Edina learns a tweet or two in explosion

On the last Tuesday in February, Edina residents getting city e-mail and Twitter alerts saw the usual mix of arts and meeting notices on their cell phones and computers.

Then, at 12:54 p.m., Edina police sent this tweet: "50th St closed both directions at Arden Av. poss gas main break. Will update when intersection reopens."

A couple of hours later, an episode that happens almost once week with little fanfare became the city's first emergency in the age of social media.

The house on the corner of W. 50th Street and Arden Avenue exploded. Laura Benson and other neighbors on the block came out of their houses into an eerily quiet street that reeked of natural gas. Shredded insulation fell like snow against a blue sky.

For much of the next 24 hours, the city communicated with residents who most needed information not through intermediaries such as the news media but directly through tweets and e-mails.

While there are lingering issues from the incident, including why houses on the block were not evacuated before the blast, one thing that went right was the city's social media updates. Though only a fraction of Edina's 37,000 adults subscribe -- 700 follow the city on Twitter and fewer than 1,000 subscribe to the city's public safety updates -- on Feb. 23 those tweets and e-mails went viral, especially among evacuees who lived near the site of the blast.

Benson was an evacuee. She was not a subscriber to city updates but got them from resident Lisa O'Brien, who lives about four blocks from the affected area. O'Brien spent much of that day and night forwarding city bulletins to about 40 people on a neighborhood e-mail list.

"I kept monitoring the BlackBerry," she said. "Someone forwarded the city e-mails listing the homes that were safe to return to. Very quickly, it was flashed to the whole neighborhood list."

Benson and other residents who had gone outside after the explosion were told by fire fighters to leave their homes immediately. Benson grabbed her daughter's teddy bear, her grandmother's jewelry, a laptop and her purse.

Residents gathered at a barricade at the street entrance and later scattered to friends' homes and hotels. A few blocks away, O'Brien, who subscribed to city e-mails mostly to keep track of park events, was just putting her son down for a nap when she heard the sirens.

When her mother called to tell her there had been an explosion, O'Brien said, she went to her computer to check for e-mail updates. The rest of the day she forwarded city bulletins. Benson read them in the street, at a friend's house and later at a Bloomington hotel.

In the 19 hours after the blast, the city sent 11 tweets and multiple e-mail updates, posted bulletins on the city website and ran a news ticker on a city TV channel. Jennifer Bennerotte, Edina's communication director, sent social media updates from City Hall, getting information directly from a colleague at the blast site.

"I never want to put out bad information, but that's the information we had," she said.

One lesson she said she took from that day: Post summaries rather than just bulletins on the city website.

Edina Fire Chief Marty Scheerer said the city is sorting out why residents near the gas leak were not evacuated before the explosion. The city handles about 40 gas leaks a year and this one "started out just like all the others," he said.

In the future, people likely will be asked to leave if they live near a gas leak. "We will err on the side of safety," he said.

Scheerer said he hopes the incident prompts more people to sign up for city alerts by cell phone. The city can target phone calls to neighborhoods, but he said those are no good if the calls go to empty houses.

She plans to sign up for the city's electronic alerts. Bennerotte said that following the explosion, about 50 more people are following the city on Twitter.

City e-mails are just fine for O'Brien, who was an unlikely civic messenger. She said she has reservations about social media partly because of privacy concerns.

"I'm not sure I understand what tweets are," O'Brien said. "I don't have a BlackBerry and I stay away from Facebook. It all just eats away at your time."