I can honestly say I feel sick and I’m in shock once again that this has happened to the community I so deeply love. A Twin Otter belonging to a local charter company crashed onto a street (the main street) in Old Town, Yellowknife around 1pm MST this afternoon. I sat down at my computer after lunch and just got engulfed into it. My thoughts go out to everyone affected and this point where we don’t know who might have been on the plane is the worst.
Social Media once again played a huge roll in spreading news (and rumours unfortunately) of this event. It was how I was able to keep up with everything happen, without being there. I want to talk more about how Social Media has impacted this event, but first I want to share with you two charts, then in another post I may go deeper into it.
The first chart we have below is of the Twitter activity of the hashtag #yzf, which is the local Yellowknife tag, from 1pm – 4pm. As you can see the first climb is all the local chatter happening about the event. Then at 2pm (where the orange line is) it was picked up by National news as the word spread.
We then have the keyword or hashtag of Yellowknife. Many people don’t know that #yzf is used as the local tag just use Yellowknife and it being the name of the community it is used in headlines and such. As you can see chatter started happen when the event happened, but no official news was out quite yet, but then at 2pm it his National at which point CBC North already had their story up.
If you’d like to read the story just search “Yellowknife Float Place Crash.” It is another sad day.
It’s such a terrible tragedy Kyle. Yellowknife is such a tight-knit community and the family I have up there has already found out who one of the victims was as his wife was involved with the fitness community.