Case Selection
The project team focused on EM organizations in Central New York region across five sectors: fire, emergency medical, law enforcement, public health, and executive departments or offices.
At the county level, executive and public health organizations were found via official county websites. For example, the Onondaga County Health Department was identified as an organization to be included in this report after it was located on the Onondaga County government website (ongov.net). Local executive agencies were located via lists of villages, towns, and cities located on county government websites.
Many municipalities were listed alongside links to the municipality’s website; where no link was provided, a web search was performed.
- Executive agencies within local municipalities were included, whether or not they had resources dedicated to emergency management.
- Hospitals (included in the public health category) were located using the “Hospitals in New York State” tool on the New York State Department of Health website; this tool provides a listing of all hospitals by county. Some hospitals have multiple listings on this tool based on multiple locations, but only primary hospital locations were listed.
- Law enforcement agencies were located via local and county executive agency websites. Where no law enforcement agency was listed on these websites, a web search was performed for “law enforcement,” “police,” and “sheriff” alongside the municipality or county name to confirm that no law enforcement agency existed for that location.
- Fire departments were located using the “What is My FDID Number” tool on the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Fire Prevention and Control website (http://www.dhses.ny.gov/ofpc/faq/fdid.cfm). This tool provides a listing of all fire departments by county.
- Emergency medical providers were located by conducting web searches for “ambulance” along with each county name.
Web Coding of Social Media Accounts
After compiling a list of emergency management organizations in the region, the researchers performed extensive web searches to locate any possible website; Facebook page; Twitter or Instagram account; YouTube Channel; or Foursquare page. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare searches were performed using the search feature on those platforms. As Instagram does not have a search feature, a web search was performed using “Instagram” alongside the organization name.
After compiling a list of these pages, each post on each Facebook and Twitter account was examined to see whether it fell into one of several categories (press release, call for action, social media interaction, preparedness information, live coverage of events, reposting from other local agencies, reposting from other organizations, after-action reports, community engagement, and political/election activity). This project did not examine frequency of posts in these categories, but simply looked to see whether organizations were using a social media platform for a particular purpose.
