As I mentioned in a recent blog, six seismologists and a government official are on trail for manslaughter in Italy for failing to provide warning about an earthquake that killed several hundred people in the village of L'Aquila. An article in today's New York Times offers an interesting commentary on how crisis communications can go wrong. […]
There's an interesting court case going on in Italy. Seven seismologists are charged with manslaughter for failing to provide adequate warning about an earthquake that killed 308 people in 2009. At issue here is not the inability to predict the earthquake but rather a failure to warn the residents that minor tremors leading up to […]
Thanks to the good folks over at the Consumerist for providing an excellent example of how not to respond to a crisis. During the recent flooding in Johnson City, NY, the folks at PETCO were taken unawares by the rising flood waters and lost 100 animals. The staff did manage to save an equal number, […]
Regular readers of my blog know that I'm sometimes a bit hard on our friends at TSA or at least the managers responsible for some really dumb decisions. However, one of the things that you can do to overcome a negative image is to educate the public on what you do well. In today's TSA […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]