“Communications Failure” Becomes “Information Delay” in Orwellian World of State Civil Defense

What are we to make of State Adjutant General Robert Lee’s commentary in last Thursday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin?

Lee’s piece – which some might read as a personal attack on CHORE’s author – reveals an alarmingly tortured view by the State’s top Civil Defense officer of what most of us would call reality.

In his commentary, Lee denies the existence of communications failures that prevented vital information from reaching the public until well after the October 15th earthquakes. “The complaint by Doug Carlson incorrectly claims that ‘communications failures’ followed the earthquake,” Lee writes.

“The ability of State Civil Defense to inform the public that the earthquake had not generated a tsunami was hampered by the loss of the electric power grid, which shut down most news outlets. This was an information delay, not a failure, and it was thoroughly reported in the news media.” (emphasis added)

“It’s Not Our Fault”

In other words, it’s not State Civil Defense’s fault that the public didn’t receive information in a timely manner. It was other people’s fault – Hawaiian Electric, the cell phone companies and radio and TV stations without backup generators.

It’s painfully obvious to nearly everyone but State Civil Defense (just ask your friends and neighbors) that the agency itself apparently failed to consider what might happen when the power was out, the cell phone companies and stations' telephone lines were overloaded and broadcasters were knocked off the air. That much is obvious by the agency's failure to work around those communications blockages after the quakes.

As we noted in our first response to Lee’s commentary, a fundamental principle of communications is that the person generating a message must take responsibility for ensuring the message is received. Lee washes his hands of any responsibility for a failure to anticipate the problems that in fact occurred on Earthquake Sunday and produced what he calls an “information delay.”

Why Should We Care?

Had State Civil Defense done an adequate job of anticipating those problems, there would have been no communications failure, the Honolulu Community Media Council wouldn’t have felt compelled to host a panel discussion on emergency communications and CHORE would not have been launched back on October 17th, two days after the quakes.

We should care about this because our families’ safety depends on well-run bureaucracies in times of natural or man-made emergencies in our state. We have a right to expect good, reality-based thinking by the professionals we employ to communicate with us during those emergencies.

And that’s why Maj. General Lee’s rebuttal is both revealing and alarming. We deserve clear-eyed assessments of events when they reveal shortcomings. Otherwise, we’ll be treated to more of the same failures during our next emergency.

We'll continue this discussion in a future post as we examine State Civil Defense's apparent criteria for assessing the public's interest in these matters.