I was surprised recently to get calls asking for contacts for emergency allocations of diesel fuel for broadcasters in hurricane-stricken areas. Ordinarily, for reasons I will make clear below, I would just explain how resource requests are handled during declared emergencies, and direct parties to talk to their proper points of local contact.

Many things were apparently going wrong with this (Katrina) emergency, including linkage between some broadcasters and those in charge of resources like diesel fuel. Government and the emergency management community have not put into practice the necessary protocols so broadcasting can be considered a vital resource during a natural disaster for resource allocation. Yet the broadcast stations are, in fact, an integral part of our country’s critical infrastructure. The premise:

At any given time in an emergency, those in charge would like the public “To do, or not to do” SOMETHING. If you can communicate that “something” to the public, you have a better chance of bringing the emergency to a better and faster resolution.

Its hard to believe this has not been done. After September 11, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set up the MSRC, the Media Security and Reliability Council. However, MSRC and the government need to go farther.

Some housekeeping issues must be resolved before this idea can work. First, broadcasters need to study “Emergency Management 101”. Here’s a short course. All emergencies are local, and most jurisdictions, together with the Federal Government, have rightly decided that communities should standardize on a version of emergency management that puts command and control squarely at the local level, and under the leadership of the best people to handle the emergency at that local level.

It is based on military theories of “span of control” that were refined by the fire service in California under the heading of ICS, the Incident Command System. ICS commonly has four functional blocks reporting to leadership. Those blocks are usually labeled Finance, Logistics, Operations and Planning. When there is a declared emergency, ICS is set in motion at an Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The responders in the field are concerned with immediate life safety issues. When they need something or run out of a critical resource, they call the EOC. This is called a Resource Request.

The “something” can be water, food, hoses, gas masks, people, fire trucks, or security forces—literally anything needed to bring the conditions at the point of response to a better level. Think of an EOC as a brokerage house for resource requests. Information from all points of response funnels into an EOC dealing with a major emergency. Requests coming in sometimes approach what you might observe at a busy brokerage house on Wall Street.

A problem always happens during major emergencies. Portions of the critical infrastructure start to run out of things at the local EOC level. When a resource shortage is identified, the EOC calls the next level of the response in their emergency plan. That could be their parish, county or their state. They enter a resource request with that next level.

If a resource request gets to the State level and the State cannot meet the need, the request gets bucked up to FEMA. The rapidity of FEMA response depends on many factors which include but are not limited to planning and preparedness, the nature of the emergency, the nature of the request, and the existence of a formal Declaration of Emergency. This has been oversimplified to make the following point:

IN THE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT COMMUNITY, CIRCUMVENTING THE CHAIN OF COMMAND FOR RESOURCE REQUESTS IS RARELY LOOKED ON FAVORABLY.

Two questions: How do we get the emergency management community to plan support for local radio? How do you assure fuel for broadcasting when lack of fuel is part of the emergency?

Katrina may help to strengthen the case that broadcasting, especially local radio, is indeed a critical emergency resource. In the New Orleans case, WWL Radio became just such a resource when their studios had to be abandoned and they started broadcasting from the EOC. Unfortunately, like many broadcasting facilities, they did not have a long-term supply of stored fuel. Some might say, “That’s just too bad. They should have planned better.” However, hindsight teaches us that planning for the unthinkable is easier after the “unthinkable” happens.

On the “public interest” side of the ledger, there may be no other, more important priority after life support and shelter issues (maybe as an integral part of life support and shelter) during a major emergency. Keeping communications alive to let people know what is going on is a necessary part of the recovery process! Without communication, silence gives looters and others support to do what they want. The people directly at risk are left in an information vacuum that breeds hopelessness and despair.

The Emergency Public Information (EPI) lessons of incidents like the LA riots, Hurricane Andrew, and the Northridge Earthquake may have been forgotten or pushed aside for many reasons. On the broadcasting side, many broadcast licensees have ignored recommendations to store a minimum of two to three weeks of emergency supplies (including generator fuel, oil and coolant) at critical stations in high-risk areas.

The emergency management community might want to give some consideration to adding a fifth operational box to standardized Incident Command practices. That box would be called “Information”. What would happen in that functional box? Literally, it would allow for an emergency newsroom desk in the EOC run by, for lack of a better term, an Editor, and staffed by specially trained public information officers (PIO’s).

The technical part is easy for broadcasters. We plug into the EOC with whatever resources we have and go to the EOC “Editor’s Desk” whenever we need an update. Add a published “hot clock” for events and updates, and you have an “All Emergency All the Time” network. There is much more to this concept, but the general idea is that we begin to treat Information as a critical emergency resource in its own right.

This concept has actually been tried in other forms and other emergencies by local jurisdictions and even FEMA. One experiment occurred in Los Angeles County during the Y2K response. Y2K proved to be a non-event, so not much was heard about these trials.

As we study what went right and what went wrong with the response to Katrina, granting information status as a resource to help save lives and property may be an idea whose time has come.

About the Author

Richard Rudman is a principal with Remote Possibilities Tech Consulting in Los Angeles. He worked for many years with KFWB radio station in the Los Angeles area and is an expert in emergency management and preparedess issues. He can be reached at: remotepossibilities@earthlink.net