Despite Report, Questions about the Human Element Remain Unexamined on Anniversary

The CCRC’s report released to the media two days ago remains unavailable on-line to the public as this is written in early morning on the one-year anniversary of the Big Island earthquakes and Oahu blackout.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Mid-Morning Update: The CCRC’s report finally was posted online this morning, two days after the committee posted the video of its Saturday press conference. Despite the report's shortcomings (see below,) all citizens concerned about their families’ communications lifeline during an emergency should read it.

First Impressions: Earthquake Sunday last year was a needed wake-up call. The long description of upgrades at the state’s broadcasting stations is impressive, and a number of other improvements undoubtedly enhance emergency communications.

Continuing impression: This report is flawed because the CCRC did not include the public in any organized and meaningful way. One example of where public input is needed is paragraph 8, page 3: “Cell phone text messages. This is where the state wants to go for the future. Working with cell phone companies.”

Why is the CCRC enthused about text messaging? How does it deal with skepticism that major hurricanes could wipe out cell phone networks and that a prolonged power outage would degrade the networks’ capabilities? What percentage of the state’s population uses text messaging? (That’s a statistic that’s undoubtedly floating around somewhere.) What age groups never, sometimes and always use TM? Why is text messaging needed to disseminate information in a state where 99.99% of the population has access to radio? How much money will be required to focus new energy on text messaging?

We don’t know any of the answers because the CCRC and State Civil Defense consistently have refused for the past year to open themselves up to public comment. Their unstated message easily can be interpreted as, “We know best. Go away.”

The Governor should consider this “final” CCRC report to be yet another draft until she concedes that public dialogue will only make the list of recommendations better.

The people know best, Governor. We always thought you believed that, too.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Continuing today's earlier post:
Today’s Honolulu Advertiser carries the second of three days of coverage on the emergency’s aftermath one year ago. Hawaiian Electric issues are the focus today, and tomorrow the paper says its coverage will focus on “State plans for better communications in event of a disaster.”

We’ve already learned about obvious technical communications fixes – alleged updates of the Emergency Alert System (although as we noted yesterday, the latest plan on-line doesn’t show much of an update); a new media center at State Civil Defense headquarters in Diamond Head, and dedicated phone lines to broadcast outlets.

Unexamined as yet in this anniversary’s performance assessment is the human element – how the men and women charged with decision making during a crisis performed and how the protocols they’re meant to follow have been improved.

Some of their decisions and assumptions were weak, such as assuming they could communicate easily using cell phone networks and assuming the public would panic if the word “tsunami” were uttered, even in a message saying no tsunami had been generated. If you’ve forgotten about that gaffe, check out the second commentary posted here at CHORE three days after the earthquakes.

Technical fixes are actually the easiest to make. Changing human behavior to respond more appropriately during a crisis is something much more difficult.

Tomorrow’s Advertiser will make good reading….and so would the CCRC report itself if the State gets around to posting it on-line today for citizens to evaluate on our own.

Emergency Communications Enhancements Should Be Briefed to the Public for Reaction

There’s still no on-line link today to the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee’s report that was submitted yesterday to the Governor. As we noted in last night’s post, the January 5th draft report was available immediately at the Governor’s website; why the final report isn’t similarly available for public scrutiny is a question an inquiring reporter may wish to ask.

We have to rely on media this morning for details, and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s list of “key recommendations for improving emergency communications in the state” apparently summarizes what’s in the report. CHORE was founded in the spirit of Citizens Helping Officials Respond to Emergencies, so let’s take a look at some of the suggestions on that list:

• Update Hawaii Emergency Alert System Plan – That’s definitely a good idea; as CHORE noted 10 days after the 10/15/06 earthquake and power outage, the EAS wasn’t activated until three hours after the emergency began. The Honolulu Advertiser reported that the City didn’t implement the EAS because of “a lack of training and state protocol.” How has the plan been updated in the past year to eliminate these problems? See if you can tell by clicking on the link to the Hawaii State EAS Plan in the left column of the Hawaii State Civil Defense website. The last change, dated 10/26/06, appears to have been an update to a list of phone numbers. Is that it? Are no other EAS changes merited, or have they been made but aren’t available to the public on the web? Those are questions a reporter could ask, and we hope at least one does.

• Utilize cell phone text messaging – Our emergency communications planners continue to advocate use of this new technology for use in hurricanes, tsunamis, floods and other major disasters. Maybe they know from extensive research that the cell phone network has been sufficiently “hardened” to survive category 4 and 5 hurricanes. Maybe the difficulty in keeping the network operating in an extended power outage has been overcome. Maybe they’re convinced a population with the oldest demographics in the nation is well suited for text messaging. Maybe they believe text messaging is an excellent way to keep the hearing impaired community informed during emergencies. Maybe their analysis of these and other issues related to text messaging is in the final report. We really don’t know what to think about text messaging because we haven’t seen the report. We do know this, however: The recommendation to promote text messaging is from a committee whose membership, as we noted in January, includes representatives from Cingular Wireless, Hawaiian Telcom, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. We aren't surprised TM is on the list.

Next: A Public Hearing on the Plan?

The list continues with suggestions that appear well founded, such as establishing a media/joint information center at Diamond Head crater and installing dedicated phone lines to broadcast stations. Readers can judge the recommendations for themselves, and after you do, CHORE hopes you’ll call the Governor’s office and ask when this plan will be briefed to the public in an open meeting.

It should have happened long ago while the draft was still being assessed. Now that the report itself has been “hardened” in a final version, the committee should have no reticence in discussing it with the audience that emergency communication is supposed to serve.

CCRC Report Goes to Governor and News Media, But for the Rest of Us, We’ll Just Have to Wait

The Comprehensive Communications Review Committee has submitted its report and held its news conference, which you can view and read about it at the Governor’s website.

But you can’t read the report there. Unlike the CCRC’s draft report that was posted online in January, the final report isn’t available to the public as of late Saturday the 13th. A report that purportedly details how the public will be better served in future emergencies is not yet available to the public. You could laugh if it weren't so serious.

Of course, this isn’t unusual, since the public has never been party to the committee’s doings. As CHORE noted in a recent post, the committee was a group of insiders who among themselves and without public scrutiny have concluded what’s best for us.

Here’s the official word on the committee’s doings, as presented at Saturday’s press conference by co-chair Lenny Klompus, the Governor’s senior communications advisor and PR man:

“The Committee is very proud of the report that was put together and that you have right now. The public should feel great confidence in the communications delivered to them accurately and in a timely manner in an emergency based on what the committee was able to do over this last year.”

Just what did the committee do that should make us confident? We don’t know. We’re simply told we should be confident that the same people and agencies who failed so obviously on October 15, 2006 to provide timely emergency communications will do the job properly in the future.

That’s asking a lot. Unanswered at this moment are the questions CHORE posed two days ago about what we hope is in the CCRC’s final report.

Since citizens were not allowed into the committee’s workings and deliberations, it’s completely within our right to demand that this document be made available on the Internet immediately.

We should be confident the Governor will do the right thing...........right?

On the Anniversary of Quake & Blackout Sunday, Do You Feel More Secure or Less Secure?

That’s a political question from another era, but it’s worth asking about emergency readiness as we approach the anniversary of the multiple crisis response failures on October 15, 2006 following a Big Island earthquake.

The Governor-appointed Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (CCRC) is expected to issue its final report this weekend on how to improve future responses. It’s worth recalling some of the lowlights of 10/15/06 and the following months so we can compare the report’s recommendations to what we experienced and later learned about emergency response deficiencies, especially on Oahu.

Living Murphy’s Law

The list of communications-related issues, problems and attitudes that prompted CHORE’s launch and subsequent commentaries begins with the inability to inform citizens of the emergency in a timely manner. (We’ve hyperlinked to CHORE’s earlier posts on these subjects.)

• Power Failure, Communications Failure – As we first noted in a Honolulu Advertiser commentary two days after the blackout and then here at CHORE in our first post, institutions we’ve come to trust and rely on did not respond well to the island-wide power outage. Nearly all radio stations went off the air around 7:15 a.m. and stayed off for hours; some didn’t begin broadcasting until the next day. All but one TV station also went dark on Earthquake Sunday.

The few radio stations with backup generator power apparently hadn’t anticipated how they might immediately switch to alternative programming, such as a pre-recorded tape noting an emergency condition. KSSK, the designated emergency broadcaster, continued its pre-recorded public affairs program for about 45 minutes even as every home on Oahu was without electricity. That evening, with half of Oahu still blacked out, the station returned to its regular programming by airing the John Tesh Radio Show – a remarkable decision in the midst of an ongoing emergency affecting hundreds of thousands of residents. Despite these obvious shortcomings, the State’s Adjutant General later testified before the State Legislature that the station’s performance was "incredible" and “fabulous” – leaving the impression that he could see no room for improvement, which was absurd.

We await the CCRC’s report for evidence that Hawaii’s broadcasters have improved their ability to remain on the air in an emergency. The report should reveal which stations have upgraded their backup power capabilities and what the others are doing to improve their ability to meet their responsibilities to the public. We might also hope for indications that an “emergency mindset” has been adopted to guide the stations’ programming during future emergencies; e.g., are pre-recorded emergency status messages ready to air that would satisfy the public’s craving for information in an emergency? A recorded emergency-related message is preferable to business as usual.

• Expecting Professionalism from First Responders – State Civil Defense dropped the ball on October 15th insofar as fulfilling one of its primary responsibilities – timely communications with the public. CHORE made that point in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin commentary in February and hasn’t backed away from that assertion. The aforementioned Adjutant General chose to attack CHORE in his response to our commentary as he defended his agency’s performance: “This was an information delay, not a failure….”

As we noted in our March 1st response to General Lee: “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.” General Lee's views on his agency's failure to carry out a basic responsibility was equally absurd. If a messenger -- State Civil Defense -- fails to foresee predictable problems in delivering a message, the failure rests with the messenger, not with others.

Will the CCRC’s report detail State Civil Defense’s adjustments to its SOP for communicating with the public? In light of the agency’s refusal to admit any shortcomings, that may be too much to expect, but it’s something we the people should be told. Using a phrase the Adjutant General can appreciate, this is need-to-know information. Failure to detail internal communications capabilities and enhancements will render the CCRC report less than satisfactory.

• Those Missing Emergency Sirens – As the Honolulu Star-Bulletin first reported, there are scores of communities throughout Hawaii with inadequate emergency siren coverage. CHORE observed on the same day that it was exceptionally bad judgment for the civil defense agencies to refuse to disclose which communities were not served by the sirens; it took weeks before those communities were identified.

Look to see if the CCRC report tells us anything about plans to fill those gaps.

• The CCRC and the public – A major flaw in this committee’s charter has been the absence of any citizen involvement. To be sure, members of the committee are all citizens of Hawaii, but as we noted here as early as October 18, 2006, no “average” members of the public were appointed to sit on this committee. And since the CCRC’s meetings were not open to the public, we’re put in a position to trust the government once again about what it’s doing to improve emergency communications. The co-chairs, by the way, are two advisors to the Governor and the Adjutant General; CHORE’s suggestion that an independent chair be appointed to enhance the body’s credibility predictably went nowhere.

It strikes us as truly amazing that a body meant to improve communications to the public has never asked members of the public to participate. Equally bewildering has been the news media’s hands-off attitude about this committee, which after all is supposed to be improving how we citizens are informed about life-threatening emergency conditions. Some meetings produced no media coverage whatsoever. To their credit, some journalists who were invited to sit on the committee withdrew when they realized they’d be in a conflict of interest – in essence, making news instead of covering it.


If the CCRC keeps to its announced schedule, its report will be open to public examination on Saturday, October 13th and presumably will receive newspaper coverage the next day. Whether the committee will finally provide the public an opportunity to comment on those proposals in an open hearing remains – as the editorials so often say – to be seen.

Details Thin on What CCRC Thinks We Need

If you want to know what really transpired at yesterday’s meeting of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (CCRC) – the details of who said what – waiting until mid-October will be a must. You won’t find details in today’s Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin stories.

Stories prepared for the Sunday, October 14th papers will have information on the final report of the CCRC, timed to be released nearly one year after Earthquake Sunday in October 2006.

As for today’s news, this is typical of the reporting:

Meanwhile, media outlets big and small talked about how they plan to get the messages out to the public, many adding or upgrading generators and installing simple land-line phones or satellite phones as an alternative to cell phones.

The sentence is taken from yet another story that gives the appearance of telling us what happened without actually do so. Exactly how do media outlets big and small intend to get the messages out to the public? Which outlets have upgraded their backup capability and which haven’t? (And are reporters writing these details, only to have them excised by an editor somewhere up the chain?)

Note to Editors:

The public needs these details in order to know whether we can trust the emergency responders to do the right thing. They weren’t prepared to keep us informed in October, and we have every reason to be skeptical about their preparations to date.

Finally, we need to ask whether the final report will provide details that will help citizens appreciate which media outlets have done their homework and which haven’t. CHORE doubts the report will include anything potentially embarrassing to anyone. The CCRC at its core is a club of insiders – government insiders, media insiders, communications industry insiders, civil defense insiders. A club of insiders isn’t likely to be tough on one another.

And because only members of the public might have risen to the level of asking tough questions, CHORE and like-thinking citizens are still on the outside and likely to stay there.

Power Outage Sets Stage for Wrap-up Meeting Of State’s Emergency Communications Body

The Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (CCRC) will hold its first meeting in months today, and to put at least some of us in the mood, the power went out last night in Kaimuki and Waialae-Kahala. It wasn’t a big outage – just a few seconds for many of us and less than an hour for the rest, but you had to laugh at the timing.

The CCRC was formed a couple days after the October 15th earthquakes that triggered a massive power outage on Oahu that lasted for up to 24 hours for some residents and half as long for tens of thousands of others.

CHORE lobbied from the start to open the CCRC to public input and attendance. That never happened, and it’s not happening today for reasons best understood by its leadership.

Coming to a Conclusion

Co-Chair Lenny Klompus called CHORE last week in response to our request to receive an invitation and an expanded agenda, which as we noted last month is without detail in its public version. We had every reason to expect our request would be honored, as CCRC Co-Chair Maj. Gen. Robert Lee urged us to request an invitation when he sat on the Honolulu Advertiser's "Hotseat" earlier this month.

Klompus denied the request and almost made the denial sound reasonable. This is merely a wrap-up meeting, he said. “We want to ask the members what have you done within your organization to be better prepared. What are you doing in the short term, and what have you done since October 15th?

“The process now is to come to a conclusion, to get final results of what people have done in the last year. Once this is concluded, we can say who did what. The next step will be to build the foundation for the next meeting.”

The 64-Megawatt Questions

Indeed, what has been done, and who’s done it? How many radio and television stations have added backup generation so they can remain on the air in a power blackout? Which ones are they? Which stations have not done so, and why?

How have stations adjusted their standard operating procedures for emergencies? Have they adopted the seemingly obvious fixes suggested here at CHORE and elsewhere, or are they still caught up in the self-congratulatory mode that was so evident in October?

Has text messaging become the fix du jour, as seemed to be the case when the CCRC issued its preliminary report in January? In a state with one of the oldest demographics in the nation, do our leaders truly expect text messaging to be useful to the majority of citizens? Or is text messaging just another communications medium destined to fail in a category 4 or 5 hurricane?

And what about State Civil Defense? What specifically has this agency done to alter its SOP for communicating in an emergency? The need certainly was obvious on October 15th, and Klompus mentioned a few improvements in our phone call.

It’s All About Serving the Public

Because the public needs to know all of these things, CHORE has to believe the CCRC at long last will recognize its obligation to the public and provide a detailed report on what transpires in today’s meeting.

We doubt, however, that it will be as comprehensive as the committee’s name would imply. We’ll shelve our skepticism if the CCRC actually tells us which broadcasting stations have not upgraded their capability.

Klompus alluded to future CCRC meetings. Will they open to the public at last, perhaps in the State Capitol Auditorium, where Hawaiian Electric Company held its public briefing on October 23rd?

Klompus hedged his answer, but CHORE took that as a “yes.”

Maj. Gen. Lee on the Advertiser's "Hotseat" Tells Citizens to Request Invitation to CCRC Meeting

Afternoon Update: A quick read of Honolulu Advertiser's Hotseat blog chat today involving Maj. Gen. Robert Lee, state adjutant general, reveals the virtual absence of anything to do with natural disasters and State Civil Defense's readiness in that regard. Maybe it's just not something the public focuses on unless there's a hurricane or tsunami bearing down on the islands.

Here's the question CHORE posted and General Lee's response

As co-chair of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee, which was created to assess the communications breakdown after the October 15th earthquakes and to recommend improvements, will you today reveal details of the agenda for the Committee's September 27th meeting? It currently reads only:

"Group discussion on status of final committee recommendations and
implementation status of those recommendations (by each organization)."

Details would help the public understand the scope of your upcoming meeting. One item worth covering: How many broadcast stations have added backup generators since October that will allow them to remain on the air during a power blackout? Which are they, and which stations have not added a backup capability? Also, is the public invited to the 9/27 meeting, and what is its location?

Thank you.

General Lee's response:

We are still working on the agenda for the Sep 27 meeting. Please contact the Governor's office to request an invite to the meeting.

And so we will, and maybe you will, too. If enough requests flow into the Governor's office, maybe they'll have to move the meeting to the Capitol Auditorium or another room large enough to accommodate a crowd and the media.

The issue is public safety, and this is the insider committee that's deciding how we'll all be served with emergency communications during our next emergency. We all have a stake in this.
-----
Morning Post:
If you're reading this before noon today (9/11), you mayR want to join the fun during the noon hour as State Adjutant General Robert Lee takes his place in the Honolulu Advertiser's Hotseat for an online chat. You can post your questions here.

CHORE already has posted a question concerning the agenda for the September 27th meeting of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee. The current agenda has no details, as we reported last month. We also asked whether the public will have access to the meeting, something that's been missing in all previous meetings of this Governor-appointed body.

As we reflect on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it's worth also reflecting on the fact that the greatest threat to the security of Hawaii citizens comes from nature -- hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, lava flows and tsunamis. Let's hope today's Hotseat chat dwells on preparations to cope with those better than what we experienced on Earthquake Sunday 11 months ago.