Retrieved this 1995 article from an old website by means of the Internet Archive. Still rings true so I thought I might give it a new lease on life – Art
Sitting in a bar in Cincinnati the other night, I found myself chatting with a man whose home had been destroyed in the great fire in Oakland in 1991. Once Bob found out I was in the disaster business, and that I’d been there for the fire, he had a lot to say.
Mostly he talked about the extraordinary intimacy he’d felt with the people who sheltered him during and after the fire. Suddenly, in that crucible of crisis, he found himself crying and laughing, sharing deeply authentic moments with people he’d never met before. Four years later, those moments were Bob’s chief impressions of that disaster.
Which made sense to me. My fellow responders have always seemed like family. When we converge at some disaster or other, there’s a sense of reunion…hugs and handshakes, the ritual recounting of recent disaster and reports on absent friends…or maybe just a quick exchange of smiles and nods before we go to work.
But Bob’s remembrance got me thinking about the role of shared disaster in the formation of communities. Most cities, for example, have some great fire, flood or other misfortune enrolled in their orporate memory. San Francisco is the only one I know that’s gone to far as to add a phoenix to its city seal, but many could.
Likewise, in the media-sphere; the assassination of President Kennedy remains a defining experience for millions of people who only experienced it on television. More recently, many young (and not so young) people found community in observing the death of Jerry Garcia. As I write this, both Israel and the global community of statecraft are responding to the shock of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Maybe this feeling of community explains “emergent volunteer” behavior and the compulsive way people watch disaster coverage on TV. At some deep level we know how crucial disasters are in defining communities. We want to validate our membership. It’s sort of a “be there or be square” situation. Not to share the disaster makes one less a member of the community, forever denied both the external rituals ( the cocktail party remembrances and so on) and the personal sense of identification.
So what about those of us who consider ourselves responders? Around my volunteer fire station the conventional farewell was always, “See you on the big one!” (Although after the Oakland fire it was amended to “See you on the next one” for a while.)
The sentiment ran deep, even though it might seem an awful thing to look forward to somebody’s catastrophe. Of course, it wasn’t people’s suffering we were looking forward to…it was the chance to renew our standing in the community of responders…and in the larger community to which we respond.
A famous circus performer once said something to the effect that, “The high-wire is life: All the rest is waiting.”
I think many responders feel the same way. But that doesn’t really set us apart from emergency volunteers or the public at large, does it? We all want to be there for our communities when The Big One comes.
It’s what communities are all about.
The New York Times website has been running a fascinating series by Errol Morris entitled “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.” (Anosognosia is defined in Wikipedia as “a condition in which a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.”)
Morris interviewed various psychologists, neurologists and others on the topics of denial, self-deception and general cluelessness. A couple of quotes caught my eye. One was from social psychologist David Dunning of Cornell:
Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”
Another is from V.S. Ramachandran of UCSD and the Salk Institute, responding to Morris’ question, “Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances?”:
Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it’s a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified…It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.
I’ve sometimes said that emergency management is mostly the management of denial processes at the individual, organizational and social levels. Having read the Morris series I’d expand that to include other forms of self-deception.
Emergency managers frequently appeal to emotion in order to motivate groups and individuals, including leaders. And indeed it’s often our own feelings of hope that cause us to bother. But is there danger in drinking too much of our own Kool-Aid?
I’d suggest that one challenge we’ve faced in the early years of the Homeland Security era has been the tendency, especially when there’s a paucity of evidence to inform our choices, to substitute passion for understanding. That’s indubitably human, and it may well be characteristic of the beginnings of any new enterprise.
But by the same token, a key characteristic of maturity is the tempering of passion by experience.
Ok, on a lighter note… the blogosphere is ablaze this afternoon with debate as to the existence and nature of the word “malamanteau.”
For those who’ve missed it, the word was first introduced, so far as I can tell, about 36 hours ago in an xkcd comic. It’s a portmanteau word constructed from the terms “portmanteau” and “malapropism“… in effect, a recursive portmanteau… or alternatively, a self-referential malapropism of portmanteau… and in either event it’s a neologism defined only by its Wikipedia entry and a cartoon referring to the Wikipedia entry.
Which seems to have created a bit of an ontological (or is it just topological?) crisis for folks who take Wikipedia way too personally. Apparently the rules of Wikipedantics require that all entries should be supported by some other published reference. That made the presence of a Wikipedia entry for Malamanteau, a term only defined in Wikipedia, problematic in some eyes. Naturally, wackiness ensued.
The only way out of this that I can see is for other authorities to post references to the word external to Wikipedia, so that’s what I’m doing here… being, I believe, as solid an authority on malamanteaux as the next guy.
There’s obviously a deep insight into the nature of originality to be found somewhere in this whole episode. I look forward to reading it soon in some blog somewhere.
Wired Magazine expands on the story of Dan Wooley, an American filmmaker whose iPhone helped him survive 65 hours buried in a collapsed hotel in Haiti, even without a connection.
Wooley referred to a first-aid app on the phone to confirm how he should treat his injuries. He used the alarm clock to keep him awake lest he fall into shock. He used the focusing light to help him find a stable void in the hotel rubble where he could wait to be rescued. He also recorded voice notes to his family and listened to music.
“For people who pointed out I should’ve had a pocket first aid kit, the reason they’re wrong is I wouldn’t have it in my pocket,” he said. “How many people have gone out of their way to add one more thing to their pocket? What was valuable about the iPhone is it was already in my pocket.” – Dan Wooley quoted in WIRED
That’s the key point, I think. We can wish for folks to carry around extra gear in their pockets and special training in their heads, but for the most part that’s unrealistic. JIT training tools like that first aid and CPR app won’t save everyone, but they can help a lot of folks.
Slashdot highlights this story from the London Sun:
Desperate dad Leroy Smith resorted to Google with the request “how to deliver a baby” when his wife went into labour… Mr Smith called a midwife for advice but before she arrived Emma, 25, began having powerful contractions. So the 29-year-old grabbed hold of his BlackBerry, accessed the internet and sought help from search engine Google for step-by-step instructions. And after following the detailed guide on the internet’s wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith.
The Sun has its tongue firmly planted in its editorial cheek, painting Mr. Smith as a clueless geek. But I see a practical example of network-centric emergency response.
We emergency professionals like to wag our fingers at the public for not embracing our priorities and training themselves ahead of time in how to deal with whatever exigency is on the tops of our minds. I understand the frustration, but it strikes me as a weak sort of professionalism. Even if we’re actually smarter than everyone else, that doesn’t really help get the job done, does it?
(Just for fun, let’s imagine for a moment that most grown-ups are actually fairly competent in budgeting their own attention, based on their own experiences and beliefs. In such a world, might repeated attempts to impose our own priorities seem presumptuous at best and abusive at worst? It’s just a thought.)
So if we can’t enforce a comprehensive personal preparedness curriculum on everyone, what’s second best? Well, for the Smiths it was having a handy pocket-sized digital reference to… well, to pretty much anything that might come up.
Anyone can dream up hypothetical scenarios in which Google or a Blackberry won’t be available, of course, but that misses the point. What matters is that a growing number of folks will have access to that sort of just-in-time learning tools. And in a disaster the people who can solve own problems will be that many fewer problems for us.
So let’s keep on training and educating and beating the drum about whatever hazard we’re funded for this week. But maybe we can also make practical just-in-time learning resources easy for folks to find and use when they decide they need them.
Just a pointer, only slightly self-serving, to a new blog on public warning at http://aware.touchstone.com/.
The site’s charter explains,”The purpose of this forum is to serve as a collaboration space to discuss, share and learn about alert and warning initiatives for emergencies. Join us and please feel free to provide your comments and thoughts as you browse through the blogs and articles. We welcome suggestions and feedback!”
Hope you find it useful.
The human population is, and has always been, quite diverse in abilities, skills and preferences. The growing recognition of that intrinsic diversity is often assumed to be a hallmark of social and cultural progress. But recognizing a challenge is not the same as meeting it. And the way we describe a challenge can either help or hinder our attempts to rise to it.
Those of us responsible for the generation and delivery of effective warnings to the public in times of emergency are called upon to address diversity in a number of dimensions, including sensory abilities, language constraints, housing and workplaces, population density, economic resources, education, and individual awareness and preparedness, just to name a few.
For most of the Twentieth Century “official warning” was largely synonymous with “mass media.” Radio and television were the communication tools of choice and largely defined public warning practices. This led to a largely unconscious homogenization of the perceived audience for official alerts. Attempts to counter this “one message fits all” tendency by means of regulation have had some limited success, but enforcement has often stalled in the face of anti-regulatory political sentiment.
The Internet, first in its wired form and more recently in growing synergy with cellular telephones and other wireless devices, seems to offer a more hopeful prospect for advocates of diversity. Since each message delivery is a separate transaction instead of a once-and-for-all broadcast, why can’t we send alerts tailored to each recipient’s individual needs and preferences?
Of course it isn’t quite that simple. Several issues need to be addressed. First, can the available connections actually be counted on to deliver tens of thousands or even millions of messages quickly (where “quickly” is roughly the same as “simultaneously”) and reliably? Second, how do we determine precisely who needs which version of the message without raising the spectres of privacy violations or even just random database error? And third, how do we actually create simultaneous versions of an alert, not only in visual, aural and tactile form, but also in a number of languages and deliverable over a variety of devices and networks?
And since none of these constraints seem likely to admit an absolute 100% solution, how do we know what’s “good enough”? And for that matter, who gets to say what’s good enough, for any individual, for a group, for the community as a whole?
All real questions. But does that mean we’re doomed to fail? I don’t think so.
THE ISSUER’S DILEMMA
Right now I’m responsible for all-hazard warnings for a county with about 1.2 million people. I have a small budget and a small staff, and I report to the elected Sheriff of the county and also to the elected Board of Supervisors. We’re all committed to providing equal access to life-saving alerts to everyone.
Of those 1.2 million people, I’m told that something on the order of three and a half percent may be deaf or hard of hearing. (I’m also told that all these statistics are subject to a fair degree of interpretation and variability, which is why I’m not trying to be particularly precise.) Something like seven percent may be visually impaired (and of course some of those two groups overlap.) Roughly ten percent of our school children are described by the state as having “limited English proficiency”; I’m guessing that number is actually higher in the older population. Of that “LEP” student base, a bit less than a third speak languages other than Spanish; call them three percent of the population spread over fourteen languages. And again, language differences may overlap with sensory disabilities and other socio-economic factors that may bear on how individuals can receive and comprehend urgent warnings.
We could argue about the precise statistics, but that’s enough to illustrate my dilemma. Sixteen languages times just two modalities (visual and aural) is thirty-two different versions of an alert, and even that’s a gross simplification. How can I generate them all in a matter of minutes? And how can I know who should get each version? Or must I decide that certain communities are just too small to serve? That’s not a position I’m eager to take.
THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND
So let’s approach this problem from a different direction. Are we actually talking about dozens of different messages? No, just a single message that needs to be presented in a number of different ways.
And do we know what the essential elements of an effective warning message are, regardless of how it’s delivered? Yes, it turns out that we do, thanks to a large body of social science research on the one common factor in all this, which turns out to be our shared human nature.
So might it be possible to create and deliver a single message to everyone in a standardized form and provide individual translation of that single message to the most useful form at each recipient’s end? It hasn’t been done yet, but we’re getting very close.
The Common Alerting Protocol is a tool for expressing a complete warning message in computerized form that can be transformed into a variety of formats as required. It’s a fairly new technology, but it has won acceptance at the federal level in the U.S. and broad adoption internationally. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission have specified it as the basis of a number of new federal warning programs, and a number of states and communities are already using it day to day.
But at present “CAP” is only being used in the deep plumbing of our public warning systems. It’s already delivering benefits in heightened efficient and warning system interoperability, but a much greater potential benefit has yet to be realized.
MASS PERSONALIZATION OF WARNINGS
Instead of trying to construct numerous different versions of an alert at the origination point, and then route them to the appropriate recipients, we are rapidly approaching the point where individuals’ personal devices can take a standardized signal, like a CAP digital alert, and display it in the most appropriate form. And since a CAP message uses selections from pre-enumerated tables to indicate the nature, urgency, severity, certainty and location of an alert, even automated translation on the recipient’s digital device would be much less challenging than the general problem of free-text translation.
Such a standards-based approach would take time to perfect, but could overcome both the origination bottleneck and the network bottleneck. More importantly, it could help overcome the political bottleneck.
BUILDING A LARGER COMMUNITY
The unhappy political reality of access issues is that there is an implicit competition for political attention and financial support among the various advocates for different groups. But the challenges of multi-lingual warning and of warning for people with sensory disabilities are only superficially different. At its root, the goal of mass personalization is shared by access and diversity initiatives of every kind.
It might be that the differences between the sensory-disabilities community and the multi-lingual community—not to mention the differences between young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural—are so deep and important that we can’t make a common cause toward this shared goal. It might also be that we can’t see past the urgency of our individual agendas—for who isn’t special in some way? —to take a strategic approach to the challenge of meeting individual needs in an impersonal world.
But if we continue to do what we’re doing, it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll keep getting what we’ve got.
Public warnings are urgent communications issued from time to time by various entities in an attempt to reduce preventable injuries or deaths. The following principles are proposed as the basis of a professional standard of public warning practice:
1. When should a public warning be issued?
1.1. A warning should be issued whenever there is an imminent threat to life or health
of which an individual or community may be unaware. “Imminent” means that more routine means of communication would not be effective.
1.2. Generally, a warning should be issued as soon as an appropriate recommendation for protective action can be made. It is preferable to issue a preliminary warning message and then refine it later rather than to wait for perfect information that may arrive too late.
1.3. In situations where a delay is unlikely to substantially affect the outcome for people at risk, consideration may be given to delaying warnings during overnight hours (e.g., from 10 PM until 6 AM) or while the recommended protective action might conflict with immediate response activity.
1.4. A fear of public panic is NOT a sufficient reason for delaying a public warning. Panic results when social bonds are torn by an acute sense of individual competition for limited opportunities of escape from a dire threat. It rarely occurs as the result of a public warning. Timely warning with clear protective action recommendations can actually reduce the potential for panic.
1.5. By their nature public warnings can never be guaranteed to be timely, effective or accurate; the issuance of a public warning is a voluntary and discretionary act.
2. By whom should a public warning be issued?
2.1. A public warning may be issued by any individual or entity that is aware of an imminent threat to human life or health, particularly if that individual or entity believes that some or all of the target audience will not receive warning from another source.
2.2. A public warning is best issued by an individual or entity that is familiar to, and with, the receiving audience.
2.3. A public warning is best issued by an individual or entity with the capacity and authority to coordinate warning information and response activity among all the responsible actors (e.g., an Incident Commander or a senior elected official.)
3. To whom should a public warning be issued?
3.1. A public warning should be given to all individuals whose life or health is at risk.
3.2. A public warning may also be shared with individuals and agencies that may be able to provide necessary assistance to individuals at risk.
3.3. To the extent possible public warnings should NOT be distributed to individuals who are neither affected by nor in a position to provide assistance with a hazard.
4. What should be the content of a public warning?
4.1. A public warning message should indicate as specifically and precisely as possible which persons are at risk from a particular hazard, in terms of their location or some other distinguishing characteristic. In some cases it may also be useful to identify individuals or communities that are explicitly NOT at risk from that hazard.
4.2. A public warning message should describe the nature of the hazard in plain terms that are understandable by the target audience. If an emergency response to the hazard is planned or underway, that activity should be described as well.
4.3. A public warning message should describe one or more protective actions that individuals or groups can take on their own to improve the outcomes for themselves and their neighbors. Where more than one protective action is suggested, criteria should be offered by which individual recipients can select the best course for themselves.
4.4. A public warning message should provide information on when the hazard is expected to materialize (which may be “currently”) and, if possible, should include a forecast of how long the hazard will persist.
4.5. When possible a public warning message should provide recipients with an expectation of what is likely to happen next. In some cases this will simply be an estimate of when and how they will receive additional information.
5. How should public warnings be disseminated?
5.1. Whenever possible, public warnings should be transmitted to the public by multiple media simultaneously. Using more than one means of delivery increases audience reach and improves technical reliability, and also enhances warning effectiveness by confirming and reinforcing the warning message.
5.2. Delivery media for a particular warning should be chosen with an eye to balancing the need for wide and immediate attention with the need not to desensitize unaffected audiences with irrelevant warnings.
5.3. Wherever possible, warning message recipients should be encouraged to share the warning message with friends and neighbors, particularly those who may be isolated by physical or sensory disability, language ability or other factors.
5.4. Wherever possible, warning messages should be delivered in multiple formats to accommodate the special needs of recipients with physical or sensory disabilities, or who do not speak a particular language. However, delays in the conversion of a warning into multiple forms are NOT a valid reason for delaying release of a public warning in whatever form is most rapidly achievable.
6. How should uncertainty be expressed in public warnings?
6.1. Where facts surrounding a warning situation are uncertain, that uncertainty should be disclosed frankly in the warning message.
6.2. To avoid creating a false sense of precision, uncertainties and probabilities should be expressed in general, non-numeric terms (e.g., “observed” / “likely” / “possible” / “unlikely”) instead of percentages or other precise-sounding language.
6.3. Descriptions of uncertainty should address not only any uncertainty about the hazard itself, but also any uncertainty about its effects on the at-risk population.
6.4. Uncertainty is NOT a valid reason for delaying a public warning. It is preferable to cancel or amend a warning as better information becomes available than to risk preventable injuries or deaths by delaying the initial warning message.
A reporter asked me today to clarify whether FEMA’s “Integrated Public Alert and Warning System” (IPAWS) was a product or an architecture or what?
Originally, IPAWS was a program to bring all kinds of different warning systems together to form a coherent sort of “warning Internet” based on the CAP standard; a single CAP message from an official would be delivered simultaneously through whatever systems happened to be available locally, thus ensuring maximum reach, consistency and effectiveness of the warnings. So it was an architecture in the sense that it would enable competitive vendors to offer an interoperable interface to their products, allowing them to be mixed, matched and shared among local, state and federal buyers.
But when a policy push came down to do a pilot project along the Gulf Coast in time for the Katrina anniversary, FEMA cobbled together a handful of particular products under the leadership of Sandia Labs and started referring to that as IPAWS. By the time the money for that pilot ran out (and both Sandia and the FEMA project manager had been shuffled off to other projects) the focus within FEMA’s National Continuity Programs Directorate had narrowed to deploying “Digital EAS” by way of PBS satellites and the PEP stations for the singular purpose of enabling the President to address the nation.
That more restricted vision was reflected in FEMA’s filing back in January in the FCC’s cellular alerting proceeding, wherein they floated the theory that FEMA lacked authority to get involved in state or local warnings. That got shot down in both House and Senate oversight hearings, and in a news release last week FEMA Assistant Administrator Martha Rainville recanted and said they could do it after all.
Still, it’s not clear whether the current program managers and their contractors over at FEMA have any real idea of how to proceed. At a congressional hearing on Wednesday of this week D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told Rainville straight out, “We don’t think you know what you’re talking about, frankly.” She demanded that FEMA open up its decision making process on IPAWS to forums involving broadcasters, state and local officials and other experts in the field of public warning.
So I’m afraid there’s great confusion, especially within FEMA, as to whether IPAWS is a national design for integrating all our warning assets (most of which are state, local or private property) or merely another federal procurement program. State and local government and most broadcasters need the former, but many of us fear the FEMA staff involved are so far out of their depth that their contractors have taken over yet again.
We can only pray FEMA will accept the help it’s being offered.
In the runup to the May 19th EAS Showdow… um… Summit in Washington, DC, most of the discussion has focused on the nuts and bolts of moving the nation’s broadcast alerts across digital networks based on CAP.
But CAP only defines the information “payload” of a warning. It doesn’t specify how that information should be presented over HD radio, digital TV, computers, PDAs, digital signage or any of our various other windows into the infosphere.
This is going to become a crucial question in the very near future, I think. As digitization drives “broadcast” content onto ever more diverse platforms we’re going to need to give these presentation/user interface issues as much attention as we have to transport/relay-network design.
We may want to develop some common elements… consistent visual, aural, even tactile (e.g., portable device vibrator cadences) cues that one might almost call “branding elements”… to ensure that emergency alerts have a degree of consistency across all media. Otherwise we risk letting diversity deteriorate into confusion.
The Australians have made an interesting foray in that direction with their Standard Emergency Warning Signal (SEWS)… basically a standard “sounder” that can be used consistently over broadcast, wireless, wireline and even acoustical (siren and public address) delivery systems. However they haven’t tried yet to set a comparable standard in the visual or other domains.
Last year the FCC’s cellular alerting advisory committee (the CMSAAC) took a few first steps toward designing a consistent user experience for a basic text-messaging interface.
But as we start talking about digital television and HD radio and the things that lie beyond them, we’re going to need to bring some real world-class user-interface expertise to bear alongside our enormous pool of transmission engineering experience.
The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) provides a rich standard data payload that can be presented… hopefully consistently… over all media, broadcast and otherwise. But the details of how best to present that richer message are still to be determined and require immediate skilled attention.
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