What's in the Communications Plan?

The frantic efforts of U.S. scientists to alert the Indian Ocean region in the minutes following the December 26 tsunami have been described by journalists all over the world. By focusing on these fruitless efforts, however, the journalists are missing a key issue:

U.S. officials might have been able to warn the mass populations of the region in time to save thousands of lives if they had alerted the major news media, such as the Associated Press and CNN, about the onrushing tsunami.

Here is the lead paragraph of a typical story on this subject; it was written by James Janega of the Chicago Tribune and published on December 28 by numerous newspapers that subscribe to the Tribune's news service:

"Chicago -- With a killer tsunami bearing down on Sri Lanka and India at airliner speeds, an effort to save thousands of lives came down to a handful of overworked employees in Hawaii trying to telephone government officials they did not know and did not know how to reach."

As noted in earlier posts and confirmed by a NOAA timeline, the tsunami had yet to reach Sri Lanka and India when scientists first suspected a tsunami had been generated. Rather than contact the mass media, however, scientists worked the phones unsuccessfully as they tried to reach colleagues and counterparts in the region.

One of Janega's sources said: "We didn't have a contact in place where you could just pick up the phone.... We were starting from scratch."

This quote quite reasonably suggests questions about the crisis communications planning of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) and the U.S. Geological Survey. Picking up the phone to call the news media is standard operating procedure for corporations that must communicate timely information to the public; utility companies do it routinely.

A New York Times story by reporters Michele Kayal and Matthew L. Wald that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune on December 29 quoted a PTWC official: "We wanted to try to do something, but without a plan in place then, it was not an effective way to issue a warning, or to have it acted upon."

Does the PTWC's communications plan provide for making calls to the news media when scientists determine there is a significant threat to human life -- inside the Pacific Basin or out? It's a question that must be asked as inquiries are conducted into how U.S. agencies initially responded to the worst natural diaster of this generation.

Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
January 3, 2005