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Disinformation and Disasters: A Deadly Combination
by Lucien Canton
ICS: Problems and Perceptions
by Timothy Riecker
Crisis Management Team: Assemble!
by Erik Bernstein
Download Emergency Management Solutions
Disinformation and Disasters: A Deadly Combination
by Lucien Canton
ICS: Problems and Perceptions
by Timothy Riecker
Crisis Management Team: Assemble!
by Erik Bernstein
Posted by Lucien Canton on 11/27/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A FEMA supervisor was fired recently for instructing disaster relief workers responding to Hurricane Milton to avoid canvassing homes displaying Trump signs. The FEMA administrator called the supervisor’s actions “reprehensible” and “a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles.” While there is no disagreement that emergency managers have a mandate to deliver relief services equally to all victims, regardless of political affiliation, one must wonder if there is more to the story.
The supervisor argues that her teams had been verbally and physically threatened by victims displaying Trump signs, indicating a community trend that created a hostile environment and danger to her workers. She maintains that her actions were taken in accordance with FEMA protocols that stressed avoidance of high-risk environments and that she is being scapegoated to save the agency’s reputation. More importantly, she claims that the problem is widespread and not limited to her area of operations or her team.
Without knowing more detail than has been given in the media, it is difficult to determine the truth of the matter. However, I believe that there is a larger issue here. The root cause was not the hostile response by some disaster victims but rather the actions that created that hostility.
With a close Presidential election less than month away, the Republican campaign had a vested interest in seeing disaster relief operations in Hurricanes Helene and Milton fail or at least appear to fail. Communications guru Art Botterell’s Fourth Law of Emergency Management states, “Perception is reality” and Republicans took full advantage of social media to create the perception that the response was a failure. This included misinformation such as:
The result of this misinformation was predictable. Many victims refused assistance, and first responders and disaster workers were demoralized and threatened. Even meteorologists received death threats. As the rumors spread and were repeated by the Republican campaign, they in turn spawned outlandish conspiracy theories among its supporters such as that the weather was being manipulated to target Republican areas or that FEMA was blocking donations and confiscating and hoarding goods. Elected officials and government workers had to use valuable resources and time to dispel rumors and misinformation, but the sad fact is that truth travels slower than lies. A 2018 MIT study found that a false news story was 70% more likely to be reposted on social media than a true one. Despite a good effort at rumor control by FEMA and the active support of Republican governors and mayors, the efforts of the Republican campaign and its supporters were able to successfully cast doubt on the effectiveness of disaster relief operations.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that politicians have never used disasters to further political agendas. A study of Presidential declarations of disaster for the years 1989-1999 showed that the number of electoral votes in a state and whether it was considered competitive had a great deal of bearing on whether a declaration was granted. According to the findings, a non-competitive state with three electoral votes was 50% less likely to receive a declaration than a competitive state with 20 electoral votes. Even my personal hero, the Marquis de Pombal, used the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to break the power of the Catholic Church in Portugal and to eliminate his adversaries.
What we see here, however, is a blatant disregard for the well-being of disaster victims to further political ambition. Even more egregious is that many of these victims were and still are supporters of the Republican party. This disregard goes against everything to which we in emergency management have dedicated ourselves. More importantly, it destroys trust in a system that relies on the support of the public. As Edward Conley, a veteran of thirty years with FEMA and author of Promote the Dog Sitter: And Other Principles for Leading during Disasters writes, “The more people trust, believe in, and work with our nation’s emergency management system, the better the system works.”
Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, and we are likely to see similar disinformation operations in future disasters. This means we now, more than ever, must understand and apply the principles of crisis management information. The age when public information officers put out periodic press releases and gave occasional interviews has been gone for some time, overtaken by the 24-hour news cycle. The old conventional wisdom of ignoring ridiculous rumors to avoid giving them creditability is no longer valid in the day of social media. We need the ability to be proactive with our information and nimble enough to react quickly to disinformation. It’s time to rethink the Joint Information Center and our use of social media and to bring them into the 21st century. I’m afraid that disinformation is the way of the future and poses a major threat to those we serve, and we need to be able to counter it. We won’t win, but we need to do better.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 11/27/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Is It Time to Rethink Disaster Legislation?
by Lucien Canton
NIMS Intel and Investigations Function – A Dose of Reality
by Timothy Riecker
Crisis Planning: A Foundation For Crisis Management Success
by Erik Bernstein
Posted by Lucien Canton on 10/31/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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In a recent opinion piece for The Hill titled Why America needs disaster reform Now former FEMA Administrator Brock Long makes the case that our emergency management system in the United States has become bogged down in bureaucracy and that there is an urgent need for reform. Brock notes that we have close to 90 recovery programs administered by thirty federal agencies, requiring the submission of multiple applications for assistance. The consequence is a confusing bureaucratic maze that creates confusion and duplication and causes delays in the provision of relief funding.
This is not surprising when one considers the haphazard way in which the system developed. Significant change to disaster relief has always been reactive, the result of legislative action in response to focusing events, disasters with high national impact. This reactive approach means that there has never really been a unified emergency management policy or supporting strategy. Indeed, it wasn’t until passage of the Stafford act in 1974 that preparedness and disaster relief were combined in a single piece of legislation and responsibility for disaster relief wasn’t placed under a single agency until the creation of FEMA in 1979.
The creation of FEMA created numerous problems that are in many ways reflective of what we’re dealing with today. Programs, budget, and staff were transferred to FEMA to form the new agency. However, those budgets were paid through separate funding streams and required reporting to multiple congressional oversight committees. The FEMA Director lacked authority to adjust staffing or budgets, and it was years before this issue was resolved.
The reactive approach of creating new programs in response to focusing events continues. In an article titled A Call for Unified Reform in U.S. Disaster Management Legislation: Answering Brock Long’s Vision in the Emergency Management Network, my colleague Todd Devoe identifies ten separate pieces of legislation currently before Congress:
As Brock points out, the problem goes further than just a complicated bureaucracy. Over the past 20 years, almost 75% of FEMA’s funding has been provided through supplemental allocations to the Disaster Relief Fund, not the annual budget. The result has been that FEMA is limited planning for immediate response and for sustained programs. The need for a reliable and predictable funding stream is critical if FEMA is to be able to prepare and immediately respond to the unexpected.
Perhaps the most urgent need is a strategic one. Brock notes the increasing reliance of local governments on disaster relief funding for the repair of uninsured public infrastructure. The reluctance of local governments to support mitigation efforts and to leverage insurance suggests the need to rethink how such assistance is provided. Brock suggests adjusting cost share rates to reward those governments who support mitigation efforts to increase resilience. He also suggests making use of alternative government funding sources by providing technical assistance to affected jurisdictions to help access programs such as those available under the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
These are big ticket items that deal with national policy and strategy. What can a local emergency manager do? Devoe suggests five things you can do and, not surprisingly, they’re already in your job description:
I’ve written before of how you can get involved in the political process by leveraging your jurisdiction’s procedure for taking official positions on current or proposed legislation. This is particularly true if you’re from a large jurisdiction that maintains political lobbyists in your state or the national legislatures. If nothing else, consider joining the International Association of Emergency Managers. IAEM has a very effective lobbying team that has been responsible for some significant legislative accomplishments in our best interests.
Developing a comprehensive bill to address multiple programs under multiple agencies may sound like an impossible task and it well may be. There would be tremendous pushback and turf battles but to continue as we are will ultimately lead to failure. FEMA is stretched thin, managing more than 100 disaster recovery efforts, not counting support to other agencies. If ever there was a time to reform emergency management, this is it.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 10/31/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Effective Presentations: Insider Tips for Improving Your Skills
by Lucien Canton
Culture of Preparedness – a Lofty Goal
by Timothy Riecker
From WTF to WTAF: Navigating the New Normal
by Johnathan Bernstein
Posted by Lucien Canton on 10/01/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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We’ve all been there. You spend money to attend a conference, select a session from a long list of competing topics, and walk into the room only to walk out several minutes later because the speaker is so boring that even she is falling asleep. Sound familiar?
As both an attendee and a frequent speaker at conferences, I’m amazed at how universally bad some presentations can be. It doesn’t have to be that way. Preparing a good presentation can be easier than developing a bad one.
What’s Your Story?
A presentation is essentially a story. To make sense, it must have a beginning, middle and an end and the flow through these parts must be logical and smooth. You begin developing your story by identifying what you expect to accomplish with your presentation. To be effective, your presentation must do more than just provide an information dump – it must demonstrate the value of that information and challenge the listener to do something with it.
This is where most presentations fail. Many speakers fail to grasp that the point of a presentation is to provoke a change in the audience’s condition. This can be done by providing a deeper insight into the subject, encouraging a change of attitude or raising awareness. Just providing data without some sort of analysis and call to action makes for an extremely boring presentation.
So, what’s your story? You should be able to sum up what you want to accomplish in your presentation in a single sentence or two. I’m not talking about the things you plan to do in the presentation but rather the central theme that will bind your presentation together, the single idea that you want the audience to take away. Once you have that theme, the rest of your presentation will flow from it.
To develop the theme, begin with an outline of your key points. These key points should support your theme and be organized in a logical sequence, e.g. general to specific, chronological, increasing importance, etc. There should not be too many of them – I’ve seen presentations collapse under the weight of too much material.
Once you have the framework of key points, you can begin to really build the presentation. Under each of the key points, identify two to three items that will illustrate the point. These supporting items could be a personal story, a case study, or historical examples.
This is where you generate interest and hold the attention of the audience. People love to be told stories and to be entertained. You can really reach them if you take the time to select examples that are particularly relevant to the audience.
Recently, I was asked to give a standard preparedness presentation at the annual conference of the Textile Rental Services Association. My contact was kind enough to grant me access to their newsletter archives and to arrange a tour of a local facility and interview with the managers there. By incorporating examples of how laundry services had performed in several disasters, I was able to make what could have been a stock presentation extremely interesting and relevant to the audience.
Fitting the Pieces Together
With the theme, key points, and illustrations you’ve got most of your presentation done. However, the two most critical points of any presentation are the opening and the closing.
The opening is important because this is where you grab the attention of the audience. Fail to do so and you may never get it back. Don’t waste time with jokes that are irrelevant to the presentation. Instead, use a startling fact, an historical example or a story to lead them into the presentation.
I opened the TRSA presentation mentioned above by telling a story about the experiences of a laundry company in the 1993 Midwest Floods. The audience was hooked from that point on because the story was relevant to them and to the presentation that followed.
Our standard method of closing is to ask for questions, then let the audience drift out. This diffuses the impact of your presentation. The audience leaves thinking about the last question (or lack of questions!) rather than your central theme.
A more effective approach used by management consultant Alan Weiss is to pause for questions and let the audience know that you will have some final concluding remarks. You can then use your final remarks to emphasize your theme and issue your call to action.
The call to action is another thing that is frequently missing from presentations. You’ve just spent 45 minutes or more of my time providing me with information. What do you want me to do with it? The answer to this question should be uppermost in the mind of your audience as they leave the room.
Now that you’ve got the pieces identified, tie them together by rehearsing. I personally tend to rehearse different pieces over time, and then do a full run through at least once to make sure I’ve got my timing down.
One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received came from Alan Weiss. Don’t memorize your speech, internalize it. If you memorize your speech, it sounds canned, and an unforeseen event can throw you off track. If you internalize it, that is, understand what you want to say and how you want to say it, you have a great deal of flexibility. You can lengthen or shorten your speech to accommodate time issues, you can have additional stories and examples on hand if needed, and you can modify your presentation based on audience reaction. Note that this is not the same as “winging it”.
Death by PowerPoint
You’ll notice that so far, I haven’t said a word about PowerPoint. That’s because preparing a PowerPoint presentation is irrelevant to building your presentation. If you have outlined your presentation with key points and supporting examples and if you have internalized your presentation, you really don’t need PowerPoint. You should be able to give your presentation without using a single slide.
The single biggest problem that I have found in presentations is a misuse of PowerPoint. Unfortunately, it has evolved into a crutch for speakers, an electronic substitute for notes.
So, what do speakers usually do wrong? One word: TEXT. We feel the need to use the outline function and put lots of words on the screen. There are two things wrong with this:
So how do you use PowerPoint? Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, suggests the use of pictures and quotes or meaningful graphs. This both conveys information more clearly and keeps the focus on you, the speaker.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. The following slide was intended to describe how local emergency managers evolved.
This rather boring slide can be replaced with a single quote, with the detail contained not on the slide but in the speaker’s notes.
Notice that the second slide sums up the importance of the emergency manager’s role rather than just serving as a set of notes to keep you on track. Which works better for your audience?
Let’s look at another example. Consider the following table of information which is intended to show enormous scope of the Great Flood of 1927. It’s interesting but it doesn’t provoke a reaction.
Now look at the following graphic developed from the same information.
Notice how the scope of the 1927 flood is immediately apparent to the audience? The slide makes this point without you having to say a single word.
Ideally, your slide presentation should be meaningless to anyone that gets a copy after your presentation. After all, if they could get the key points of your presentation from your slide show, why bother going to your presentation?
This brings us to the point of handouts. All too often, we create incredibly complex slides that are unreadable, and then apologize to the audience. Edward Tufte, an expert on information design, says that PowerPoint is the worst way to provide complex information and suggests the use of handouts instead.
Unfortunately, we usually limit our handouts to copies of the slide presentation. If, as I mentioned above, your PowerPoint is meaningless, this is a very poor take away except for those few who used it for note taking.
Instead, consider something that provides useful information. My personal preference is a one- or two-page handout that includes an outline of my presentation, a list of references that I used in developing the presentation, and my contact information. This handout provides the audience with a summary of my key points and resources for obtaining more information without burdening them with 10 pages of tiny, unreadable slides.
Why Not Go First Class?
Preparing a presentation in the manner I’ve suggested does require a change in how we currently do presentations. You won’t have the comfort of the outline showing on the screen and you may have to memorize data or refer to your notes. But on the other hand, identifying your theme and key points makes it easier to put a presentation together. Internalizing your presentation allows you to stay better focused and you can still use the photos and quotes as cues for what you want to discuss.
So, stop boring your audience and yourself. It really doesn’t take all that much more effort to do a first-class presentation.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 09/30/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The Emergency Manager as Mediator
by Lucien Canton
ICS Training Sucks – Progress Inhibited by Bias
by Timothy Riecker
Crisis Management For When the Media Goes Too Far
by Johnathan Bernstein
Posted by Lucien Canton on 08/31/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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One of the main functions of an emergency manager is to help stakeholders with competing agendas agree to a common goal and the best approach to achieving that goal. The problem is that often those competing agendas and organizational biases can lead to conflict. Consequently, emergency managers may find themselves serving as mediators for the opposing groups.
Here are just a few examples of the types of conflicts that can create the need for mediation between opposing demands:
Mediation is not just a case of just holding a meeting and working through issues. This is the normal approach, and we are very effective at it. Mediation comes into play when there is a deadlock that requires intervention to help the parties in conflict reach an agreeable compromise. It is frequently exacerbated by a mutual distrust among the parties involved. Success in mediation really depends on doing your homework beforehand and being adequately prepared. Here are some suggestions you might want to consider:
Mediation is not often necessary, but when it is, it is the result of a major conflict between two or more participants. In this case, it’s best approached outside a larger planning group and by focusing on the specific issues causing the conflict. Focus on the problem, resolve it, and move on.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 08/31/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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How Do You Plan for Everything
by Lucien Canton
Preparing for Community Lifelines Implementation
by Timothy Riecker
30 Lessons from 30 Years of Crisis Management
by Johnathan Bernstein
Posted by Lucien Canton on 07/30/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Anyone who has spent time in emergency management understands that the public’s attention to risk is often either non-existent or fleeting. It takes disaster on a large scale to gain attention and that attention is usually accompanied by demands for swift corrective action in the immediate aftermath which is in turn followed by apathy as the disaster fades into history. This is particularly true of disasters that have a low frequency of occurrence but a high potential impact.
Consider, for example, the Y2K crisis of distance memory. Also referred to as the millennium bug, the problem was caused by computer coding that failed to account for changing the first two digits in a date from 19 to 20 at the turn of the century. The problem was known well in advance and there were numerous missed opportunities to correct it. However, it wasn’t until a year or so before the event that the problem became a widespread crisis, with predictions of catastrophic failures of computer systems leading to the apocalypse. A lot of effort went into last minute planning by emergency managers to help allay public concern. However, within a matter of months all the lessons learned about system interdependencies, critical points of failure, and the need for parallel systems were forgotten.
This tendency of the public to create what is sometimes called the disaster “flavor of the month” poses considerable problems for emergency managers. On the one hand, the nature of the disaster is usually real, albeit often exaggerated to epic proportions and there is a responsibility to respond to a concerned public. On the other hand, with limited resources and competing priorities, emergency managers cannot afford to focus all their resources on a single threat. But how then do you balance these two challenges?
To answer that question, consider the latest flavor of the month, the recent CrowdStrike debacle. The cybersecurity upgrade that created what is most likely the biggest IT failure in history has raised the issue of cybersecurity with the public to extremely high levels and it’s likely that we will see a demand for action on the part of emergency planners. The question is, “How much of this problem do emergency managers own?”
To begin, we need to consider that various issues raised by the crisis, much of which are still being learned. There is the immediate response which is requiring a significant effort on the part of IT departments to manually remove a corrupted file from thousands of individual computers. This clearly in the purview of the IT department. But many organizations also responded by switching to manual systems. Others had never invested in the training and materials needed to do so. One can argue that identifying the need for such systems and encouraging their development is clearly something with which emergency managers could assist, even if the actual development and testing of such systems are the responsibility of the affected organization.
This is the first lesson in “planning for everything”: Recognize who owns the problem. Emergency managers don’t have to do it all but can provide guidance and resources. We can point out problems and suggest solutions. We can assist in the formation of workgroups or taskforces. We can also hold people accountable through workplans and operating agreements.
The CrowdStrike failure highlighted the interdependence of critical infrastructure. This is exacerbated by the fact that something like 85% of the critical infrastructure in the United States is privately owned, making the transfer of information difficult. This means we may not always recognize this interdependence until a crisis occurs. This points to another lesson for planning: think strategically. It is easy to view threats from a purely local level but recognizing interdependencies can allow you to prepare for crisis and provide early warning before a problem arises. Remember that disasters have ripple effects and that events in occurring in locations far removed from your organization can have profound impacts. Consider, for example, the far reaching effects on local economies caused by the terrorist attacks on September 11th.
More importantly, however, is the recognition that emergency managers do not deal in specific hazards but rather in the consequences of those hazards in relation to an organization's vulnerabilities. For example, had the CrowdStrike failure affected a municipal water supply’s SCADA system, the result would clearly be an emergency management issue. But a cybersecurity attack, a terrorist attack, or an earthquake could produce the same issue. We plan for consequences, not hazards. This is your third lesson in planning for everything: focus on consequences. This is emergency management 101: all hazard planning means planning for response generated needs that remain relatively constant in all disasters. In other words, plan for consequences. Planning for agent generated needs that vary with the specific disaster is more strategic in nature and more like contingency planning.
We really can’t plan for everything, but we can plan for the things that are common to all disasters. To do that, we need to share the load by making use of the broader planning community and recognizing that emergency management is not a discrete process but a distributed one that should involve all members of an organization.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 07/30/2024 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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