KITV Wins Honor for Earthquake Coverage

KITV has won an Edward R. Murrow Award in the spot news category for its breaking news coverage of the October 15th earthquakes, according to "The Buzz" column in today's Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The station was essentially the only TV outlet to perform well on Earthquake Sunday thanks to an emergency generator that provided power during the massive island-wide outage.

The story says there were no Hawaii radio winners -- which should tell you something about radio's performance that day. CHORE began writing about radio's deficiencies one week after the quakes.

With a Final Nod to the Dueling Commentaries, We Await the Next Crisis with High Expectations

Today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin may have given us the final round in the barrage between State Civil Defense and CHORE. (Scroll down the letters column to find CHORE's.)

We hope so; this tiff looks less savory the longer it continues, and there’s no reason to sustain the crossfire. Each side has made its points, but we can’t disguise our satisfaction that the Bulletin today saw fit to print our response to Maj. Gen. Robert Lee’s response to CHORE's original commentary about communications failures on October’s Earthquake Sunday.

This ongoing argument about the adequacy of fixes to the emergency communications system presumably will end when the next crisis arrives. We’ll know then whether our first responders reacted quicker and more effectively than they did five months ago, whether they’ve figured out how to contact radio stations without fail and whether those stations have remained on the air.

Moving Beyond Win-Lose

CHORE isn’t interested in winning an argument if “winning” means a repeat of past communications failures. What we’ve attempted to do here over the weeks is sustain a dialogue on how communications can be improved.

We’ve felt all along that the public wasn’t sufficiently involved in discussions about the enhancements. We became increasingly critical of State Civil Defense the more the agency dug in and eventually began firing back at its critics. We still think State CD and the Administration have gone out of their way to avoid a true, meaningful dialogue with citizens. The so-called legislative briefings at the Capitol were laughingly inadequate.

Regarding the recommendations of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee, we really have no idea about the status and priority of those recommendations. No public meetings, remember?

We Do Know This Much

In the next crisis caused by a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, flood, power blackout or traffic blockage, citizens will have every right to expect a rapid-fire response by Civil Defense and other officials who share emergency communications responsibilities.

We should be able to obtain emergency information across the radio dial, since the medium is available to nearly everyone in the islands. We should expect stations knocked off the air temporarily to resume operations in short order. And when they do, we should expect station personnel to have their “crisis hats” on and not attempt to entertain us during the emergency. (Tip to broadcasters: check out how big city stations on the mainland handle a crisis.)

TV news crawls and other means to contact the hearing impaired and other special needs individuals will have to be in place to ensure their safety, as well.

All this will have to be done without fail. Too many people are on the payroll and presumably planning for all manner of contingencies for things to fall through again as badly as they did in October. First responders can silence their critics by performing with near-perfect excellence the next time we citizens need them.

If it doesn’t happen, they can anticipate another round of Citizens Helping Officials Repond to Emergencies until they get it right.

Attendance at Legislative Briefings Is State CD’s Gauge of Public’s Concern over Communications

We’ve already examined Maj. Gen. Robert Lee’s view (here and here) that there were no communications failures after the October 15th earthquakes. The State’s Adjutant General said in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin commentary that what really happened amounted to an “information delay,” not a failure.

CHORE today turns to State Civil Defense’s second in command to examine why he apparently believes the average citizen isn’t all that concerned about emergency communications.

Vice Director Ed Teixeira was a guest on KIPO’s “Town Square” program on February 22 and said the following while answering a question about the lack of public involvement in assessing how to improve emergency communications:

Teixeira: At the beginning of the year, the Legislature had some information briefings, and there was one particular session left open to public comment, and you know, surprisingly, there were maybe about a dozen or so folks with special needs that stuck around. After two days of briefings, and that was the only public representation that was left over on that last hour – people with special needs that were there talking about what they needed from being deaf or hard of hearing or those who just can’t get around, and articulated their needs to us.

Host Beth-Ann Kozlovich: Did that surprise you, that there weren’t more members of the public there?

Teixeira: Yeah, it really did, because as we got into the second day on January 9th in the afternoon, the room selected for the information briefing was pretty crowded, with a lot of faces. And as we approached the 4 o’clock hour though and reconvened, only the folks with special needs were there to talk to us about what they thought we should have.

Be There if You Care

The implication of Teixeira’s remarks is that if the public truly cared about these matters, you would have attended those hearings – staying right to the bitter end.

Leave your job, even fly to Oahu if you’re a neighbor islander and sit through hour upon hour of testimony over two days – that’s what average citizens would have done if you really cared about improving communications to keep your family safe in a crisis.

And maybe that’s what you would do if your job description included what State Civil Defense officials are paid to do – attend endless hours of Capitol hearings.

But you’re not paid to do that, and your inability to be at the Legislature doesn’t mean what Teixeira seems to think it means.

An Inconvenient Truth

State Civil Defense won’t hold public meetings to hear your views at times and places that are convenient to you. The inconvenient truth here is that SCD won’t expose itself to criticism of its communications lapses. Why else would a public agency responsible for public safety during emergencies refuse to meet the public?

We continue to bang away on this topic because there will be future emergencies in which you and I will expect emergency communications to work flawlessly. That didn’t happen in October, and the record of SCD officials’ comments since then suggests they think you are satisfied with their performance.

Again we quote George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And so, too, are we citizens condemned to future communications problems if first responders can’t even acknowledge yesterday’s failures.

“Communications Failure” Becomes “Information Delay” in Orwellian World of State Civil Defense

What are we to make of State Adjutant General Robert Lee’s commentary in last Thursday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin?

Lee’s piece – which some might read as a personal attack on CHORE’s author – reveals an alarmingly tortured view by the State’s top Civil Defense officer of what most of us would call reality.

In his commentary, Lee denies the existence of communications failures that prevented vital information from reaching the public until well after the October 15th earthquakes. “The complaint by Doug Carlson incorrectly claims that ‘communications failures’ followed the earthquake,” Lee writes.

“The ability of State Civil Defense to inform the public that the earthquake had not generated a tsunami was hampered by the loss of the electric power grid, which shut down most news outlets. This was an information delay, not a failure, and it was thoroughly reported in the news media.” (emphasis added)

“It’s Not Our Fault”

In other words, it’s not State Civil Defense’s fault that the public didn’t receive information in a timely manner. It was other people’s fault – Hawaiian Electric, the cell phone companies and radio and TV stations without backup generators.

It’s painfully obvious to nearly everyone but State Civil Defense (just ask your friends and neighbors) that the agency itself apparently failed to consider what might happen when the power was out, the cell phone companies and stations' telephone lines were overloaded and broadcasters were knocked off the air. That much is obvious by the agency's failure to work around those communications blockages after the quakes.

As we noted in our first response to Lee’s commentary, a fundamental principle of communications is that the person generating a message must take responsibility for ensuring the message is received. Lee washes his hands of any responsibility for a failure to anticipate the problems that in fact occurred on Earthquake Sunday and produced what he calls an “information delay.”

Why Should We Care?

Had State Civil Defense done an adequate job of anticipating those problems, there would have been no communications failure, the Honolulu Community Media Council wouldn’t have felt compelled to host a panel discussion on emergency communications and CHORE would not have been launched back on October 17th, two days after the quakes.

We should care about this because our families’ safety depends on well-run bureaucracies in times of natural or man-made emergencies in our state. We have a right to expect good, reality-based thinking by the professionals we employ to communicate with us during those emergencies.

And that’s why Maj. General Lee’s rebuttal is both revealing and alarming. We deserve clear-eyed assessments of events when they reveal shortcomings. Otherwise, we’ll be treated to more of the same failures during our next emergency.

We'll continue this discussion in a future post as we examine State Civil Defense's apparent criteria for assessing the public's interest in these matters.

Hearing Impaired Need Better Visuals in a Crisis

As promised earlier this week, CHORE is following up here with comments by a representative of the hearing-impaired community at the Honolulu Community Media Council's “Media and Emergency Response” panel discussion.

Before we do that, we call your attention once again to yesterday’s post with our response to State Adjutant General Robert Lee’s commentary that takes issue with just about everything CHORE has written since the October 15th earthquakes:

General Lee Launches Counter-Offensive at
CHORE; We Respond with Defense-in-Depth

You’ll find our long paragraph-by-paragraph response to General Lee below today’s post.

When Will the Hearing Get It?

Deaf interpreter Larry Littleton of Kauai reminded the Media Council audience that communication must not be merely audible. It must be visual, as well.

“In any emergency, I LOOK for information,” he says. “In any emergency, the hearing LISTEN for information. We are both trying to obtain the same thing, in different modes.”

Littleton later emailed CHORE and asked pointedly, “When are these hearing people going to get it? It is a mockery of any emergency agency to put up a ‘visual emergency scroll’ when NO ONE is monitoring the scroll at the station where it is uploaded.

“Because, if you are one of the over 6,000 hearing-impaired people who reside in the state of Hawaii and you are watching TV with closed captions, the captions will overlap the emergency scroll! This does not include the untold thousands of visitors with hearing loss here on holiday. And I'm not talking about the culturally deaf; I'm talking about our ohana, bless them, who cannot hear due to advancing age.”

Littleton knows of what he speaks. He’s been deaf since 1962 and has more than four decades dealing with inadequate communications designed and dispatched by the hearing. Without a doubt, Littleton or one of his colleagues should have been asked to participate as a member of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee that studied how to improve emergency response.

He could have given them both an ear and eye full. Thanks for your comments, Larry.

General Lee Launches Counter-Offensive at CHORE; We Respond with Defense-in-Depth

Major Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, Hawaii’s adjutant general and director of State Civil Defense, has a commentary in today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin that’s apparently designed to blunt CHORE’s sustained offensive to improve communications to the public during emergencies. (We urge readers to also visit yesterday’s CHORE post, which reported on Tuesday’s “Media and Emergency Response” panel discussion sponsored by the Honolulu Community Media Council.) Lee’s commentary ends with the following shot, and that’s where our response begins:

Frankly, I don’t understand the purpose of the negative, misdirected attention that Carlson has focused on State Civil Defense. We, along with the county civil defense agencies, the governor's tourism liaison, state Department of Transportation, other state, county and federal agencies, as well as private sector organizations that responded to the earthquake, have been open and honest about what we need to improve. And, as always, we welcome the public's comments and suggestions.

It’s unfortunate the General believes what we wrote in our own Star-Bulletin commentary last week and here at CHORE is negative and misdirected. We have taken pains to be civil in this space; our very first post on October 17 affirmed our intention to help improve communications, not lay blame. As to why we have relentlessly drilled away on these issues, one need only go back to the media coverage following the earthquakes for a memory refresher. Letters to the editor and news reports were filled with citizens’ complaints about both the sustained power outage and the communications void in the early hours of the emergency. Not A Failure To Communicate? Back to General Lee’s commentary, starting near the top:

The complaint by Doug Carlson…incorrectly claims that "communications failures" followed the earthquake. The ability of State Civil Defense to inform the public that the earthquake had not generated a tsunami was hampered by the loss of the electric power grid, which shut down most news outlets. This was an information delay, not a failure, and it was thoroughly reported in the news media.

The General seems to say State Civil Defense can’t be faulted if the public was left uninformed in the first hours of the emergency. The failure was in the electric grid, not in the communications, he suggests. A fundamental principle of communications is that if the message does not get through, there has been a failure to communicate. The communicator must take responsibility for ensuring that the message is actually delivered. This is a basic communications concept that seems to be unappreciated by State Civil Defense, which obviously failed to anticipate what might happen if its cell phones didn’t work due to network overload. Also unanticipated was the inability for Civil Defense officials to call the stations that remained on the air because the phone lines were jammed. The failures didn’t begin with the electric grid’s crash; they began when contingency planning didn’t anticipate the loss of the phone networks. The General’s “information delay” was actually an out-and-out communications failure, no matter how narrowly the hair is split.

A second inaccuracy in Carlson's column is that there was no public representation on the Governor's Comprehensive Communications Review Committee. In fact, the committee, which was appointed for the purpose of improving communications with the public in a disaster or crisis, had 85 members from private businesses or organizations, including nearly every print, TV and radio news outlet statewide. Only 25 participants were from government offices -- county, state and federal.

The General himself says the non-governmental members of the committee were appointed to represent “private businesses or organizations….” The point we first made here at CHORE on October 18, the day after the committee was formed, was that average citizens were not being asked for their input: “This committee won't be "comprehensive" until it gives voice to the people who did not have their fears calmed about a possible tsunami, who did not know why the power was out and for how long and who wondered why 10 or more broadcast outlets were silent for hours or even until the next day. Let's add some men and women to this committee who aren't in the media and Civil Defense. That would make it real.” The Comprehensive Communications Review Committee’s membership breaks down as follows: Media (radio, TV and print executives, reporters and editors), 69 members; Wireless Representatives (Cingular wireless, Hawaiian Telcom, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless), 12 members; Government Representatives, 24; Additional Representatives, 3 (a tour operator, a Veteran’s Coalition representative, and one unaffiliated person). 

Despite the massive media representation, not one news report was generated by local media until after the last of four committee meetings. All meetings were held in private – i.e., the public was not given access -- and the committee did not solicit public input prior to the publication of its final report and recommendations. 

It’s not surprising, given the wireless industry’s representation, that one of those recommendations is to use text messaging on cell phones to communicate emergency information. What does the public think about the viability of that information channel? We don’t know, but we suspect many citizens may be skeptical about the cell phone network’s ability to survive a category 4 hurricane. Assessing the Public Mood The next paragraph in General Lee’s commentary refers back to his previous comments:

This fact also counters another of the story's allegations, namely that the public had no input in the decision making about how to improve disaster communications. In the several Disaster Assistance Recovery Centers set up on the Big Island, Maui and Oahu following the earthquake, hundreds of members of the general public met and talked with officials from State Civil Defense, who were rarely asked about the delays in communicating with the public immediately after the earthquake. The same is true of the numerous public gatherings, ranging from legislative briefings to neighborhood board meetings, attended by State Civil Defense leaders, myself included.

It’s not hard to imagine that someone whose home or business was damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes would be more concerned with obtaining reconstruction aid than inquiring about communications problems. Additionally, most accounts said communications on the Big Island were far better than on Oahu. Despite whatever briefings the General and his staff have given to legislative committees and neighborhood boards, they are no substitute for meetings called specifically to brief the public on communications-related issues and what State Civil Defense is doing to improve disaster response. Officials have steadfastly refused to schedule meetings that could be held at the convenience of the public, not State Civil Defense. As we noted here at CHORE on January 29, State Civil Defense’s position seems to be that neighbor island citizens should have traveled to Oahu to attend legislative briefings if they wanted to air their concerns about communications. Until State Civil Defense schedules communications-specific briefings on all the major islands to address how it’s improving disaster response, we’ll continue to question the agency’s responsiveness to the public it’s in business to serve. More of the Same Continuing with General Lee’s commentary:

Carlson's last charge is most erroneous and offensive. He claims that "State Civil Defense officials have not briefed the public on what they are doing to improve their communications capabilities." We have responded to media inquiries, briefed lawmakers and members of the general public, and answered phone calls and e-mails on this subject. Additionally, the Governor's Comprehensive Communications Review Committee report was released to the public on Jan. 5. Its 15 key recommendations prompted widespread coverage by the news media.

We’ve already covered what we believe is an inadequate “public information” effort by State Civil Defense. Briefing lawmakers and the news media and the few members of the general public who attend legislative hearings does not constitute a rigorous, public-oriented effort. As we’ve noted at CHORE, a private company that suffers similar communications failures affecting its customers wastes no time in launching such a campaign. Hawaiian Electric briefed the public on its massive October 15th power outage eight days later, and one has to believe it would have done so even without the Public Utilities Commission looking over its shoulder. State Civil Defense is accountable ultimately to the public, and that’s where its communications efforts should have been directed. Public Safety Is the Issue General Lee’s commentary concludes two paragraphs later, and we encourage you to read it all the way through. Let’s be clear about our alleged “erroneous and offensive” comments, as he sees them: There is nothing personal in our ongoing effort to focus attention on how State Civil Defense has acted and apparently thinks. Public safety is at the core of our disputatious dialogue with the agency. When General Lee praises KSSK’s efforts on October 15th as “fabulous” – the word he used in his legislative briefing on January 8 – that tells us something about how he and his colleagues think. Encouraging listeners to call the station with their earthquake anecdotes and thereby prevent first responders from calling with their own critical information, as KSSK did early in the crisis, was not “fabulous” emergency broadcasting. Playing the pre-recorded “John Tesh Radio Show” at 7 p.m. while half of Oahu was still suffering through a blackout was not “fabulous” programming. Yet that’s what State Civil Defense told two legislative committees meeting in early January. This alone is cause for concern by anyone who must rely on KSSK and other emergency broadcast stations during the next hurricane, flood, tsunami or earthquake. We all have the absolute right to question the performance of government officials and private broadcasters when our own life experience tells us their performance was substandard. General Lee obviously thinks we’re out of line. We disagree and will continue to write about these issues until the reasons for our concern have been fully addressed. We invite you to continue reading and jump down to yesterday’s post, immediately below, for a report on Tuesday’s Media Council meeting on these matters. We’ll provide the additional promised coverage in a future post of the hearing impaired community’s concerns.