Millions Are Spent on Servicing CD Insiders, but True Need Is a Better Public Information System

The Honolulu Advertiser editorializes today on the need to upgrade the state and county Civil Defense centers, but we’re struck once again by what those upgrades would and wouldn't do.

Have you noticed in earlier media coverage that recent Civil Defense expenditures seem to be for tools and toys to keep officials themselves informed, coordinated and linked in? From the editorial:

The city’s center would coordinate the first responders – ambulances, firefighters and the like – and manage traffic on Oahu. The state’s center would monitor and respond to all the counties’ needs with its own resources, including the National Guard.

Just once we’d like to read about what’s being done to upgrade human software in the emergency communications chain. The big failure in October ’06 when two Big Island earthquakes resulted in a prolonged island-wide power outage on Oahu was CD officials’ inability to communicate efficiently with the public. (First-time visitors to CHORE are directed to our summary of the event more than a year after the fact.)

Officials relied on faulty assumptions – that cell phone networks would work in a power emergency, that they could simply call radio stations to convey information to the public, that emergency broadcasters were prepared to react professionally. The public was left uninformed far too long, and the fix for those human lapses is more training for humans, not necessarily more millions for computers and inter-agency communications.

After a prolonged drought, Hawaii can expect storms this winter, so if our Civil Defense officials haven’t trained and retrained on getting the word out, all those millions on electronic gadgets will be a waste.