Last week’s tragedy of 12 coal miners’ deaths in West Virginia not only brought a number of safety issues to light, but also called into question how companies communicate with the public and stakeholders during a crisis. As initial reports told the victims’ families that 12 miners were alive and one dead when the opposite was true, many observers are wondering if any crisis can truly be managed.

In an opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune, writer Holly Mullen says “the word used only slightly more often than ‘dead’ and ‘tragic’ was ‘miscommunication’… the rescue operation had depended on recovery teams relaying cell phone messages to administrators. Rumors and leaks were competing with struggles to confirm information.”

Communication efforts during the crisis really resembled the children’s game of “Telephone,” Mullen remarks, saying how the right information can easily get garbled when it goes through too many channels. Unfortunately, a crisis is one time where “Telephone” is a dangerous game.

Mullen says communication expert Chris Thomas told her that the first hours and days following a crisis are ripe for speculation and misconstrued signals. In light of that, she says, it’s not “so surprising, according to several news accounts, that someone at the command center overheard a phone conversation regarding checking for the miners’ vital signs. That person somehow heard ‘alive’ in the message.”

But Mullen wonders if anything could have been done to improve crisis communication during the tragedy. “The problem is, someone wanted to be first with news of a ‘miracle,’” she says. “And who wouldn't want credit for that? Some outcomes - in this case, the wild card of human hope - can't always be neatly managed or maneuvered.”