One software company volunteered and designed an information system to track and register survivors. It was ignored by official agencies, but received nevertheless 3-4,000 inquiries within one day. However, once the Nifty bulletin board information grew in volume, it tended to be self-verifying. While some messages may have been inaccurate, their sum-total offered a better picture than the official information collected in the traditional way. Since the sender of the message was identifiable and information was periodically reviewed by a Nifty monitoring committee, the messages on Nifty seems to have been generally informative, responsible and often quite interesting.
Government authorities are just as much at a loss in a catastrophe as individuals are.
During the Los Angeles quake, President Clinton's early information sources were his brother and the TV news. In Japan, too, Prime Minister Murayama could not get information quickly. At its noontime meeting, the government still believed the number of dead to be about 200. To get a first-hand report, the military sent a helicopter to videotape the damage, but it lacked telecommunications facilities to send the recording to Tokyo. Public notification was correspondingly late and incomplete.