Technology in time of need

For my second blog this week I’d like to take a slightly different direction. Last Saturday, on February 27th, I was traveling to Santiago, Chile with 27 other students and 2 professors. This was to be a week long study tour of Santiago and Viña del Mar, Chile which would count as an International Ethics class. Our flight was just a few hours away from landing in Chile when the 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck. Our plane was diverted to Miami. In the hours that passed in between the pilot announcing the earthquake and landing in Miami, we had no details on the earthquake. All we knew was power had been knocked out at the Santiago airport and we could not land because the Chilean airspace had been closed. It was not until our plane touched down in Miami that we could learn of the true magnitude of the earthquake. At that moment a plane full of cell phones turned on in a frantic rush to get more information. I would like to praise our current state of technology for relaying and having information available so fast.

We were able to learn how big the earthquake truly was by using our smart phones to get on the Internet for news. I immediately called my boyfriend who had been awake for 1.5 hours, basically freaking out and wondering where I was. Without this data and voice technology this information would not be at our fingertips. Our families would have had to wait much longer to hear from us as we would have had to wait in lines in the terminals to use payphones. When we got into the terminal CNN was on and was broadcasting video and photos of the damage and devastation. Chileans on my flight were able to see what has happened in their homeland and what was keeping them from landing there. Technology aided us further as the class made our way back to Baltimore. We were able to communicate with our families and friends as we traveled from airport to airport. Some students made the final flight to Baltimore at the last minute and could call their families immediately so they could be picked up. We could post status updates to Facebook and Twitter so extended family and friends could know we were ok. I know that Chileans were also encouraged to communicate via text messages, Facebook, and Twitter if landlines or cell signals were busy.

This day would have been a lot more frantic if technology hadn’t been there to support, inform, and connect us.