This system was first ignored by official agencies but received 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. Information was periodically reviewed by a Nifty monitoring committee, the messages seems to have been generally informative, responsible, and often quite interesting. Feedback among network members, as well as messages of thanks by those benefitted, further encouraged reliability.
Government authorities are just as much in the dark 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, at its noontime meeting, the government still believed the number of dead to be only 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. Emergency communications often failed.