Details Thin on What CCRC Thinks We Need

If you want to know what really transpired at yesterday’s meeting of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (CCRC) – the details of who said what – waiting until mid-October will be a must. You won’t find details in today’s Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin stories.

Stories prepared for the Sunday, October 14th papers will have information on the final report of the CCRC, timed to be released nearly one year after Earthquake Sunday in October 2006.

As for today’s news, this is typical of the reporting:

Meanwhile, media outlets big and small talked about how they plan to get the messages out to the public, many adding or upgrading generators and installing simple land-line phones or satellite phones as an alternative to cell phones.

The sentence is taken from yet another story that gives the appearance of telling us what happened without actually do so. Exactly how do media outlets big and small intend to get the messages out to the public? Which outlets have upgraded their backup capability and which haven’t? (And are reporters writing these details, only to have them excised by an editor somewhere up the chain?)

Note to Editors:

The public needs these details in order to know whether we can trust the emergency responders to do the right thing. They weren’t prepared to keep us informed in October, and we have every reason to be skeptical about their preparations to date.

Finally, we need to ask whether the final report will provide details that will help citizens appreciate which media outlets have done their homework and which haven’t. CHORE doubts the report will include anything potentially embarrassing to anyone. The CCRC at its core is a club of insiders – government insiders, media insiders, communications industry insiders, civil defense insiders. A club of insiders isn’t likely to be tough on one another.

And because only members of the public might have risen to the level of asking tough questions, CHORE and like-thinking citizens are still on the outside and likely to stay there.

Power Outage Sets Stage for Wrap-up Meeting Of State’s Emergency Communications Body

The Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (CCRC) will hold its first meeting in months today, and to put at least some of us in the mood, the power went out last night in Kaimuki and Waialae-Kahala. It wasn’t a big outage – just a few seconds for many of us and less than an hour for the rest, but you had to laugh at the timing.

The CCRC was formed a couple days after the October 15th earthquakes that triggered a massive power outage on Oahu that lasted for up to 24 hours for some residents and half as long for tens of thousands of others.

CHORE lobbied from the start to open the CCRC to public input and attendance. That never happened, and it’s not happening today for reasons best understood by its leadership.

Coming to a Conclusion

Co-Chair Lenny Klompus called CHORE last week in response to our request to receive an invitation and an expanded agenda, which as we noted last month is without detail in its public version. We had every reason to expect our request would be honored, as CCRC Co-Chair Maj. Gen. Robert Lee urged us to request an invitation when he sat on the Honolulu Advertiser's "Hotseat" earlier this month.

Klompus denied the request and almost made the denial sound reasonable. This is merely a wrap-up meeting, he said. “We want to ask the members what have you done within your organization to be better prepared. What are you doing in the short term, and what have you done since October 15th?

“The process now is to come to a conclusion, to get final results of what people have done in the last year. Once this is concluded, we can say who did what. The next step will be to build the foundation for the next meeting.”

The 64-Megawatt Questions

Indeed, what has been done, and who’s done it? How many radio and television stations have added backup generation so they can remain on the air in a power blackout? Which ones are they? Which stations have not done so, and why?

How have stations adjusted their standard operating procedures for emergencies? Have they adopted the seemingly obvious fixes suggested here at CHORE and elsewhere, or are they still caught up in the self-congratulatory mode that was so evident in October?

Has text messaging become the fix du jour, as seemed to be the case when the CCRC issued its preliminary report in January? In a state with one of the oldest demographics in the nation, do our leaders truly expect text messaging to be useful to the majority of citizens? Or is text messaging just another communications medium destined to fail in a category 4 or 5 hurricane?

And what about State Civil Defense? What specifically has this agency done to alter its SOP for communicating in an emergency? The need certainly was obvious on October 15th, and Klompus mentioned a few improvements in our phone call.

It’s All About Serving the Public

Because the public needs to know all of these things, CHORE has to believe the CCRC at long last will recognize its obligation to the public and provide a detailed report on what transpires in today’s meeting.

We doubt, however, that it will be as comprehensive as the committee’s name would imply. We’ll shelve our skepticism if the CCRC actually tells us which broadcasting stations have not upgraded their capability.

Klompus alluded to future CCRC meetings. Will they open to the public at last, perhaps in the State Capitol Auditorium, where Hawaiian Electric Company held its public briefing on October 23rd?

Klompus hedged his answer, but CHORE took that as a “yes.”

Maj. Gen. Lee on the Advertiser's "Hotseat" Tells Citizens to Request Invitation to CCRC Meeting

Afternoon Update: A quick read of Honolulu Advertiser's Hotseat blog chat today involving Maj. Gen. Robert Lee, state adjutant general, reveals the virtual absence of anything to do with natural disasters and State Civil Defense's readiness in that regard. Maybe it's just not something the public focuses on unless there's a hurricane or tsunami bearing down on the islands.

Here's the question CHORE posted and General Lee's response

As co-chair of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee, which was created to assess the communications breakdown after the October 15th earthquakes and to recommend improvements, will you today reveal details of the agenda for the Committee's September 27th meeting? It currently reads only:

"Group discussion on status of final committee recommendations and
implementation status of those recommendations (by each organization)."

Details would help the public understand the scope of your upcoming meeting. One item worth covering: How many broadcast stations have added backup generators since October that will allow them to remain on the air during a power blackout? Which are they, and which stations have not added a backup capability? Also, is the public invited to the 9/27 meeting, and what is its location?

Thank you.

General Lee's response:

We are still working on the agenda for the Sep 27 meeting. Please contact the Governor's office to request an invite to the meeting.

And so we will, and maybe you will, too. If enough requests flow into the Governor's office, maybe they'll have to move the meeting to the Capitol Auditorium or another room large enough to accommodate a crowd and the media.

The issue is public safety, and this is the insider committee that's deciding how we'll all be served with emergency communications during our next emergency. We all have a stake in this.
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Morning Post:
If you're reading this before noon today (9/11), you mayR want to join the fun during the noon hour as State Adjutant General Robert Lee takes his place in the Honolulu Advertiser's Hotseat for an online chat. You can post your questions here.

CHORE already has posted a question concerning the agenda for the September 27th meeting of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee. The current agenda has no details, as we reported last month. We also asked whether the public will have access to the meeting, something that's been missing in all previous meetings of this Governor-appointed body.

As we reflect on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it's worth also reflecting on the fact that the greatest threat to the security of Hawaii citizens comes from nature -- hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, lava flows and tsunamis. Let's hope today's Hotseat chat dwells on preparations to cope with those better than what we experienced on Earthquake Sunday 11 months ago.