Text Messaging Has a Role in Emergencies, but UH Needs Much More To Reach Everyone

Many University of Hawaii students text message one another to stay in touch, but as a key component of UH’s emergency notification procedure, TM is sorely lacking.

Today’s Honolulu Advertiser story lays it out plainly enough: “…UH officials expect only 10 percent of the students to sign up” for TM alerts. Doesn’t that say it all about TM’s role in emergencies?

CHORE made this same point four months ago by quoting a National Public Radio report:

"College administrators are finding that students are not rushing to sign up for cell phone text-message alerts. After the Virginia Tech shootings last spring, many campuses felt this was the answer to keeping their students alert to danger, but students don't share their concerns."

It should come as no surprise to UH officials that students here apparently feel the same. Whether they “don’t care enough” about emergency notification – as one official is quoted in today’s story – isn’t the point. UH must use information channels that actually work!

The Love Affair with Technology

The Advertiser story notes that officials are taking steps beyond TM, but here again, technology is seen as a solution. A warning siren would be “…designed to alert faculty, staff and students and direct them to the UH Web site for more information.”

Always it’s about technology -- the web, TM, wifi. We love technology, too, but let’s get real about its limitations. We’re talking about potentially life-saving information that must be communicated to virtually everyone on campus. Do administrators really believe the Web would be effective? Sure, it's ONE way to communicate, but only one.

Tech-oriented administrators may not want to admit it, but low technology has a major role. Nowhere in the story do officials mention good old-fashioned loud speakers in campus buildings. They don’t mention using the campus radio station or how off-campus broadcasters could relay security messages.

Calling Common Sense

In other words, emergency communications is too important to leave to high-tech gurus. We need a heavy dose of common sense, and while we're at it, the public also needs to see UH's complete emergency communications plan for evidence that common sense is at work.

Shortly after a recent test of text messaging among UH’s faculty, we were told by a UH official that the test had been a success. How do you know, we asked. Because we received the message, was the answer. How many faculty and staff didn’t receive it? The official paused slightly, then said she didn’t know.

Unless UH has created a web of information channels to its community, we have to expect many faculty, staff and students will be ignorant about a potentially life-threatening situation. And that’s not good enough.

No Blinking Devices Means Reliability Was Perfect During Trip; a Tip for Wai`anae Coast

After the string of power outages at our place late in the year, it was a pleasant surprise to return from several weeks on the road to find no blinking clocks, radios, cable boxes, microwaves, ovens, amplifiers or coffee makers. Whatever was plaguing our circuit, Hawaiian Electric seems to have figured it out.

Speaking of HECO and reliability, we saw during our travels that the utility has proposed undergrounding transmission and distribution lines along Farrington Highway in Wai`anae as a work-around for the downed power line problem.

Retired HECO engineer Alan Lloyd suggested in his letter in the Advertiser on January 22 that steel poles would be preferable to burying the lines. Lloyd is one of those exceptionally knowledgeable and practical people you like to have around with a second opinion when knee-jerk solutions are suggested to solve a problem.

It’s true that undergrounding utility lines would beautify the Coast (it would beautify my street, too), but as Lloyd suggests, there may be bigger issues to consider. Here’s his letter:

STEEL POLES A BETTER SOLUTION FOR WAI'ANAE

As an engineer with some local utility system planning experience, I have a recommendation for the electric transmission lines serving the Wai'anae Coast.

I would strongly recommend that HECO be permitted to replace the wooden poles along Farrington Highway that failed during severe wind storms during the past two years with modern steel poles designed for hurricane force winds.

Steel poles have a good record on Kaua'i and on Guam, which has severe hurricane exposure. Also, there is an excellent example of a steel pole power line carrying two transmission circuits and one distribution circuit from Kailua-Kona to Kona airport.

The installation of a steel pole system will offer several advantages over converting these existing transmission circuits to underground, including much less disruption of traffic on Farrington Highway, the only road serving Wai'anae; much less possibility of disturbing iwi in the area; and for a given amount of investment, much more protection from future wind storms because many more miles of transmission lines can be converted to steel poles in the Wai'anae area than could be placed underground.

Alan S. Lloyd
Kailua

Top 10 List Ignores What Affected Most of Us

Thousands without power for days, Waianae Coast residents cut off from the rest of the island, parents scrambling to find babysitters as scores of schools are closed.

What does it take to make the Star-Bulletin's list of the Top 10 Stories of ’07? Maybe what the list tells us is that disruption to the lives of average citizens like December's Kona storm just doesn't register with journalists. Or maybe the inconveniences inflicted on residents have become so routine they don't seem newsworthy.

We're a bit hyper here at CHORE about emergencies, but we have to believe the average person doesn't give a fig about the resignation of the Governor's chief of staff, #8 on the list, or successful missile tests on Kauai, #10. Compare that to having the only highway access to Waianae communities blocked yet again by a wind storm.

Chaos Defined Response to San Francisco Zoo Tragedy; Despite Planning, Execution Is Key

Unless events give a reason to do otherwise, CHORE’s taking a break from these occasional posts for some traveling. As we sign off for 2007, we recommend the recent San Francisco Zoo fiasco as an excellent example of how presumably competent officials can botch an emergency response.

A San Francisco Chronicle story today details the missteps minute by minute, including the declaration of a “Code One” by Zoo security personnel that prevented police and fire department personnel from entering the Zoo to attend to the victims of the tiger mauling!

Read the story and you can’t help wonder whether zoo officials ever rehearsed their emergency plan, which a second Chronicle story examines and concludes had little relevance to what actually went down on Christmas Day.

And that’s the essence of CHORE’s posts over the past 15 months – the necessity to plan for both expected and improbable events and then rehearse every conceivable scenario.

CHORE hopes all your conceivable and inconceivable scenarios in 2008 are good ones.

Tsunami Anniversary Show Has Nothing New; NOVA Recycles Program Already Shown Twice

PBS’s third anniversary remembrance didn’t advance our understanding whatsoever of what might have been done to save some of those hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost in December 2004.

“The Wave That Shook the World” documentary shown in the NOVA time slot Christmas night was aired twice previously, the first time just three months after the event. All the views expressed in the show therefore are nearly three years old.

CHORE’s sister blog – Tsunami Lessons – has banged away consistently since the massive earthquake and tsunami about the complete absence of a plan to use the international news media to quickly disseminate tsunami warnings to remote populations.

The concept is so logical and so low-tech that it has attracted no support from NOAA and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. And that’s a shame – but not nearly as shameful as the lack of foresight and preparation within NOAA that left the Center unprepared to issue a life-saving warning on Christmas Day 2004.

Year-End Review Suggests Some Seemed To Be Open To Criticism, While Others Were Above It

A bright (and quiet) Hawaiian Christmas Day offers reflection time on the state of emergency response in 2007:

• We haven’t had a “big one” this year – a hurricane, tsunami or earthquake (like the October 2006 quake that launched CHORE) to test officials’ and agencies’ ability to respond adequately. Without one – and we’re not wishing for one – we have to take it on faith that civil defense officials have improved their procedures since Earthquake Sunday (see below).
• The “minor one” we did have in early December – a Kona storm with gale-force winds – proved daunting for both Hawaiian Electric Company and the several first-response communicators who were slow in putting what they knew on the airwaves.
• Oahu’s electric utility likely will be under pressure in 2008 to do something relatively dramatic to strengthen its grid on the Waianae Coast. One more episode of fallen polls blocking the only highway access to the coast might be the proverbial back-breaking straw for residents there.
• The falling utility line problem proved more than an inconvenience in November when a man died after a line set fire to his van. HECO will undoubtedly address this issue with inspections and maintenance in ’08 – either voluntarily or under PUC oversight.
• Oahu’s primary emergency broadcaster did a better job following the December storm by switching to “crisis mode” much quicker than it did on Earthquake Sunday. (Maybe our criticisms of its flawed response to the quake-triggered island-wide blackout paid off. Broadcast executives won’t agree, but we’ll think so anyway.)

Campus Communications

• The late October threat against students at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus produced a woefully inadequate response by UH officials. Text messaging is one method to communicate with students and faculty, but using that mode exclusively was a flawed response. Low-tech modes are needed, too -- banging on doors, public address announcements, the campus radio station…whatever it takes.
• Our initial reaction was endorsed by a somewhat surprising survey reported by NPR: college students were shown to be less than enthusiastic embracers of text messaging. That alone – in addition to common sense – should prompt UH officials to produce a new crisis communications plan.
• CHORE’s recommended Standard Operating Procedure: Any threat to the security of the campus community warranting an alert to students and faculty will be disseminated by all available means – text messaging, emails, loudspeakers in buildings and in the campus’s exterior spaces, and broadcasts over KTUH and the commercial stations. A UH student's commentary in the Star-Bulletin argued that students and faculty require information to make decisions about their own personal safety.
• The UH faculty Senate ultimately passed a resolution calling for improved campus communications. We hope to see evidence of same in 2008.

Non-Comprehensive Review

• Finally, this year-end review of emergency response in Hawaii would be incomplete without touching on what launched CHORE in the first place – the breakdown in the flow of information to the public following the October 15, 2006 earthquakes and Oahu power blackout. Although a committee was created two days later to review that response and recommend enhancements, its name was wrong from the start: Without public involvement, the committee couldn’t be called “comprehensive.”
• And the public never did get a seat at the table during the committee’s many meetings over the next year. Worse, CHORE took it on the chops when State Adjutant General Robert Lee decided our criticisms were unjustified. “Frankly, I don’t understand the purpose of the negative, misdirected attention that Carlson has focused on State Civil Defense,” he wrote in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Continuing, he blamed the electric company for the failure of his agency to provide timely emergency information to the public: “This was an information delay, not a failure, and it was thoroughly reported in the news media.”
• Our response (‘Communications Failure’ Becomes ‘Information Delay’ in Orwellian World of State Civil Defense) noted that “we citizens (are) condemned to future communications problems if first responders can’t even acknowledge yesterday’s failures.”

What’s in Store in ’08?

The contretemps with State Civil Defense were a distraction from the real issue: Will the next major emergency result in an exceptionally timely and informative response by those responsible for informing the public? Have first responders adjusted their procedures?

CHORE used the first anniversary of Earthquake Sunday to summarize what went wrong and our hopes for the future, and the "non-comprehensive" committee published its final recommendations for communications enhancements. But with National Guard deployments to the Middle East a higher priority for the Adjutant General and his staff, we may have to wait until the next emergency to know whether all the meetings and all the talking have produced better results.

A “Good Start” Implies More Steps in the Future

CHORE agrees with Honolulu Advertiser columnist Lee Cataluna that Hawaiian Electric’s recent half-page newspaper “apology ad” to Waianae Coast residents was a “good start.”

Since “Helping” is part of CHORE’s charter, we offer this helpful advice: Don’t stop there. We suggested earlier this week that bold steps are needed for HECO to restore its reputation in the area.

Full-on community meetings along the coast would demonstrate the company’s resolve to step up to the criticism and the challenge of improving power reliability in leeward Oahu.

Face-to-face meetings with residents will be infinitely more effective than signed statements published on paper.