The state's #KnowYourZoneVA plan launched June 1 by Governor McAuliffe was "designed to enhance current evacuation plans, boost public safety, and improve travel efficiency in the event of hurricanes or other disasters." Communication mentions are limited to
- "When a serious storm is expected to impact Virginia’s coastal region, state and local emergency managers will work with local news media outlets that will broadcast and publish evacuation directives to the public." (Governor McAuliffe Urges Coastal Virginians to "Know Your Zone" For Safer Hurricane Evacuations (PDF))
- "Those without Internet access are urged to contact their local emergency managers or call 2-1-1." (2017 Hurricane Tiered Evacuation Plan Overview (PDF))
This post will consider effective communications from officials and what happens in their absence.
Rumors thrive in the absence of no, little, and poor official communications
No matter what you call it — talk around the water cooler, rumor mill, gossip, word of mouth, scuttlebutt — talk before, during, and after disasters or emergencies will happen particularly when leaders don't share information. Taylor Clark, in Psychology Today, explains the phenomenon succinctly: "Fear breeds rumor." Clark writes:
Successful rumors needle our anxieties and emotions.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, water wasn't the only thing that flooded the city. In the environment of intense anxiety and uncertainty, grim rumors flourished: Sharks have infested the water! Terrorists planted bombs in the levees! Murdered babies and piles of corpses filled the Superdome!
. . .
So why did these stories pop up? Fear breeds rumor. The more collective anxiety a group has, the more inclined it will be to start up the rumor mill. As Rochester Institute of Technology rumor expert Nicholas DiFonzo explains, we pass rumors around primarily as a means of deciphering scary, uncertain situations: Exchanging information, even if it's ludicrously false, relieves our unease by giving us a sense that we at least know what's happening.
Professor DiFonzo explained more about rumors during disasters in Anatomy of a Rumor, a December 5, 2005 Talk of the Nation segment. Host Neal Conan set up the segment:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, reports of chaos, rape, murder, even cannibalism swept across New Orleans, stories that rescue helicopters had been fired on, that the government intentionally blew up parts of the levee system to destroy black neighborhoods, that hundreds drowned awaiting rescue in a warehouse. More than three months later, it's clear that terrible things did happen after the hurricane, that some stories remain to be confirmed and that some of these stories were just rumors.
In response to Conan's question "There were a lot of these stories in Hurricane Katrina. Is that to be expected in such a dramatic event?", Professor DiFonzo said:
Well, I think that in hurricanes or cataclysms or catastrophes or earthquakes like this, there's always a great deal of rumors in the aftermath. There's a great deal of anxiety; there's a great deal of uncertainty, communication. Networks have broken down, people have a need to know information, and it's not there. The formal sources of information, especially in the Katrina situation, as you well know, telephone lines are out, cell phone lines were out, people were isolated. And so these rumors sort of percolated about and became much more exaggerated than they normally would in, say, other situations, which tend to produce extremely accurate rumors. But natural disaster rumors tend to be extremely inaccurate. (Anatomy of a Rumor transcript)
The goal: Effective official communications during emergency and disaster situations
Like in social work, an essential element of communications is meeting people where they are. This concept refers to both where people are emotionally and what sources they use to learn important information.To the first, recall DiFonzo's comments about people feeling anxious and uncertain in disasters and other emergency events. Anne Crick, Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, suggests stingy behavior helps no one. Instead, she calls on officials to do two things:
- Provide information sooner rather than later. The longer you delay, the greater the vacuum and the more active the speculation. Tell people what you do know and provide regular updates.
- Provide all the information that you can. Don't dole out information in teaspoons on a supposed "need-to-know" basis, because people will simply speculate about what you have not said.
To the second, Crick recommends having "robust feedback systems" to ensure the message you want and need delivered is received. Crick writes:
Because you have spoken or written does not mean that people have understood, or that they have understood it in the way that you intended. Be prepared to repeat, re-emphasize and re-engage as necessary until your constituents get the message. Note that communication can be a frustrating business because some people fail to take advantage of opportunities to be engaged - they don't read emails, skip briefing meetings and so on. However if the goal is to gain understanding, then it is important to keep sharing until your feedback tells you that the message has been understood.
The University of Maryland's Language Science department, in a discussion about effective outreach, says that to effectively communicate with people is "to learn how to explain insights in a way that is sensible and intriguing to [them] and that resonates with what they already know."
Finally on this point, It's Not Nagging: Why Persistent, Redundant Communication Works summarizes research about drivers of message deployment. According to the article,
The researchers also determined that clarity in messaging, while not a bad thing, was not the goal for redundant communication. Even if a powerful manager is clear and direct with an employee, it's still the redundancy that counts.
Effective official comms before, during, and after a disaster
That effective communication is different things to different individuals and communities does not mean governments should not communicate effectively during emergencies and disasters. To the contrary, the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization assert "Well planned and well-executed communications, fully integrated into every stage of a crisis and emergency response, can help reduce deaths and suffering." And as described above, proactive and effective communications can help reduce the incidence, spread, and stickiness of rumors.The authors of Keeping Up with the Tweet-dashians: The Impact of 'Official' Accounts on Online Rumoring (PDF) speak to this last point in the world of social media. Their research, and that of some others, provides empirical evidence supporting the idea that emergency responders and other officials can effectively reduce the spread of rumors using social media. In fact, the 2017 Humanitarian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Forum website has this to say about social media:
More than 2.7 billion people—almost 40 per cent of the world's population—use social media. Humanitarian responders must understand how to communicate with affected people through social media, and they must learn how to use insights from social media to shape and improve humanitarian responses.
The bottom line: Nature abhors a vacuum. And information, sometime rumor, fills it.
This is the ninth in a series of posts about threats and risks, especially during hurricane season.
- Part 1, New series: Hurricanes, evacuation, data, and the Northern Neck
- Part 2, Virginia's got a new hurricane/other disaster evacuation plan
- Part 3, Hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather on the Northern Neck
- Part 4, #KnowYourZoneVA on the Northern Neck
- Part 5, Flooding risk on the Northern Neck
- Part 6, Flood insurance on the Northern Neck
- Part 7, Hurricane, tropical storm, and Nor'easter damage on the Northern Neck
- Part 8, Tornadoes on the #NNK
