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Reflecting on my last 13 years. What a wild fucking ride that was at times. I literally got to task satellites. Like draw boxes on Google Earth and send them on to say hey these are the really broken places from the latest quake, point shiny space camera at them? Thanks
I went to a place that was, shall we say, war zone adjacent. All power to the Dolo Ado Airport air traffic control which was one guy with a VHF radio, when a plane was coming in, he got the big stick to chase the goats off the runway.
There was a really weird moment at the start of that one, chucking my backpack in the back of one of those big white UN 4WDs you see on the news, and then the driver walks around with a mirror on the end of a stick to check for bombs
Oh and I think I've told this before, but we put a typo on the front page of Google. I will never misspell Philippines again. After the Japan quake we put up a warning on the front page, advising folks of possible tsunami danger and listed countries
I had a slide in my deck about our efforts that included that front page, and mentioned we had to wake folks up, and joked they said "make sure it is spelled correctly". I presented it at a media event in Singapore a few years later and a Filipino journo went "it's spelt wrong"
I'm not sure if there is video online of my reaction. I went oh no, one L two Ps, oh no.
That misspelling was on the front page of Google for like 12h and no one noticed.
Or if they noticed they didn't manage to complain enough that we heard.
Or the time I had dinner with Mahathir and joined in with his wife to make fun of him for being unable to program the VCR.
After Christchurch got hit by the quake, many folks were please don't delete the Streetview imagery, it's the best record of the city as it was. When we launched Streetview Time Machine a few years later, I did the press event, at the Christchurch Museum.
First time I had to do a TV spot there wasn't enough time to go through media training. Afterwards I said ok more coming up, should I get training and the comms folks were like "nah, this is good"
One interview for, fuck I cannot remember, CNBC or CNN? asked why Google did the crisis response work and I answered "because we can". If I ever get around to writing a book about my time on crisis response "because we can" will be the title.
Oh yeah one more bit. Morning after the "you spelt Philippines wrong" event, I was due to fly back to Syd, a typhoon was threatening Philippines so I had to delay flight back to work it. Was meant to be a 2 day trip. I was ok but if it's another day I need to go buy more undies
I'm very much focussed on not being sad that it's over, and more focussed on how goddam incredible it was that this happened. For a number of years a small group of us got to use a mega corporation to push out information during disasters and hopefully saved lives
Ooo another one. When NYC got hit by Sandy, and a bunch of subways flooded, NY Transit lost power, so for a few nights they'd ring me at 5am their time to read out where the replacement bus routes would be, I'd trace them onto Earth and share them out.
On one occasion I was at the pub after work they were ok then the bus turns left into this street and I was "you sure? Maps says that's one way" and he was shit ok the next street then.
Google Earth is genuinely something that was scifi years ago, and now it's a thing we all accept as a normal thing. No one gets a street directory as an 18th birthday present anymore. This is a good book on it https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35820393-never-lost-again
Anyway I'm trying to focus on not being sad but instead being amazed that for a while I legit was able to have a three word mission statement of "Save the World" in an unironic way.
I was downloading all the bonus awards I got during my time on crisis and some of them I had to google because I didn't remember. Not because neglect. Because there were so fucking many of them.
There was a quake in western iran and we had to handle this is a sensitive region and yeah
Anyway. Save the World. It's important.
What a weird job that was.
Enough of it from meta harm. Harm among harm.
Tagging a fork onto the end of the original thread https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1327916198697201664?s=19
And another fork (yes I goofed, Chch is east coast and fault is west coast) https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1328235781039656960?s=19
Hurricane Sandy, part one https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1328621523058388992?s=19
One thing I really haven't talked about in this thread so far is working on this stuff absolutely fucks you up. There's only so many times you can see lots of deaths and not absorb some damage. On crisis we got that regularly. It's the dark side of it.
I will at some point come back to Boston Bombing which extremely fucked me up. But there's also the regular experience of seeing disasters where folks are either dying or seeing everything they loved destroyed. I don't know how to see this regularly and not be ruined in the soul
I ain't trying to trauma off with CNN folks or whoever but for a few years crisis we went live for any disaster anywhere if it was bad enough. We had a spreadsheet to calculate is this bad enough to go live? Nerd Thunderbirds
If I do a book on crisis the final chapter will be entirely about the impact that dealing with these huge disasters will mess you up. Not great
A shorter one tonight to tack onto the end, about Street View Time Machine and Christchurch. https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1329003388126724097?s=19
Here's a new bit about satellite imagery https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1329300679232372738?s=19
Here's the second part of the one I meant to do a night or two ago https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1330086816809148416?s=19
Tomorrow, I will tell the tale of a place called Tsunami Pizza in Hawaii and how that resulted in a huge engineering effort at Google to fix a problem it showed up. (sadly the place appears to no longer be a going concern)
And here's the origin story for Public Alerts. https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1330758199788519428?s=19
And here, as promised, is the thread about the time the Australian Army made a solid effort to burn down the Blue Mountains outside Sydney thru a combination of idiocy and ... well, more idiocy. https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1331135099786543104?s=19
A brief one on the creation of Google Crisis Response https://twitter.com/swearyanthony/status/1331835991347273728?s=19
