Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - November 2024

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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

 

Disinformation and Disasters: A Deadly Combination

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:

• FEMA had run out of money because the Disaster Relief Fund had been diverted to provide housing for illegal immigrants. The truth is that funding to support immigration was a separate allocation provided by Congress for that purpose and the Disaster Relief Fund was adequate to deal with the disaster.
• FEMA was only providing $7000 to each victim so the agency and no more assistance would be forthcoming. In fact, the $7000 was an initial payment for immediate needs and additional funding would be allocated based on need.
• The Biden administration had not reached out to governors of the affected states to offer federal assistance. This was debunked by the Republican governors and mayors of the affected jurisdictions.

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.