Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management: Measuring ROI

How do you measure the effectiveness of an emergency management program? More specifically, how do you show that the money you invest in preparedness has been well-spent? Traditionally, we have used quantitative measures because "things" are easy to measure. So we count "things" like the number of plans written, the number of exercises held, the number of brochures distributed and the number of hits on a website. But none of this really tells us if we're making a difference. Is there a better way? The International Association of Emergency Managers thinks there is.

IAEM has recently released Preparedness: A Principled Approach to Return on Investment for comment. The work is an attempt to apply the Principles of Emergency Management to performance measures for the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) and allow us to base our assessments on relevance rather than just numbers. My colleague and good friend, Randy Duncan, Chair of the IAEM-USA Government Committee, recently gave an excellent presenation on the new framework on EM Forum. You can find a transcript of it on the EM Forum website along with links to the slides, video and podcast of the presentation.

Listen to Randy's session, read the document and send your commentsinto IAEM by September 15. This is a major step forward for our profession and the more input we receive, the better the end result. It's an opportunity to develop measurements that are meaningful to us rather than letting them be dictated to us by legislators.

And by the way, if you're not already on the mailing list for EM Forum, you should be. The programs are highly relevant and presented by some of the top people in our profession. Best of all, it's free! Sign up today and don't forget to check out the library of previous programs.

Social media and the 1st Amendment

There's an interesting debate going on here in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency has been dealing with a lot of fallout since an officer involved shooting a few weeks ago, including one major disruption by protesters that I blogged about on July 12. In anticipation of another major protest last week, BART temporarily turned off cell phone service in some of it's terminals. No demonstration took place. In contrast, BART left the service in place yesterday and ended up closing four terminals because of demonstrators.

BART is taking considerable heat from the public, the ACLU, and the FCC for potentially violating the First Amendment by restricting free speech. It has been suggested that the demonstration yesterday was larger and more disruptive because of BART's actions last Thursday. The demonstration yesterday was allegedly instigated by Anonymous, a hacker group that hacked a contracted customer service site over the weekend and posted personal BART customer information on the web in retaliation for BART's decision to shut down cell service.

BART owns the cellular service in its terminals and believes that public safety concerns should outweigh a brief inconvenience to its riders. The agency maintains that the ability to shut down service in stations targeted for demonstrations is a valuable tool that can help diffuse risks to passengers. 

This will be an interesting debate that will have a major impact on how we view social media. BART is a special government agency created by the State of California and we are right to be leery of any government restrictions on communications or the right to assembly. But does the use of cell phones and social media to organize protests rise to the level of a right? Is the right to free speech tied to the medium or the message? Is the use of social media by violent anarchists the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater?

These are not easy questions. On the one hand, BART's reasons for the restriction seem to be in the public's best interest. However, case law permits demonstrations on railway platforms, so BART's action affects the organization of a protest - it cannot prevent the protest. We're already seeing attempts to curtail social media as an organizing tool in other countries both during the "Arab Spring" and more recently in England. In this context, I think that a debate on how far we go in restricting communications in the interest of public safety is both healthy and essential. 

Emergency Management Solutions August 2011 - Social Media: Harnessing a Runaway Horse

Emergency Management Solutions August 2011

Social media policy: Harnessing a runaway horse

Download Social Media Policy

Social media and recovery: the London riots

My friend Regina Phelps just posted a fascinating article on how Twitter and Facebook are being used to organize the post-riot cleanup in London. At this writing the page @Riotcleanup has over 87,000 followers exchanging information about the cleanup and trying to match resources to needs.  A Facebook page exchanging information on the riot has over 19,000 likes.

There's also a webpage that assists in organizing the cleanup via Twitter - the website shows a map of cleanup locations and corresponding Twitter feeds or allows viewers to add their own cleanup location.

What is extremely impressive is that this is all organized by the community, not the official emergency services. Even more interesting is that these are not the only social media sites for this subject - this is not a case of one or two people leading and others following. Rather, it is a community responding collectively to a crisis. We're seeing similar things happening in Christchurch and in Japan.

Despite years of research to the contrary one of the most persistent myths in emergency planning is that people must be led and are incapable of acting in their own best interests. Social media is finally providing the community with the means to finally put this myth to rest.

Water shortages and the "yuck" factor revisited

Last month my white paper, Public Relations and the "Yuck" Factor, talked about how one community responded to a person urinating in a reservoir. The jurisdiction drained the reservoir at a cost of over $30k.  I questioned whether this was an over-reaction or a clever ploy to gain support for the water department's budget.

Today I received a link to an article about a town in Texas that is planning to recycle its wastewater. The town is considering using a system similar to that used by NASA in the space program to provide drinking water for astronauts. The article also notes that Los Angeles is considering a $700 million project to use recycled wastewater to recharge underground wells.

Despite a bit of sensationalism in the article, this really isn't something new. Recycled wastewater has been used all over the world in arid regions out of necessity. Both the Texas town of Big Spring and Los Angeles are pursuing wastewater recycling for the same reason: water is becoming scarce because of drought and increasing populations. Wastewater recycling may well be the way of the future for a lot of major cities.

Sort of puts the reaction to 6-8 ounces of urine in 8 million gallons of water in perspective doesn't it?