Veteran Big Island Reporter Rips State Civil Defense Chief for “Failure To Communicate”

While we await updates on the University of Hawaii’s effort to construct a workable emergency communications program, we’ll turn to an unexpected source of inspiration.

Hawaii residents with even a modicum of public affairs awareness will recognize Hugh Clark as the long-time (as in, decades-long) Honolulu Advertiser reporter/editor/bureau chief on the Big Island. During his long tenure as the Advertiser’s “man on Hawaii,” Hugh covered every imaginable natural and man-made disaster – hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, volcanic eruptions and more.

You name it, Hugh Clark was there – which is why his letter to State Civil Defense chief Major General Robert Lee has so much weight. Hugh was moved to write his letter after reading General Lee’s commentary in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that attacked CHORE for questioning State Civil Defense’s response to the October 15th earthquakes.

Here’s Hugh’s letter to General Lee, printed with his permission and cleaned up only for the occasional typo:

Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee
Director, State Civil Defense
3429 Diamond Head
Honolulu, HI 96815

Dear Sir:

I was dismayed when I read your attack on Doug Carlson in the Star-Bulletin in March. My reply was delayed by my desire to think through an appropriate response.

Several pieces since then, including Gordon Pang’s (story) about 147 sirens MIA, convinced me to act, since it is clear you have done little or nothing after your disastrous response to the October double earthquake event.

I speak from 40 years of residence on the Big Island where, as a former editor and reporter, I participated in Civil Defense drills as a guest and covered events from major earthquakes to such wide-ranging events as disastrous lava flows and snow-blinded tourists on Mauna Kea. I also was involved in several would-be hurricane events that alarm Oahbu residents far more than seasoned Big Islanders.

That an alleged 147 tusnami sirens are needed and not yet installed six months after the Kiholo quakes speaks volumes about your inaction. Sirens are the key to tsunami alerts, more so than on-air radio stations.

That you have not set up to this point radio backup electric systems also is unpardonable.

Let me add some other observations. I was alert when these events occurred nearly simultaneously and my Big Island radio stations were dead. I turned on my television service and listened stupefied by Fox News that had some moron who said he was puzzled by a Hawaii earthquake because there are no fault zones here.

Later, as electric service here was restored, (Mayor) Harry Kim came on with his reassuring voice and gave us the first sense of what was happening. He continued to do that while you folks in Honolulu failed miserably, as Doug obviously has observed.

You say you “don’t understand the purpose of the negative.” A more real question is, do you understand your responsibility and your failures since these earthquakes?

You might have the spit and polish of a military officer, but your Civil Defense performance is plainly lacking.

I recommend you sign up Doug as an adviser, rather than trying to kill the messenger, and get yourself in gear to fix the most obvious problems – lack of radio signals because there is no back-up generation ,and get the damn sirens up and running.

Until then, you are the one “failing to communicate.”

Yours truly,
Hugh Clark
Hilo, HI

We've posted this letter simply to reflect the fact that CHORE was not alone in our criticism of State Civil Defense's commuications efforts during its big test in October. The agency's aggressive response to our criticism seemed out of line at the time and still does.

We’re glad Hugh Clark -- an experienced and respected observer of current events -- sees it that way, too.

UH Official Agrees KTUH May Be Useful Link to Campus Community During Emergencies

CHORE has talked with Dr. Francisco Hernandez, vice chancellor for students at UH-Manoa, who was quoted in the Honolulu Advertiser story this week on campus emergency communications planning.

KTUH’s possible role as an information channel during a campus crisis wasn’t mentioned in that story or any other, as we noted on Wednesday.

We referred Hernandez to Wednesday’s post and our hope that “the ultimate PA system” – KTUH – will be integrated in the UH emergency communications plan. He said the point was well taken and that he’d begin discussions with KTUH’s management. We look forward to updated media stories and future discussions with Dr. Hernandez on his progress.

That’s the kind of positive response we love to see. It certainly feels better than being attacked by an agency you’re trying to help! For a comparison, check out our March 1st post: General Lee Launches Counter-Offensive at CHORE; We Respond with Defense-in-Depth

Maybe UH will be open to meeting with citizens -- especially students -- and allowing them to participate in discussions on how the institution can best serve them during emergencies. The failure of the Governor-appointed Comprehensive Communications Review Committee to meet with the public during its sessions last year was a major blunder, from our perspective, as we noted from the get-go.

It seems reasonable to anticipate greater openness from the University -- an institution dedicated to open discussion and debate -- than from government agencies adept at obfuscation.

UH Officials, Students May Not Be on Same Page about Campus’s Emergency Readiness; KTUH Not Yet Mentioned as Part of Communications Plan

University of Hawaii officials say they’re confident they can quickly alert the student body during an on-campus emergency, according to a Honolulu Advertiser story today.

CHORE hopes they’re right, but as we cautioned yesterday, over-confidence can be a dangerous thing. The Advertiser asked some UH students what they think about their campus’s readiness. Here are two responses:

"I don't know that we would be able to get the word out," said fine arts senior Amy Craig, a resident adviser at an on-campus dorm. "I'm concerned about the lack of access to students after an emergency. There is no comprehensive plan in place."

"The school is definitely not prepared," said Michele Messina, a junior in psychology and dorm resident. "There's no procedure. We can't lock down."

Two students don’t represent an entire student body, but if any students feel this way, UH officials have reason to wonder about the gap between their own confident attitude and what these – and maybe many other – students believe.

Dialing for Students

The story ticks off some of the ways officials say they would communicate with students – email, a public announcement system in Campus Center and a telephone tree “which starts at top officials and drops down to professors or staff members, who are supposed to notify students.”

The reporter didn’t fully describe the process, but if this “tree” means senior officials will call professors and staff who then will notify students, you have to wonder how quickly an emergency message will reach students – and what the message will sound like when it finally gets there.

Did you play the Telephone Game as a kid? Did the message at the end of the circle ever resemble the message at the start? Surely there’s more to the system than what traditionally passes for a “telephone tree” – a small number of people calling other people who call others until it spreads down the branches in Christmas tree-like fashion.

The first obvious objection is the time involved to move the message down a tree, but there are many more whenever you put people in the middle of a communications chain. Here’s a principle UH officials might well consider: The fewer the components in a communications chain, the faster a message will travel with fewer changes.

What About KTUH?

We’ve had two days of reporting by Honolulu’s two dailies on the university’s emergency alert procedures, but so far, we’ve seen no mention of how officials would use KTUH, the on-campus radio station.

Is that just an oversight, or have officials not even written KTUH into their emergency communications plan? They talk about email and telephone trees and public address systems but presumably have told reporters nothing about how they’d use the ultimate PA system right there on campus – a radio station!

As CHORE noted yesterday, multiple channels are necessary to communicate with a community of people scattered throughout a campus doing different things at any given time. Wiring all major buildings for public address announcements makes sense; emailing makes sense; mass telephone calling makes sense; a wailing siren makes sense; roving security officers make sense, and so does using the broadcast media – both on campus and off. Radio's message stream can be nearly continuous.

H is for Help

CHORE was started as a way to offer helpful comment and stimulate discussion on emergency communications within our community. That’s what we and others are doing when we write our blogs and comment on what others have written.

We're offering help when we encourage officials to abandon any thought of being confident they have everything handled. Based on what UH officials are telling reporters about Manoa's communications plans, it doesn’t look that way to some of us.

VT Tragedy Spurs Response Review Here; Multiple Channel Approach Will Improve Alert

Education officials throughout the country are analyzing their emergency response procedures in the aftermath of yesterday’s mass slaughter at Virginia Tech. Both the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin take on the issue in stories today.

In the Star-Bulletin story headlined "UH touts e-mail, phone and PA warnings", a University of Hawaii spokesman describes the institution’s current thinking:

During an emergency, UH administrators can notify faculty, staff and students on campus through email, telephone and even through the broadcast news media (the spokesman said). If the chancellor decides there is a need to notify people on campus that there is still a danger, the most immediate means of alerting them would be through e-mail.

Without giving a source, the Advertiser story notes the same mindset:

UH-Manoa does not have a public address system, and students and staff would be notified of a crisis by e-mail and telephone calls.

CHORE’s mission since its inception after the October earthquakes (our first post was six months ago today) has been to improve emergency communications by stimulating discussion here at this blog, and we’ll continue doing so now.

Too Reliant on Email?

As the Bulletin’s story notes, the email channel works for people sitting in front of a computer, but what percentage of a campus’s population is doing that at any given moment? We have to think it’s small.

Email certainly is one channel to use, but don’t stop there. How do UH officials propose to alert students in class, walking through campus, studying in Hamilton Library or eating lunch in Paradise Palms? Email won’t reach anyone who isn't on-line, and neither will cell phone text messaging if phones are turned off (many UH professors and instructors tell their students to turn off their cell phones at the start of each class).

The Advertiser story notes the absence of a loudspeaker system under centralized control for instant communication throughout campus buildings and grounds. The Star-Bulletin mentions reliance on mobile loudspeakers, which suggests spotty coverage impeded by the “human factor”; the Campus Center and vicinity might be covered, but announcements may not reach other areas:

“Campus security officers can spread out on campus and make announcements using mobile loudspeakers. School officials can also tap into the internal public address sound system in the Campus Center. The Campus Center also has speakers that can be heard in the surrounding area.”

What About Radio?

CHORE continues to think radio is being short-changed as the most ubiquitous communications channel going. When properly managed and rehearsed, radio station staffs should be able to respond instantaneously to an urgent need and blanket the entire island with an emergency broadcast.

Management and rehearsal is the key, and we’d like to know how recently any radio station has staged an emergency response drill in concert with an outside organization, such as the University. The Earthquake Sunday experience with radio wasn’t reassuring.

And as the Honolulu Community Media Council has suggested, the consolidation of the broadcast industry has resulted in personnel cutbacks at stations owned by the conglomerates. Station automation introduces new challenges to a rapid response.

Getting the Word Out

The sub-head in the Bulletin's story today is "The university says it can get the word out if gunfire erupts at the Manoa campus". Based on today's media coverage, we're not so sure about that and hope University officials aren't exposing an overly confident attitude. Additional planning and implementation of rapid response procedures can only help.

Hawaii Citizens, You’ve Made a Difference; New Emergency Protocols Respond to Complaints

Maybe the communications problems on Earthquake Sunday were so obvious even a caveman could solve them, but we think grassroots activism had something to do with the changes reported in today’s Honolulu Advertiser (“Alert will come, tsunami or not”).

The paper’s story on emergency communications and preparedness includes State Civil Defense’s repudiation of its own mindset in October that telling the public no tsunami had been generated could have produced panic and confusion.

That’s exactly what State Civil Defense thought would happen, as reported in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on October 18th. CHORE took issue with that assertion the same day (“Common Sense Says Our People Won’t Panic”).

Today’s Advertiser story goes right down the list of improvements we citizens have advocated – television “crawls” and radio station announcements after large quakes when no tsunami has been generated; quicker response using the Emergency Alert System; more emergency generators to keep broadcasters on the air; maintenance of unpublished phone numbers at the stations for use only by emergency communicators, and emphasis on radio as the most ubiquitous information source.

More Work Remains

Not mentioned in the story is a communication channel we’ve been skeptical about – text messaging on cell phones. Maybe that’s still to come, but we still have to question whether any cell towers will survive a category 4 hurricane.

Also not mentioned is whether emergency broadcasters have adjusted their own playbooks on how to deal with emergencies. As noted here at CHORE early and often, emergencies are not “entertainment” and therefore require different broadcasting standards.

So although this is a good start, the job’s far from over. As we told the Advertiser, now we wait to see if these adjustments will work in the next emergency. And we still think officials in charge of emergency communications to the public should meet with the public to discuss these measures and hear what average citizens think about them.

6,335 Days and Counting

One clarification about the Advertiser story: Although I’m identified near the end as “Hawaiian Electric Co. spokesman” (to the dismay of HECO officials, no doubt), that description hasn’t applied since December 1989. “Former spokesman” would have been accurate (and now is in the story's on-line version).

HECO Says No More Quake-Caused Outages; Communication Failures Still Not Discussed

Today’s Honolulu Advertiser front-pages Hawaiian Electric’s bold assurance that earthquake-caused massive power outages are a thing of the past (“Quake outage won’t recur, HECO says”).

The story’s sidebar lists three technical problems (Problem 1, Problem 2, etc.) that address the equipment and procedural failures that produced the prolonged blackout on October 15th.

But Problem 4 is missing from the list – the company’s failure to communicate effectively with the public until well into the outage. Unless we’ve missed it, HECO has yet to explain what it has done to fix Problem 4, which has been CHORE's focus all along.

A host of communications failures that day – not just by HECO but at State Civil Defense and many broadcast outlets – made Earthquake Sunday worse for most people. Frustration can turn to anger when the public is left in information limbo.

HECO’s reluctance to discuss these matters is puzzling. Company officials brushed off questions about the communications problems when asked about them at the October 23rd open meeting at the State Capitol, and they don't seem to have talked about them in public since.

A HECO spokeswoman is quoted in today's story: “In wake of the outage, we’ve had many lessons learned and there have been many meetings at all levels of the company, from the executive level down to the detailed operations level.”

If any of those meetings covered public communications issues, we’ve yet to hear much if anything about them. It can’t hurt Hawaiian Electric to be as open about Problem 4 and it seems willing (or required) to be with Problems 1 through 3.

Problem 4 made 1-3 worse.

Rename the PTWC To Be Accurate; Call It the ‘United States Tsunami Warning Center’

(This is a "two-blog" post; it’s also found today at our sister blog, Tsunami Lessons.)

Yet another tsunami has killed Pacific islanders, but at least America was well informed about the status of the threat. “The system worked,” said a Hawaii Civil Defense official in praise of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center’s network of buoys and seismographs.

Can it truly be said “the system worked” when people die? Are we so concerned about our own safety that we applaud a system that was incapable of warning unsuspecting islanders that they were in imminent danger of losing their lives?

Wanted: A Vision

How appropriate to quote Solomon in Proverbs as we look for lessons in the Solomon Islands tsunami:

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

What might the vision be for a tsunami warning network that actually saves lives? The current version demonstrably doesn’t do that. More than 230,000 people died in the December 2004 tsunami; at least 30 died in the Solomons, and the toll is rising.

Clearly, the way the network is put together doesn’t work if “work” is defined as being a life-saver. So let’s give the vision thing a try.

Start with a goal: An effective tsunami warning network will be structured and operated in such a way that lives will not be lost – even in a locally generated tsunami.

Apply that goal to all high-threat islands, countries and territories in the Pacific where we know with certainty killer tsunamis are generated. Analyze the existing warning capabilities – sirens, radio stations, networks. Test their reaction time.

Does the System Work?

Analyze the test results. What worked and what didn’t? Is there any possible way the existing system can warn people that a locally generated tsunami may kill them?

If not, change the system!

Argue, debate and harangue local authorities until they agree to relinquish their control of the system; holding on isn’t worth the potential loss of their citizens’ lives.

Work with the United Nations. Establish funding for system enhancements. Install a fast-alert capability that sounds sirens and scrambles radio station personnel within minutes when a threat is recognized. Set a threshold that seems reasonable – perhaps a magnitude 7.5 quake in a region that historically experiences tsunamis.

Whatever you do, NOAA, do something! The current system is not working for Pacific Islanders – so don’t call it a Pacific Tsunami Warning system.

Be honest and rename the center in Hawaii to reflect its true function. Call it the United States Tsunami Warning Center. That’s what it does well – alerts and warns the states and territories of the United States.

But don’t pretend to be a Pacific-wide life-saving tsunami warning system. Your current vision isn’t big or bold enough.

Article Raps Public for its Poor Tsunami Awareness, but Officials' Reaction Is Critical

Today’s second part of the Star-Bulletin’s series on tsunami and emergency preparation lays a lot of blame on the public for its apparent collective ignorance on what to do during a major earthquake and tsunami event.

And that’s undoubtedly true. People are people, and changing public perceptions is going to take time. Not everyone will leave the water when the warning sirens begin to wail.

What CHORE wants to keep in focus is the requirement for the paid professionals to react flawlessly during the next crisis – unlike their response on October 15th.

A tsunami expert opines that “thousands would have been killed if the Oct. 15 Big Island earthquakes had triggered a tsunami, because people in low-lying areas who felt the ground shake did not move to higher ground.”

Failures All Around

The hypothetical death toll likely would have been boosted by the failure of several key links in the communications chain on Earthquake Sunday due to the power blackout, the lack of emergency generators at radio and TV stations, communicators’ unwise reliance on cell phone networks that failed, the lack of foresight in compiling lists of unpublished emergency-only numbers at broadcast outlets, etc.

“All the money being spent to improve the tsunami warning system is a waste if people respond as they did during the earthquakes,” the expert said.

Replace “people” with “officials” in that sentence and the same will be true.

PTWC Touts Tech as ‘Tsunami Month’ Begins; Emergency Siren ‘Gap Areas’ Get Second Look

[Today’s post at Tsunami Lessons, our companion blog, is duplicated here at CHORE this morning.]
* * * * *
"One goal of the improved instruments is to avoid having too many warnings, which erodes confidence in the system, McCreery said. 'The gap is really trying to keep the public prepared to do the right thing when the situation occurs.'"

That paragraph is the final one in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin story today on new instruments installed at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The irony should be obvious to anyone familiar with the complete absence of a useful warning after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. (New visitors to Tsunami Lessons might want to start reading on this subject at our first post on January 2, 2005, "No Tsunami Warning -- Why?")

Tomorrow's second part of this two-part series is titled "Getting the public to respond to tsunamis" -- potentially another irony-laden angle in light of the 2004 tsunami warning failure.

Our observations are long overdue here on improvements made in NOAA's standard operating procedures to disseminate tsunami warnings using the news media -- the #1 subject we've flogged for the past two years. Enough has been written about these improvements in the past few months to conclude that NOAA has indeed restructured its early-warning procedures to engage the news media earlier than ever.

For now, we'll wait for more news during Tsunami Awareness Month to see how the PTWC actually will use its new technology to accomplish its mission -- which is to warn.
* * * * *
5-Month “Gap” in Gap Reporting

The Honolulu Advertiser today carries a page 1 story that essentially repeats revelations made by the Star-Bulletin on October 29th – that nearly 150 “gap areas” around the islands aren’t covered by the emergency siren network.

Back then, officials wouldn’t disclose which communities are in the gaps, but that lapse in judgment was swept away by the Bulletin’s public records request, as noted in CHORE’s January 14th post.

Conclusion: Tsunami Awareness Month has begun with a media blitz that focuses attention on needed improvements in Hawaii’s emergency communications capabilities. And that’s no joke.