Virginia Tech Officials Put Own Safety First, Waited to Alert Students to Shooting Threat

Going on three years after the tragic Virginia Tech shootings that claimed 33 lives, word now comes that some university administrators warned their families and locked themselves in before the rest of the campus was alerted more than an hour later to the threat of a rampaging gunman.

According to an Associated Press story, even garbage collection was halted on the Blacksburg, VA campus before students and faculty were told of the danger.

There’s been little news in the past two years about what University of Hawaii officials are doing to improve safety on our local campuses, but the news in October 2007 wasn’t good.

On October 25, 2007, UH officials were told that a man riding a city bus was overheard threatening to kill 30 UH students. Officials responded by issuing an email alert to students and staff, but other potential channels such as loud speakers and the campus radio station were not used. Several posts here at CHORE in October 2007 noted deficiencies in the University's communications plan.

Students Left Unaware

Students and others subsequently said they never received the alert and were unaware of a potential threat to their safety. Administration officials later said the communications plan needed improving.

It’s time for the media and others to ask for details on what’s been done to improve campus security in Hawaii. The latest revelations from Virginia Tech show why officials need this kind of “help” from outside their comfort zone – why citizens have an appropriate role in urging officials to prepare for and respond to emergencies.

Left to their own devices, officials have demonstrated all too often that they don't respond appropriately.

Felicia To Test State, Broadcast Storm Readiness

Felicia is taking dead-eye aim at the Big Island.

We’re two or three days away from feeling the effects of Felicia, and we don’t yet know whether it will be a hurricane, a tropical storm or a depression when it blows through next week.

The trend is downward in wind speed as the storm moves toward Hawaii through cooler surface waters and into wind shears – a combination that can tear at the storm and reduce its power.

This is the first storm we can recall in decades that has approached Hawaii so directly straight from the east. Hurricanes Iwa and Iniki (1982 and 1992) were spawned in the Central Pacific region – hence their Hawaiian names – and came from the south.

Forecasting has improved greatly since those storm devastated Kauai and damaged Oahu, as well. We still recall the 1 am call on 9/11/92 from a newspaper reporter friend who had just learned Iniki was heading straight for Kauai, something not known when most of us went to bed.

What Else Has Improved?

We won’t know until after this storm arrives whether our communications professionals in civil defense and the broadcast industry also have upped their game. It was distressing during and after the Oahu’s island-wide power outage in December to hear the primary emergency broadcaster respond with an “entertainment-as-usual” manner. Our newspaper commentary suggested at least a partial fix to the problem – giving emergency broadcaster status to the professional team at Hawaii Public Radio.

We also hope State Civil Defense has improved its capability to communicate with citizens in a timely manner. This and more will be clear within 72 to 96 hours when Felicia arrives – hopefully as nothing more than a breezy and damp visitor.

Pacific Business News Commentary Suggests ‘No-Nonsense’ Approach to Emergency ‘Casts

Our commentary in the January 23rd edition of Pacific Business News strikes a familiar theme – that the designated emergency broadcast stations have a responsibility to report and inform, not entertain. Here’s the text:

Let’s be honest: The National Weather Service gets it right much more often than wrong. Those “clueless weatherman” jokes are so last century, thanks to today’s array of high-tech tools available to weather forecasters.

When they do get it wrong, the public probably should cut them some slack. The same goes for the officials who relied on severe weather forecasts last week to shut down government offices and schools.

However, one link in the severe weather chain must perform perfectly – the emergency broadcast system. The primary job for designated emergency broadcasters during a crisis is to inform residents about its cause, its likely duration and how to cope and stay safe.

It’s to inform, not entertain, and that’s where today’s chain could use some mending, as many listeners have concluded following Oahu’s island-wide power outage last month.

Emergency station KSSK’s Mike Perry and Larry Price, said to be the nation’s most dominant radio personalities, are exceptionally gifted entertainers who have been number one in their timeslot since taking over for the late Hal Lewis in 1983.

But emergency broadcasting isn’t primarily about entertainment. In addition to being the most influential broadcasters in the state, Perry and Price could be even more valuable during emergencies if they relied less on entertainment and adopted a no-nonsense approach that would help the public understand what’s happening and how to cope.

Here’s what an information-oriented broadcaster could do during future emergencies:

• Tell listeners not to call the station except to report emergencies. KSSK tends to open its phone lines to all callers, and the result is predictably frivolous (fish tank aeration was a big topic last month).

• Use valuable airtime to focus on real-world drama. Dozens of high-rise residents were stuck in elevators during the blackout, and others who rely on electricity-powered respirators were in jeopardy.

Without question, Perry and Price and KSSK are community assets, but we have other assets that could grow into valuable roles during future emergencies. One is non-profit Hawaii Public Radio, whose primary role is public service.

HPR’s journalists would bring an entirely different mindset to emergency broadcasts. For now, however, HPR’s biggest priority is to remain on the air during power outages, something it couldn’t achieve last month.

HPR always is in need of public support, and if emergency broadcast status is ever to be achieved, even more community backing will be required for HPR to add its public service voice to the current mix of entertainment-oriented stations.

The likelihood of future hurricanes, earthquakes and power outages in the islands requires an emergency broadcasting philosophy that emphasizes keeping citizens informed and safe, as well as entertained.

Honolulu communications consultant Doug Carlson previously worked at all-news radio stations in Philadelphia, PA and Los Angeles, CA.

If We ‘Never Learn Less’ as Seminar Gurus Insist, What Was Learned from the Wind that Wasn't?

Having spent three long days volunteering at the Sony Open with another to go, we’re going to keep this short. Plenty has been written already about the predicted big wind that didn’t arrive. But there is something worth wondering about, even briefly:

Was anything learned from what many are calling an over-reaction to weather service predictions of heavy winds yesterday?

One senior civil defense official is quoted as saying if given the same weather information, he’d make the same recommendation to close down schools and government offices. “Given the same factors, that would be the prudent thing to do,” he said.

But first, maybe the prudent thing to do before the next big-wind prediction would be to sit down with the weather service and try to learn something from what just happened.

Put in another context, few military leaders would insist on conducting exactly the same operational maneuver after the first one failed. They’d learn from the failure and plan accordingly.

At a minimum, that’s what citizens expect from their civil defense officials following Friday's non-wind experience.

HECO Says Lightning Caused Dec. 26 Blackout; July 13, 1983 Outage Deserves Another Look

Hawaiian Electric Company’s explanation on the cause of the December 26-27 Oahu blackout boils down to “unusual lightning strikes.” Both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin give the story page one treatment.

We have no inside knowledge to dispute HECO’s explanation and, in fact, we’re not disputing it. Lightning apparently was the cause, and without the storm, power presumably would have been uninterrupted.

But we can’t help wondering about whether something designed into the power grid failed to isolate the problem. That issue hasn’t been addressed in any media reports we’ve seen, and far as we can tell, HECO’s representatives have avoided talking about that possibility.

HECO’s explanation suggests lightning strikes created grid instabilities that inevitably required all the generators on the island to shut down. We and others are left to wonder whether those shutdowns truly were inevitable. Is it possible something failed to operate properly that, for example, might have allowed the Honolulu power plant to remain online and provide power to the circuits it serves?

Black Wednesday’s Finding

Oahu experienced an island-wide power outage on July 13, 1983 that a study determined might have been avoided if the system had reacted as it was designed to operate. Both these outages – December’s and back in 1983 – involved unusual “three phase faults.”

Stone & Webster published its report on the “Black Wednesday” outage in 1984. Here’s a reference to that outage from a PUC docket:

“A three phase fault occurred on the Kahe-CEIP 138kV line and then relays mis-operated to trip three additional 138kV lines leading to the system blackout. The relay mis-operation contributed to the blackout, and had the relays operated properly the outage may have been avoided.”

The report goes on to note that the transmission system was vulnerable because two additional 138kV lines were out of service for maintenance. But the “mis-operation” of those relays, or circuit breakers, was seen as key. Our recollection of the incident (as HECO spokesperson at the time) was that the relays were set to react within a third of a second after a disruptive incident, such as the 1983 cane fire that caused the flashover, but should have been set to operate even faster to isolate the problem.

If something could “mis-operate” in 1983, it seems plausible something similar could have happened last month. And that’s all we really want to know about the electric system’s reaction to the lightning: Was the generator blackout truly inevitable, or might something have tripped earlier along the transmission system that would have prevented the collapse.

It would seem highly unlikely that the engineering report eventually published about the December outage will conclude there’s no defense to Acts of God. Someplace, somewhere surely there is a system designer who knows how to keep the system operating, even when He steps in.

Citizens Deserve Better Emergency Response

Creation of a more robust and flexible electric grid on Oahu receives the Honolulu Advertiser’s editorial support today. The recent island-wide blackout that left residents without power for 12 hours or more is discussed as a providential opportunity to not only strengthen the grid against such blackouts but make it capable of accommodating independent power producers more easily.

But let’s not stop there as we clean up after the outage. Questions are being raised by growing numbers of residents about whether emergency communications serves them adequately during our many storms, power outages and other disruptions to the normal order.

Designated emergency broadcaster KSSK-AM and its primary on-air personalities have repeatedly failed to meet their responsibility in delivering responsible and thoughtful emergency communications to a troubled and fearful public.  (The Honolulu Star-Bulletin expressed similar views in a recent editorial.)

More than Minimal

It’s not enough to start a generator and remain on the air, the minimum requirement for an emergency broadcast outlet. Equally important is the content of emergency broadcasts. Without question, serious-minded and fact-based programming is also required during an emergency.

What we get from KSSK and the other Clear Channel-owned stations, however, is more of the same entertainment mindset rather than crisis management. The station’s two-man team seems incapable of switching off their weekday personas and adopting a no-nonsense approach to helping the public understand what’s happening and how to cope.

Many have written letters to the editor and left comments online about how callers with concerns and questions during the recent outage were dismissively laughed off the air. Is it OK to flush the toilet? Will tomorrow’s canoe regattas be cancelled?

The anchor team dismissed such concerns, yet information was aired in the morning that the regattas were in fact cancelled and the Board of Water Supply was urging water conservation.

Dissing the Public

Callers with legitimate concerns should not expect to be ridiculed during emergencies for sport and entertainment or out of habit. Listening to the KSSK during a crisis, one has the feeling the weekday morning show has simply been dropped into the emergency slot – jokes, quips and all.

Taking it further, an emergency broadcaster intent on serving the public would keep its phone lines open for urgent matters and government officials. Instead, KSSK’s team puts no such restriction on its listeners and spends valuable airtime on multiple calls dealing with comparatively less urgent concerns, such as the proper aeration of fish tanks.

Adding to the dysfunction are senior government leaders and civil defense officials who consistently praise KSSK’s performance as if they’ve never heard anything better from an emergency broadcaster. The predictable result is mutual back patting and no impetus for improved results in the next crisis.

Strengthening Hawaii Public Radio’s ability to remain on the air and designating its stations as emergency broadcast outlets would be an improvement over our near-total reliance on Clear Channel. HPR’s tradition of public service and journalism-based broadcasting might even move KSSK and its sister stations toward more a responsible emergency performance.