In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

During 2010’s National Preparedness Month (NPM) this September, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) will be asking Americans to accept their responsibilities as part of the country’s emergency preparedness and response effort. It echoes a major theme of FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate’s tenure which marks its first anniversary today.

FEMA’s Ready Campaign held a NPM kickoff webinar yesterday with a record 779 participants. Ready’s Becky Marquis said that NPM’s messaging and activities will focus on getting Americans “to recognize their role as part of the nation’s emergency management team” and encourage them to get prepared and involved.

This is the 7th annual NPM, which is sponsored by the Ready Campaign in partnership with Citizen Corps and the Ad Council. The NPM was ”designed to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses, and communities.” This year’s slogan is: “Plan Now, Work Together, Get Ready”.

During the webinar, Citizen Corps Director Karen Marsh reviewed findings of its comprehensive public survey, “Personal Preparedness in America: Findings from the Citizen Corps National Survey,” which reported shortcomings in public readiness, but also found an interest among many Americans in becoming prepared and getting involved. Those results feed right into the theme of the Month: Administrator Fugate has said that the emergency management community has to do a better job of capitalizing on that public interest, but he has also been challenging the public to step up and accept their responsibilities for improving the preparedness of their family and their community.

For more information on National Preparedness Month 2010, check the Ready.Gov site here. A transcript of the webinar is here. A toolkit to help organize NPM events is here. To register as a NPM Coalition Member, click here (I just did.) You can also follow the @ReadydotGov Twitter feed. If you have questions about the Month, e-mail the Ready Campaign at: npm@dhs.gov.

Yesterday was YouTube’s 5th Anniversary, and I wanted to express my appreciation to the site for making it so easy for even a technology neophyte like myself to use.

Shooting with the equally user friendly Flip camera and then posting my (often shaky camera work) to YouTube, I have been able to utilize a lot of video both from others as well as homemade. The primary example of the latter has been the blog’s “What Should We Tell The Public?” series in which I ask someone in the field for what citizens should know about emergency preparedness. I have posted 43 of these short videos.

Spokes-Muppet Grover Urges Families To Prepare For Emergencies

One of the favorites in the series was with that noted preparedness expert, Grover the spokes-Muppet for Sesame Workshop’s preparedness program for young kids and their families, “Let’s Get Ready! Planning Together For Emergencies” done in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Ready.Gov campaign and the Ad Council.

I never thought I’d put a Miley Cyrus video on this preparedness blog. Not that I’m not a fan (originally turned on to her by my two young daughters).  I have several Miley songs on my iPod (my favorite: “G.N.O.”) and went with the family last year to one of her concerts in Newark, New Jersey. So, I am happy to post the new American Red Cross PSA with Miley requesting donations for the organization’s efforts on flood relief and other disasters. In the video, she asks viewers to either call 1-800-Red-Cross or go to redcross.org.

Miley Cyrus PSA for the American Red Cross

For anyone interested in the role of technology in public disaster preparedness and response (and everyone in the field should be!), I highly recommend a new paper, “A Vision for Technology-Mediated Support for Public Participation & Assistance in Mass Emergencies & Disasters”.

It is co-authored by the University of Colorado/Boulder’s Leysia Palen (head of the school’s Crisis Informatics program which has been a leader in this area), Kenneth M. Anderson, James Martin, Douglas Sicker, Martha Palmer and Dirk Grunwald, and the University of California/Irvine’s Gloria Mark. The research is being done as part of the new Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis established by faculty from both institutions.

The authors write that their aim is to: “present a vision of the future of emergency management that better supports inclusion of activities and information from members of the public during disasters and mass emergency events.” And the paper does a terrific job of doing so in a detailed but readable manner. It offers an excellent summary/analysis of information and technology (ICT) uses during previous emergencies and then lays out ideas and multidisciplinary research questions that should be studied and addressed in the future:

According to the paper, the objective of the “vision”:

…is that people find and share the information they need to make the best, most informed decisions possible during situations of emergency and high disruption—in other words, to support and enhance the analytical skills of members of the public. In our own work, we aim to do this through leveraging the knowledge of members of the public, and through reframing emergency response as a socially-distributed information system. This work will support people across a range of geographies (Powell, 1954), by which we broadly mean those who are inside the crisis zone as well as those on the outside who are compelled to help not only through supplying physical labor, goods and psychological support, but also by playing critical roles in information dissemination.

Through reuse of computer-mediated communications that are publicly available (such as those on community websites, personal blogs, public texting systems like Twitter, social networking sites, mapping sites, etc.), we aim to derive applications and services for use by the public that integrate those original communications with information that helps citizens assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.

Such a vision of research, then, is guided by this question: How can publicly-available, grassroots, peer-generated information be deemed to be trustworthy, secure and accurate, so that it can be leveraged and aligned with official information sources for optimal, local decision-making by members of the public?

The full paper can be found here.

During his tenure, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has been trying to somewhat reposition the agency’s role in the nation’s emergency preparedness for and response to disasters. And that effort was on display last week when he appeared in the White House media briefing room with press secretary Robert Gibbs to discuss FEMA’s activities during the floods in Tennessee and tornadoes in Oklahoma.

Fugate wants to get the message out that the agency cannot do everything, does not have limitless aid and is only part of the “team” (including other members of the “federal family”) that augments the work of the impacted community and its residents. As he told the press corps, “FEMA’s not the only game in town.”

At the same time, Fugate is also running an organization still rebuilding its own reputation with the public post-Hurricane Katrina so he can’t be seen to decentralize responsibility too much. So, he’s not saying that this team approach does not mean the agency’s response won’t be rapid, robust and responsive (as most reports say it has been during the flood and throughout Fugate’s administration). His point is that citizens and communities should look to all stakeholders (ie. private sector, non-profit groups, etc.) to take a leadership role in the effort, and further that citizens themselves have a responsibility to prepare in order to mitigate the damage of these disasters in the first place. There is a limit, Fugate says, what “a governmental centric” response can do.

It’s a subtle message — the cavalry will come, but it can’t completely save the day. The citizen and the community is ultimately responsible for preparation and recovery — and for the choices we make in advance (e.g. to buy flood insurance or not). Yet, managing those expectations needs to be done before the disaster not during it (and Fugate has been on the bully pulpit over the past year pushing his ideas). It’s particularly difficult to state candidly in the immediate days after a disaster, because the focus among the public, elected officials and the media is solely on providing as much help as possible as quickly as possible.

That delicate communications line Fugate has to walk was illustrated by the first question he received from the White House press corps:

Q.    When we were in Tennessee on Saturday, we talked to Secretary Napolitano, and she said that the extent of FEMA’s ability to help was limited. Given how many people there did not have flood insurance, how heavily impacted they are and how limited the FEMA aid is, where do you suggest these people go, beyond that? I mean, obviously $29,000 isn’t enough if you’ve lost your home and you don’t have flood insurance.

The reporter’s question is typical of how we as a nation generally react directly after a disaster. There is a ‘more is more’ expectation when it comes to federal assistance — that somehow FEMA can make everyone whole (as the reporter’s question implied). It is understandable, particularly with media coverage of the victims (or “survivors” as Fugate wants them to be called) circumstances. The challenge is not to sound unsympathetic or ineffective, but also to stick to his philosophy of individual and community responsibility and sufficiency. His answer:

ADMINISTRATOR FUGATE: That is correct. That’s, I think, part of the reason why — we look at disasters a lot differently than probably in the past, and we know that it takes a full federal team to support recovery. We have a lot of programs that Secretary Donovan brings to the table, with the HUD Community Block Development Grant; other types of programs that help. Plus another thing that we’ve not always done well on the federal side, and that is really collaborate with faith-based and volunteer organizations that can oftentimes provide labor and other assistance to people in trying to rebuild their homes, where we can use our dollars for materials.

And so, again, if you come in and you do what I call a federal-centric or government-centric response to these disasters, you’re going to have a lot of unmet needs, because we do have very defined programs and limits to those programs.

But if you look at a team approach and looking at what are the resources in a community; where are we going to be able to pull resources together to address particularly those folks that just are not going to have many other options — for a lot of folks, some of the more affluent neighborhoods, SBA disaster loans will help them get their homes repaired. But for those that don’t have the ability to do the loans and where our grants may not be able to return their home back to a useable condition, partnered with volunteers and other groups as part of a team effort gets us to those unmet needs.

And so this is our approach of not just looking at what one program can do, but how do we leverage the entire federal family to recognize there’s a lot of other resources in the community that we have tended not to bring to bear or work in a coordinated fashion. Often times, they were trying to do one thing — we’re over here, we’re not talking. And we don’t help the survivors.

I thought Fugate did pretty well in sticking to his doctrine without sounding insensitive. He got his message out that FEMA can’t do it all and citizens (and the media) should not expect that. Though he didn’t use the opportunity to say: ‘here’s why you should have flood insurance.’ It’s a subtle balance — you want to use disaster situations to educate the public and the press on what lessons can be learned from the incident, but you don’t want to add to the emotional distress of the survivors. The best time to talk about public preparedness is when you have the public’s attention — during a disaster — but it’s tough to talk policy when water is still swamping a city.

I highlighted the White House reporter’s question to Fugate, because the media has such a major role in shaping public perception and political behavior when it comes to disaster preparedness and response. And, I would argue that in addition to covering disasters in real time, the media has a responsibility to also provide the public with the underlying policy implications during and between crises.

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate answers reporters questions at the White House Briefing Room

That’s the excellent question asked in a post by Elizabeth Grossman on The Pump Handle blog. The answer, Grossman finds, is still — like the crisis — evolving. She writes:

As the unprecedented offshore oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico unfolds and extraordinary measures are being taken to protect vulnerable coastal and marine environments from the toxic fuel, the question arises: Is the health and safety of responders being protected as well? Over the past week, I’ve been investigating this question for The Pump Handle, but answers to my questions have not been forthcoming. On May 3, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) head David Michaels visited the Gulf and profile of responder health and safety issues began to rise, but many questions remain unanswered…

…A pressing question is how to ensure the health and safety of response workers – a question being asked with the specters of the Exxon Valdez, World Trade Center, and Hurricane Katrina looming large. Concern is real that in the rush to protect beaches, sensitive wetlands, and wildlife – and to contain the massive oil flow – health and safety of those on the front lines is receiving scant attention.

Obviously, the health and safety of all rescue workers should be a top priority (though this blog will be focused on the thousands of citizens who volunteer for the cleanup — Grossman says there have 14,500 involved so far.) It’s a topic that we’ll continue to keep an eye on as the situation develops. Grossman’s full post can be found here.

Also today in the New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt raised a wording question that has both journalistic and policy implications when it comes to disasters. As part of the column, “Semantic Minefields,” Hoyt wrote about a petition organized by Sandy Rosenthal of New Orleans asking the Times “to issue a style memo requiring that news articles use ‘man-made disaster,’ not ‘natural disaster,’ when referring to Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans.” The column continues:

Rosenthal, a co-founder of the advocacy group Levees.org, told me that had the Army Corps of Engineers designed and built the levees in New Orleans properly, there would have been minor flooding, not the deluge that killed some 1,800 people. She said that describing Katrina as a natural disaster suggests that nobody has to be held accountable and relieves the urgency for fixes.

The article that set off the petition effort — a “White House Memo” by Helene Cooper about President Obama’s response to the big oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico — called Katrina a natural disaster but said nothing about New Orleans. However you want to define what happened in that city, the hurricane certainly was a natural disaster for residents further east, along the Mississippi coast.

But in other articles, The Times has said Katrina “devastated” New Orleans, and used other similar language. Philip Corbett, the standards editor, said, “We have repeatedly in our coverage over years dealt in great detail with all the factors that led to the catastrophe in New Orleans.” Readers, he said, “will understand you are talking about the whole event: the natural disaster that was the hurricane and the various problems, man-made, and the government response that exacerbated the problems.”

Corbett will not issue the edict Rosenthal seeks, and I don’t think he should. Joseph Treaster, now a professor at the University of Miami, was a Times reporter who was in New Orleans when Katrina hit. He said that mistakes by people made things worse, but, “No hurricane, no damage.”

Like it or not, “Katrina” has become shorthand for a lot: the hurricane itself, the failed levees, the neglect that followed. Maybe the Times should just call it a “disaster,” without modifiers, and be as specific as possible when needed.

Sounds like a pretty good compromise. Though this might just seem like a matter of words, in the disaster field language matters a lot. In fact, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has put an emphasis on redefining disaster related words. One example is that FEMA no longer talks about “victims” but instead “survivors”. More relevant to the ombudsman’s column is that Fugate has also spoken about substituting “natural hazards” for “natural disaster” in the public and media crisis lexicon. The point is that hazards are often not the cause of accelerating the seriousness of  disasters, but rather it is either ‘man-made error/decisions (ie. that Americans have built and live in vulnerable areas).

In today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, there’s an article, “Cass Sunstein Wants To Nudge Us,” profiling Cass Sunstein, the director of White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

OIRA, according to the piece, has “the power to review every significant new rule that emerged from…[federal] agencies and to decide whether the benefits (in health, safety or environmental protection) were greater than what it would cost society to comply.” Cost/benefit analysis is central to the current climate change debate but it also very relevant to disaster preparedness decisionmaking. The article continues:

For years, Sunstein has wrestled in his writing with the difficulty in estimating the possibility of catastrophe — studies of insurance markets have found that we tend to ignore small risks until their probability passes a certain threshold, at which point we overspend wildly to prevent them. Our public assumptions about costs and benefits are often similarly out of whack.

We probably spent too little on air security before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sunstein says. Afterward we have struggled to calibrate the appropriate response. Likewise, the threat of catastrophic climate change bedevils even experts. How do you account for a small but real chance that the global sea level will rise by 20 feet?

The “nudge” in the magazine’s headline refers to a 2009 book Sunstein wrote with Richard H. Thaler called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which according to the Times article (written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells):

elaborated a philosophy called “libertarian paternalism.” Conservative economists have long stressed that because people are rational, the best way for government to serve the public is to guarantee a fair market and to otherwise get out of the way. But in the real world, Sunstein and Thaler argue, people are subject to all sorts of biases and quirks. They also argue that this human quality, which some would call irrationality, can be predicted and — this is the controversial part — that if the social environment can be changed, people might be nudged into more rational behavior.

The book describes a “nudge” as:

any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

I’ve long felt that changing public behavior on citizen preparedness requires the kind of smarter presentation, better integration, small incentives, and more rigorous attention to create effective and targeted nudges along the lines of what Sunstein discusses in his book. Instead of using nudges on preparedness, most government bodies have relied solely on ‘call to action’ pleas. As a top FEMA official underscored last month, it has not worked. In fact, I would argue that when it comes to citizen preparedness for the range of threats the nation faces, we still don’t even fully understand — let alone have applied — the actual choice architecture of the citizenry.

I wanted to mention a new blog, “Recovery Diva,” by prolific emergency management expert, Claire Rubin. Claire is not new to the internet as she already co-edits (with John Harrald) the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management an electronic web-based publication. Claire is also the author of the book, Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2005, and she creates graphic time-lines on disasters. (And, she is a CERT volunteer.)

The new blog’s goal “is to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners. We will be posting and commenting on current disaster and disaster recovery news (such as newly released reports from Government Agencies) and provide commentary and context for those events. We also will refer you to relevant recovery research.” Recovery Diva can be found here.

There’s a useful roundup by Mollie Vandor, How To Prepare For Disasters Using Social Media, from the website Mashable.com. It was originally posted in March when this blog was on hiatus, and I just saw it. I wanted to post the article even though some of you may have already read it.

Vandor separates her guide into “Create A Plan,” “Keep In Touch,” and “Get Your Life Back,” and offers technology ideas for each, including:

Google’s MyMaps feature (screen shot above) and the ICE app for the iPhone (below):

The full article can be found here.