Advice to Emergency Communicators: Please Concentrate Only on What We Need to Know

We start by reiterating the purpose of this blog; go here for our first post, which includes our Mission Statement. In sum: we’re here to help.

That said, we urge State Civil Defense officials to confine their public statements in the few seconds afforded to them by the media as Hurricane Flossie approaches to what is truly important for citizens to know – information that will help us in the coming emergency.

We do not need briefings on internal logistical moves. What are we talking about? Here’s what the State’s top Civil Defense official said this evening on KGMB-TV’s 6 o’clock news:

“We have a fairly large full-time force of both the Army and Air National Guard that’s on duty now, and we’re just waiting for additional needs that we can activate very quickly. Our helicopters are on alert to fly to the Big Island, and the rest of the Air National Guard assets if need be.”

Just Give Us the “Need to Know”

Military personnel would call this “nice to know” information, but it’s certainly not “need to know.” As this official and anyone in a position to be interviewed regularly should know, the media will use what you emphasize in your remarks – and your remarks should emphasize what’s important. We simply do not need to know what Air Guard assets are available to fly to the Big Island.

What information might the citizenry want to know? Let’s start with the status of all those radio stations that lost power on October 15th. We need to know whether those stations have improved their ability to stay on the air and which stations have invested in improvements. We might also want to know which stations have done little or nothing to improve their resiliency in a power emergency.

We might want to know how often and when civil defense officials will issue updates over those stations. And we should know how many of the nearly 150 "gap areas" in the emergency siren warning system have been filled in the past several months and which communities remain unprotected by a warning system.

Exactly what's been done to improve emergency communications to the citizenry, General?

Measuring Up to the Test

Hurricane Flossie is the first real test of Hawaii’s emergency communications capabilities since Earthquake Sunday. Hawaii’s citizens deserve highly professional emergency communications. CHORE urges officials to confine your logistical information to your internal briefings and give us only what we need to know to be prepared for this hurricane.