Google and Facebook Help Nepal Earthquake Survivors and Contacts Connect

NEW YORK  TIMES  by Karen Zraick                                                                   April 28, 2015

In decades past, after a large-scale natural disaster, the people affected and their friends and loved ones often struggled to reconnect. In New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, phone lines were disrupted and people resorted to pinning missing-persons posters around the city.

But now technology and social media are transforming the ways individuals and organizations regroup after disasters and allowing people quicker access to information.

This became clear in the response to the devastating earthquake in Nepal, as technology companies deployed apps to connect people in the earthquake zone with their panicked friends and relatives. Google and Facebook are among the companies that have introduced apps designed for disasters.,,

Facebook said millions of users in Nepal, India, Bhutan and Bangladesh had been marked as safe, and their status had been relayed to tens of millions of people as of Monday afternoon.

Google and the Red Cross took a slightly different tack, assembling databases with the names of people in affected areas. As of Monday afternoon, the list compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross had 1,385 people registered as missing and 241 registered as alive and safe. That site allows users to input and search data.

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