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.”