitter whether I should pack a go bag. The response I got was a unanimous YES — this was 30 minutes before my husband came home and told me that Clinica [his work] had evacuated and we should consider doing the same. People on Twitter also advised what we should pack and to take a video of everything in our home in case our house did burn. And as we worried whether we should evacuate, it was Twitter that made us realize it was better to leave before we received an evacuation order telling us to leave, because we could see the tweets from others who were caught in traffic trying to flee or who had lost electricity and were panicking in their garages not sure how to manually open their garage doors. I learned all of this on Twitter by following the hashtag and seeing peoples’ tweets about the fire and evacuation.” 

As for official systems, Ho’s household “never received a text or email warning us about the fire or whether we were in the evacuation zone. We didn’t learn anything about packing a go bag or documenting what was in our home from any public agency. It was only Twitter that helped me learn about these things—and that kept me informed about the path of the fire and the traffic (and we learned where traffic was bottlenecked through Twitter and so when we evacuated we were able to avoid the worst areas).”

Ho also pointed out that “it’s chilling to imagine how many more lives might have been lost if Twitter had changed hands in late 2021 rather than 2022.”

Unfortunately, most of the popular socials are privately owned and, in most cases, optimized for profit-seeking based on relentless controversy. They can be just as unreliable and insufficient as some of our present government-supported systems have been, and they can foster an atmosphere that is too toxic for sharing psychological support — make that double failure of neoliberalism a triple, then a quadruple. The likely collapse of a dominant platform like Twitter is a serious threat to public safety.