Category: Uncategorized

(NOTE: This was written before the latest events in Japan. I’ve pushed up the publish time just because it looks like tomorrow morning will be, well, something I hoped I’d never see.)

As it should be in the wake of a disaster, two big things are happening off-site. The first is an outpouring of support (which you can do here and here). The second is everyone in the emergency preparedness and response fields watching very closely to learn as much as they can. And there is so much to learn from a country that was so prepared for disaster but instead saw a catastrophe.

Frankly, I hope the lessons stop soon, but the bad news just continues to compound—more lessons to be learned, I guess. If anyone is myopic enough to think I’m looking at this disaster selfishly, I argue that I owe it to my community to learn as much as I can so that I might help them avoid the same fate. Those who lost their lives in Japan will not have died in vain. We won’t make the same mistakes again.

So, what have I learned thus far? For as little information has made it out and in my tiny slice of the emergency world, there is plenty to learn. The first, and arguably most buzzwordy, is about social media. While traditional communications lines went down, social media use continued and served as a lifeline to those trying to communicate. If you don’t know how to use text-based communications, learn. And if you count people who don’t use text-based communications amongst your target audience, teach them. And incorporate those tools into your plan for communicating with your publics. And if you’ve got someone who sneeringly tells you that the internet will go down in a disaster, you can now tell them that even after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 10-meter tsunami, the internet still worked.

The second is all about our communications. People understand earthquakes (better on the west coast than on the east coast), and after 2004 people understand tsunamis (and after this latest disaster, they’ll know even more thanks to ubiquitous video). But nuclear accidents? Well, there was Chernobyl, which was really bad, and TMI, which ended up being a lot of nothing, and, well… The China Syndrome, maybe? I know this, a meltdown is bad, except that’s what happened at TMI, and they think might be happening there now. And explosions are the worst of the worst, except when they aren’t.

How the heck do you do risk communication in an event like this? And maybe this is just showing that I do not work very close to a nuclear reactor, but damned if I’m not confused.

The thing is, if something big were to happen in Japan or somewhere else in the States, I would have to be able to communicate on nuclear risks to my publics. The last really big threat was TMI and that was in an era when it would’ve gotten two, three minutes on the six and eleven o’clock news, and then an above the fold article in the mornings paper with all of the info coming directly from the mouth of the horse. You think that’s happening today? With a million bloggers and pundits on half a dozen cable news shows are spouting off on every rumor you can think of, filling miles of blog inches and weeks of evening television and talk radio, I doubt it.

If something big happens, my publics are going to be scared and confused. And I don’t live by a nuclear reactor; so I cannot take for granted that they know anything. I have to boil down nuclear physics to a fourth-grade reading level. Sure, we’ve got templated message maps, but I don’t know the last time they were reviewed (before today, I mean). And I’ve got to find a health physicist to find out if they’re even any good!

We live in a world where disasters on the other side of the globe raise questions from our publics in hours. The hazard-vulnerability analysis that I need to develop my messages maps from just grew from Philadelphia-centric disasters to envelop everything under the sun.

For me, the biggest lesson that communicators can learn from all of this is that you are not ready. Consider everything and don’t dare say, “But it’ll never happen here.” Because it doesn’t need to happen here to be a disaster.

Ms. Valerie Lucus-McEwen, writing for Emergency Management Magazine, had an interesting couple of articles recently published that I wanted to touch on. The first, Demystify the Message, is an in-depth critique of how emergency managers view emergency warnings from the perspective of vetted, accepted academic research on the topic. The second, Demystifying the Message: An Afterthought, points us to another resource from which we can learn more. Both are worth the click through.

I wanted to talk a bit about the blind spot that these articles call out because I think that all of us are afflicted by it and can unlearn it. (By us, I mean government communicators.) Ms. Lucus-McEwen described it thusly:

Many emergency managers still think of emergency warnings as an initial blast and don’t think of following through by monitoring public interpretation or people’s need for additional information.

She quotes Art Botterell, a disaster management consultant with Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley:

We assume we have the authority to wag out fingers at the public with great vigor and tell them what to do, and them express frustration when they don’t listen. Well, nobody told them they had to listen.

I bring this article to your attention not because I don’t talk about it enough (because I do), but because of the language that Mr. Botterell used. I immediately knew that feeling, and had felt it around topics beyond emergency notification. I think of the same thing when I read a lot of public health communications, too. Which got me to wondering, do we, as government communicators talk to our audiences in a certain way? Do we assume that because we represent some official voice that we can decree things be?

This is dangerous on so many levels. How dare the government assume! I believe that in emergency situations people may have died from the government’s hubris. In public health, people live less full lives because we produce crappy materials that don’t give them the tools to fix their lives.

We are communicators before we are government communicators. We know—deep down—what works and what doesn’t. I worry that we allow ourselves to think that subject matter experts should guide the development of materials because they are the experts. But we are the experts, too. We are the ones who took all of those classes on the communications process (message, encode, transmit, receive, decode), so we know where it can break down. But do we say that out loud? At meetings? In front of a grizzled fire chief or a battle-tested infectious disease doctor? Why not? And does our messaging suffer because of it? Do our communities suffer because of it?

A couple of weeks ago, Gerald Baron posted on an ongoing discussion about who does emergency notification. Is it the folks in Operations (with all of the cool gear) or the folks in the JIC (with their tiny laptops) whose job it is to give the public the very first warning that somethings up?

Our Ops folks have traditionally had the job of sounding the alarm bell. And at many levels, it makes sense. Your Operations staff are amongst the first activated, so they’re most likely to be responding when the notification needs to be sent. Besides which, Ops can coordinate the public’s movements to jive with their operations. The problem is that your public information folks sitting in the JIC will conduct all communications with the public aside from that initial notification. In fact, my favorite document in the whole world, the FEMA TCL, says that the public alert function should be done by the PIO.

Now, as much as this blog has focused on these types of issues, the whole issue is problematic. Many times this discussion revolves around issues of control and ego. I’m a communicator at heart, so my thought is that this role is primarily a public information role. I take pride in the work that we do and think we do it better than most. We should control the whole message. Operations folks probably believe the same. And you know what? If my IC pulls that function out of the JIC and gives it to the Ops folks, I’m going to wonder who she trusts more: them or me.

At the end of the day, though, the job needs to get done come ego, hell or high water. Hell and high water are more difficult to deal with, but ego can be worked on provided it gets worked on soon. Gerald thinks, and I agree, that the best way to handle that is to shorten the distance between the players. Public information needs to work closely with Ops. There is a legitimate blurring of their roles, so they should be able to pinch hit for each other. Besides which, the more interaction there is between Ops and public info, the more they can learn to trust each other.

And hopefully it’ll just be hell and high water between us.