Causing Panic?

In today's paper there was an article about a revised report on the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Among the criticisms leveled against the university was not issuing timely warnings about the incident. The report did acknowledge, though, that university officials hesitated in issuing a warning because of a desire not to create a panic.

This is a fairly common thread that runs through after action reports. Officials hesitate to provide a warning because they fear creating a panic. Yet starting with the work of Dr. E.L. Quarantelli in 1954, research has continually demonstrated that panic occurs only under very specific circumstances and people do not generally tend to panic when warned of a crisis. So why do we keep doing this?

The answer is simple: fear. We are afraid of making a decision until we have all the facts because we are worried that we will make a mistake. In some cases, those mistakes can cost lives or result in significant costs, so this is not just a case of nervous jitters. In other cases, it could result in public embarrassment. It doesn't help that we were raised on stories like Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf that pre-dispose us to hesitate and second guess ourselves before giving warning.

This fear goes beyond just warning. I've noticed a tendency among new emergency managers to hesitate to activate plans during a potential crisis for the same reasons. I know - I did the same thing when I started out in this profession.

However, the problem with a fast moving crisis is that you never have all the information you need. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut. There are two things I tried to keep in mind when making decisions about issuing warnings or activating plans. The first is to remind myself that the risk of my personal embarrassment is vastly outweighed by my duty to protect those in my charge. Personally, I'd rather be pilloried for being overly-cautious than for failing to warn people who were later harmed by the crisis. The second is that the best test of plans is an actual activation in a real crisis. Activating your crisis team in the early stages of an incident is better than trying to do it in the middle of a full crisis and you can always conduct a brief "what if exercise" and debriefing if the incident is resolved without intervention.

So if you find yourself hesitating whether or not to issue a warning, remember that it's not really about creating a panic, it's about your personal fear of failure. Once you understand this, you'll make the right choice.

Comments

[Coffeecolouredworld.wordpress.com]

To be case specific, would running drills on campus have helped this? Not just drills with the staff but say the first week of classes if Virginia Tech (or any college) ran a test of their emergency systems so students knew exactly what these alerts were. Would doing someting like that help break past the panic of pulling the switch?

[Lucien Canton]

You raise a good point. In a crisis, people tend to default to what they're used to doing. Frequent drills build familiarity and would definitely help reduce concerns over panic.