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Sandy has been a particular challenge for New York’s MTA and the subway system. Fast Company shows how the MTA is utilizing social media to document the damage.
To date, the MTA has posted nearly 600 photos from Hurricane Sandy, documenting everything from damage at the South Ferry station to the impressive transferring of A-train cars to the Rockaways via flatbed truck. The cars will provide temporary shuttle service in that hard-hit area.
Besides using Cashin’s shots, the MTA has also been crowdsourcing photos within the agency. The idea was conceived on the fly during last year’s Hurricane Irene. This time, as Sandy loomed, the agency made a concerted effort to encourage photo submissions from employees in the field–and so far it’s worked. One employee snapshot, a boat resting squarely on a Metro-North track, made the rounds on the Internet and is among the MTA’s most-viewed photos.
“When the weather reports first began to predict a large weather event, we put out an all-points bulletin to our folks throughout the MTA–on-the-ground workers, the frontline employees,” says Donovan. “It said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be seeing a lot of stuff. The media’s going to be interested and riders are gonna be interested in the conditions that are evolving constantly throughout our system.’ We asked them if they had BlackBerries or happened to be carrying iPhones, take a shot. If you see anything, take a shot, send it to us in the press office so that we can distribute it out via social media.”
