Gustav: when lines go down

From the traditional radio operators to the hip Tweeters, people in Louisiana and beyond found ways to communicate with each other when Gustav swept through.

The BBC News website spoke to some of the people who followed the hurricane minute by minute and helped with emergency and relief operations.

GARY STRATTON, AMATEUR RADIO OPERATOR

Amateur radio operators set camp in Louisiana.

When Gustav arrived, I left my home in northern Louisiana and travelled to Baton Rouge, where there is an amateur radio operators' station, and we set up the operation there.

During the height of the storm, our networks were operating to help emergency services as land and mobile phone lines went down.

We found that the lessons learned from Katrina were really useful. People were ready for the hurricane and all the people living in the low lying areas left.

When normal cell phone communications don't work, we come in. We provide bypass communications for a short time until all the systems are back in place. We bring support to organisations like the Red Cross and the Samaritans on the ground.

We don't depend on anyone but ourselves and we can talk to people miles away.

We also help people who cannot reach their relatives over the phone. Their messages are collected by the Red Cross and then delivered by radio operators, so that they can tell their loved ones they are safe.

I've been a radio operator for my entire life and I am the section manager of the American Radio Relay League, in Louisiana. We are ready for emergencies and will donate our time and equipment.

Everyone has their own thing. Some people volunteer with the Red Cross or other organisations, or work at feeding kitchens, well we just volunteer our time and effort in emergencies.

ANDY CARVIN, ORGANISING VOLUNTEER ACTION ONLINE

Andy Carvin is National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities.

Gustav seemed like it could be a really bad storm and I'd had experience organising online volunteer efforts with Katrina, the Tsunami and September 11 attacks, so it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

Managing all the information has been a big challenge. With Gustav, it was headed to a geographically focused area. With Hannah, it could potentially impact almost every state on the US east coast.

Collecting and organising information for more than a dozen states takes a lot more discipline. Fortunately I've got some really great volunteers who know a lot about information architecture, so we're working out the details as quickly as possible.

The challenge then is coordinating a critical mass of volunteers to tackle discrete tasks, so they don't cancel out each other's work. That requires a lot of constant communication, which is why having a social network at the centre of our project has been critical.

We've been using a social networking tool called Ning to serve as our primary organising platform and it's been key to our communications efforts. Twitter in particular made it possible to spread information quickly as well since users can receive our message blasts via instant messaging, sms and the like.

By the time the Gustav reached landfall, about 80% of the work we set out to do 36 hours earlier had been completed. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as everyone expected, so there was less of a need for our products to be used in an emergency context. But as Gustav fizzled, it became clear that as many as three more major storms - Hanna, Ike and Josephine - were on their way. So Gustav served as a catalyst to get us organise and prepare for the days and weeks ahead. So much so, in fact, we changed the names of our social network to Hurricanes08.org, we renamed our wiki HurricaneWiki.org and we're reorganising all of our efforts so they'll be useful for the entire hurricane season.

Lots of people have come out of the woodwork to volunteer, but after Gustav fizzled, it's been harder to get as many people involved. So now we're working to bring in a fresh crop of volunteers.