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.
CHORE was launched in 2006 after an inadequate response to an earthquake emergency in Hawaii. That event revealed an opening for average citizens to contribute experience-based suggestions to improve crisis communications. The many deaths recorded after California's wildfires in 2017-18, the wildfire destruction of Lahaina, Maui in 2023, and the tragic Texas floods in 2025 also revealed gaps in officials' ability to communicate effectively. Visitors are invited to comment.
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