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I have, in the past, complained about the terms we throw around, especially on the weather side of things.

But I’ve also been known to give props when positive change is made.

My point is this: what we doing, especially in the world of emergency messaging and alerting, is evolving. There are better practices, but best practices are few and far between. Experts are little more than folks with quick minds and oodles of experience. And they’ve got to have a willingness to learn because things are changing. For example, after Sandy:

[T]he weather service announced Thursday[, April 4, 2013] that starting with this hurricane season, “the definitions of hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings will be broadened” to allow these watches and warnings to be issued or remain in effect after a tropical cyclone — or hurricane — transitions to become post-tropical, when such a storm still poses a significant threat to life and property.

In addition, the weather service says the new system will “ensure a continuity of service by allowing the National Hurricane Center to issue advisories during the post-tropical stage. These changes were motivated by the special challenges posed by Hurricane Sandy, which was forecast to evolve from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone prior to reaching the coast.”

And after the 1999 Moore, Oklahoma tornado, the term tornado emergency was born:

“We had a large, violent tornado on the ground about to head into the most populous center in the state of Oklahoma and we were trying to make people aware that this was something different than normal. We were trying to do anything that we could at that time to get people’s attention.” -Scott Curl, senior forecaster

And the movement towards refining our terms continues as some of the most forward-leaning organizations start to advocate away from the old terms, like ranking hurricanes by the Saffir-Simpson scale:

This year, Phillyweather.net is going to refrain from using Saffir-Simpson in any posts. We encourage others in our field to do the same. It is an outdated classification system given a storm like Sandy can produce more damage than Irene at the Shore, given both were similarly ranked storms, yet we communicate them both as “just” Cat 1 storms.

…

No two storms are ever the same. Throwing them into a simple ranking based on one factor is not beneficial to the public. It may be easy for TV consumption but it’s not helpful for public consumption. People, we think, need to know more than that.

And the continual refinement isn’t limited to just weather. Even the World Health Organization has recently updated its pandemic alert system in an effort to make it more realistic and timely:

The World Health Organization (WHO) today[, June 10, 2013] proposed a new pandemic alert system, one that’s designed to focus more on disease risk than geographic spread and to streamline communications to the public.

…

The revised global phases are more of an “average” of the situation in all countries and don’t reflect the situation in individual countries, the WHO said. For example, it said in the “alert” phase, one country might be in full response mode, while another might still be at the earlier preparedness steps.

These changes, and I’m sure these aren’t the only terms that connote danger that are being reviewed and updated, are important to note for two reasons. First, they indicate a more subtle understanding of emergency situations, and it is thus critical that we as communicators understand them.

Second, and possibly even more important, is that our publics (who, between you and me, never really got the terms we used to use) now need to be taught what these new terms mean. What is a pandemic and how is it different than H1N1, what should I do during a tornado emergency, but it’s not even a hurricane anymore. It’s our job to not only integrate those terms into our work, but also to start from scratch and teach them.

When I follow emergencies unfolding online, I follow them using Twitter. It’s where news breaks these days. The problem is that it keeps breaking. Over and over and over again until the entire situation is a mish-mash of unhelpful posts.

Let me explain.

See this post?

Topical, relevant, timely, eminently share-able, excellent. And it was shared, at least four times. Viral emergency messaging for the win!

But what you don’t see on this snapshot is when those retweets came. I know that at least one of them came around 10:30am that day, which was when I saved the tweet. I saved it because, well, a tweet about a Severe Thunderstorm Warning at 10:30am doesn’t do much when the Warning ended at 10:15am, and the storm about ten minutes before that.

Now, imagine if the original OEM tweet didn’t have a time on it. Every retweet thereafter runs the risk of alerting people to information that is out-of-date. Runs the risk of unnecessarily scaring folks, inflaming folks, misleading folks. And in some emergencies the cost is much worse than confusion. Think of the Oklahoma tornadoes from last month, when some meteorologists told people (incorrectly) now was the time to go home to avoid the storm. Delays in delivering that information could have life-threatening consequences.

The absolutely amazing Greg Licamele discussed a similar topic recently around flash flood warnings in the DC area.

Two-day old info is obviously not true and storms are not minutes away. It’s impossible to “train” casual Twitter users to manually add a date and timestamp, so those of us in the response business must be diligent to timestamp our info when appropriate so our own tweets are not errantly retweeted days later.

Greg recommends that Twitter update their time-stamping tool, which would be ideal, but in the meantime, I think that our good friend Marcus Deyerin had a great suggestion for what we should be doing in the meantime, very similar to what Philly OEM did:

If you’re sending tweets with time-sensitive info, add your own time stamp (e.g. 1015hrs).

Maybe we should include more, like a time and a date. Maybe more consistent messaging, such as posting when a message is out of date. In an information vacuum filled with a need for more, more, more, people will take the last thing you posted as the latest information, often incorrectly. And we should be careful about what we retweet. You’ll notice that everyone that retweeted our Thunderstorm Warning above was an agency, so it was one of us that passed along out-of-date information. We can do better.

Government communicators get asked to do lots of not fun things. When things have gone sideways, we’re in charge of cleaning up the mess until the underlying mess (which is never our fault!) is fixed. When the press is looking for blood, or inches, or quotes, we stand guard at the gate and beat back the hordes. We sometimes have over-inflated visions of what our jobs are. But through it all, we are the ones that have to say something about a topic that most likely we’ve had nothing to do with until that moment when the phone rings.

So when I see headlines like this:

FEMA Scales Back Flood Zones After Controversy

It really gets my goat. Because, one day, some poor communicator will be asked why FEMA said a home wasn’t likely to flood, and then it did. Again.

The agency released advisory maps in December that vastly expanded the so-called V-zones, where waves could cause severe damage to property. Many homeowners and elected officials objected, because those areas carry much higher reconstruction costs and higher flood insurance rates.

In new maps, officially out today, much less of the coast is considered in the highest risk category.

Just to demonstrate that I’m not totally heartless, I understand why the public and elected officials complained. Many would be absolutely priced out of their homes and businesses. That’s upsetting and they’re upset. I get that. But, assuming that the first maps published by FEMA were science-based, that’s where the recommendation should lie. Even if it makes people upset. Because it’s the right thing to do.

When those houses flood again, and they will, the media will swamp that poor communicator asking why all of those homes weren’t required to have flood insurance, and whatever they say in reply won’t be completely honest. They’ll say it was based upon the latest models, that it was it was most cost-effective, that no one could have predicted. But they did, and then they walked it back. Unless she says, “We wanted to say they were in the 100-year floodplain, but we crumbled due to political pressure,” whatever she says won’t be the full truth. And that is something that no communicator can fix.

Instead, we need to let the science dictate what we say. Because the science is our answer to why we did it that way. Not politics, not underhanded dealings, not sweetheart deals, nothing reproachable. We did it because the science said that we should. And it doesn’t matter if you hate me for it, this is our rationale and it’s defensible. A communicator can work with that.