Divers' website gets nearly a million hits in days after tsunami

List of Finns who had been located alive in affected Thai resorts was only source of news for many concerned relatives

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Just as in the aftermath of the Myyrmäki bombing two years ago, the Finnish online community once again showed its strength in the speedy dissemination of information in the days immediately after the earthquake and tsunami in Southern Asia.
      Lists of names of the missing and the found in the principal Finnish "crisis area" of Thailand began to be posted on Internet weblogs and on message boards soon after the disaster took place. It was several days before the Finnish authorities published any comprehensive list of missing persons, even though Finland was among the first countries to take this controversial step.
     
One of the most important sources of information for Finns seeking news of relatives in the early stages of the crisis was neither the print & electronic media nor government outlets, but a website maintained by a group of Finnish scuba-diving enthusiasts and instructors, www.sukellus.fi.
      These pages, which would normally be enjoying a modest 300 hits a day from like-minded souls, received 900,000 visitors in the week following December 26th, when the tsunami struck the Andaman Sea coast of Thailand. On December 29th, for example, more than a quarter of a million hits were registered on the site.
      The reason was that the page produced a regularly updated list of all those Finns who had been found, even specifying wherever possible if they were injured and which Thai hospital they had been taken to. For anxious relatives unable to get through to official channels, it was the only half-reliable source of information. What’s more, it was actually very reliable, since the information was being put together by people on the ground with strong local knowledge and even skills in the local language.
     
As so often in these matters, the list was the work of a very light organisation of dedicated people working with no thought for the clock or for payment.
      The central figure and site administrator at the Finnish end was Alex Nieminen, a former journalist and management consultant (and PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and serious diving freak).
      In Thailand itself, the information was collected by people from the Thai-New Zealand-Finnish Raya Divers operation, which in happier times took tourists to the coral reefs off the coast at places such as Raya Yai and Raya Noi south of Phuket, and out to the famed Similan Islands.
      The link to Nieminen - often via SMS messages - came from the diving centre’s co-owner Janne Miikkulainen. The Aamulehti reporter Petri Ahoniemi (another diving enthusiast), who was among the first Finnish journalists to head to the affected area, was also a key figure in the process, according to Nieminen.
      "The planets were obviously in the proper ascendancies to make an operation like this even remotely possible", commented Nieminen. The right people in the right place happened to know one another and to be able to call on the right skills.
     
People with PADI diver training skills were ready to move into action when the crisis hit. What began with the round-up of diving centre personnel in the devastated resort of Khao Lak rapidly escalated into the listing of all Finns found alive in the Phuket, Khao Lak, and Krabi areas.
      The ability to sift out the wheat from the chaff picked up through journalistic work enabled those on the ground to separate reliable information and sightings from rumours, and at the Finnish end there were the technical smarts to put the information on the web, and also - when the number of hits began to spiral upwards - the ability to stretch server capacity and find workarounds so as to prevent the site from crashing. It stuttered only briefly, for an hour or two, at the most acute period of the crisis, despite the abrupt and enormous increase in loading.
      It is perhaps worth noting that the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s crisis hotline was swamped by callers in the early days, and that this phenomenon was by no means a Finnish one: the same failures occurred in countries throughout Europe where nationals were feared to be in danger in Thailand.
     
In a lengthy blog report on the week’s happenings, Nieminen plays down the work that he did in Finland, placing the real credit with those in Thailand who were doing the rounds of hospitals and temples in search of missing Finns. "We also happened to have that week after Christmas off from work. In practice the only thing we sacrificed in all this was our own time."
      Those who maintained the list of persons who had been located have received a great deal of positive feedback from the public and from concerned relatives.
      The authorities took a somewhat less congratulatory or encouraging view: no help was forthcoming from official sources, and with the exception of an e-mail contact from the Finnish Embassy in Bangkok, nobody even bothered to get in touch with them, although for several days they were the only coordinated outfit providing information on the whereabouts of Finns in the disaster area, where communications were chaotic to say the least.
      "We did this work out of no sense of self-interest or personal gratification. All the same, the whole time we did hope that the phone was going to ring and that some State authority would announce that they were taking over the maintenance of the list for themselves", says Nieminen.
     
In the case of future catastrophes, Nieminen believes that it would be wise to consider how unofficial sources and channels of information can better be made use of.
      "I can understand perfectly well why the government did not go public with our list. Then again, the fact that the authorities did not even glance at it leaves me quite baffled. The first list of the missing that was eventually put out by the National Bureau of Investigation [on Thursday 30th December] contained the names of several people for whom we already had confirmed information that they were back in Finland."
      These names were duly removed from the updated lists put out by the NBI.
     
Nieminen says pointedly that he is not looking to attack the actions of the government or the official authorities as a whole. "The criticism has already gone a bit beyond the reasonable", he notes.
      Nieminen observes that, understandably, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs was not expecting this kind of thing to happen; they did not have the necessary tools in place and/or the ability to use them.
      At the same time, he believes that the mistakes made in the spread of information should be acknowledged with a shade more courage and alacrity than has been seen so far.
     
Technically speaking, the posting of such a list as Nieminen and others made could have been construed as an illegal privacy violation. However, under circumstances in which there is deemed to be an imminent threat to life and limb, the privacy rules are no longer valid.
      The Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman Reijo Aarnio has already commented that he has no intention of taking the matter up. The names will be removed in short order in any case, as no imminent threat exists any longer.
     
Note: the list of names of persons found was removed from the sukellus.fi site at 10:30 on January 5th.


Links:
  Sukellus.fi weblog (mostly in Finnish)
  A brief translation of the lengthy report by Nieminen on the site linked above

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