When a major tsunami hit the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, newspapers and TV channels had gone into overdrive to explain what a tsunami is.
Seven years later, the word tsunami needs no introduction. Wednesday’s earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra triggered a wave of trends on social networking and micro blogging sites. Facebook witnessed thousands of postings alerting friends and near and dear ones while on Twitter seven of the top 10 trends were related to the tsunami.
Even national governments used Twitter and Facebook to issue alerts about tsunami. The Union ministry of external affairs posted updates about the earthquake and its aftershocks and alerted Indians living in tsunami-prone countries particularly Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
The spokesperson for external affairs ministry official Syed Akbaruddin tweeted that control rooms are being set up in the Indian Mission in Jakarta and the Consulate in Medan to assist Indian nationals if necessary.
Thanks to mobile phones, social networking and micro blogging sites, people started taking precautionary measures even before the governments officially issued tsunami alerts to warn citizens. Thousands of smses flooded the networks within minutes of the 8.5 magnitude earthquake having hit several parts of south India including Chennai, Puducherry, Nellore, Ongole, Vijayawada, Kakinada and Visakhapatnam among other places such as Bengaluru and Kochi.
Trends on Twitter alerted users of the earthquake which had its epicentre near the west coast of northern Sumatra. The trends not only warned people of a possible tsunami but also about the safety measures to be taken in such an eventuality. Ironically, the TV channels in their rush to give ‘Breaking News’ only seemed to create only more panic.