How did Civil Defence communications do?
October 1st, 2009 at 1:00 pm by David FarrarAs I blogged in July, I attended a Civil Defence briefing earlier this year on how their Tsunami warning system works, so I figure it is worth reviewing what went well, and not so well.
Timeliness – a big tick for this one. The advisory was released well before the potential tsunami was due to hit NZ.
Media – NZ Herald and Stuff websites carried the info, as did Breakfast TV. Seemed to do well keeping media informed.
Website – Not so good here. The main Civil Defence website did say an advisory had been issued, but nowhere on the site could you actually get the full details of it. The media do not always get things absolutely correct, and people should be able to go to authoritative sources.
Radio – people were told to listen to their radios for any local evacuation instructions. I think at some stage this strategy may have to be revisited. With ipods, more and more people do not have or listen to the radio. To get through to younger people especially, the Internet and text messaging is going to be more relevant.
Twitter – Twitter was great as a way to alert people, and that is where I first heard about it. I suggested to Civil Defence that they should look at having an official Twitter account as it would have been good for people to be able to retweet an official advisory rather than second hand reports.
E-mail – I received the warning threat by e-mail at 8.06 am. That was 90 minutes before the first wave was due, so pretty good. Only complaint is the e-mail address they came from was cdevent@datasquirt.co.nz and that doesn’t look too official. Would be better for it to come from a govt.nz address.
Overall pretty good effort I though, as in by 0945when the first wave might hit, I would have thought most of the country was aware of the advisory.
Tags: civil defence, Tsunami, twitter
October 1st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I agree about your point about radio.
I think the ability of radio to reach a large target audience has diminished a lot. We don’t listen to a lot of radio anymore, and the coincidence of us watching TV and/or listening to radio at an opportune time seems increasingly unlikely.
Twitter or text-based alerts would be more likely to get us aware of the issue (heck, even my dentist uses a text alert these days to remind me of appointments). For instance, I thought the MoH twitter updates on H1N1 were quite useful and a good corrective to some of the wilder rumours stalking the internet.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hmm, official disaster announcements via twitter. I’m sure a bored teenager could have some fun with that..
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I think it all worked brilliantly (in the top of the NI)
I received no warning, and there was subsequently no tsunami. No worries.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
A few people are using #nzcd in tweets, including Manawatu’s “Horizons Emergency Management Office”.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I would think that was some local cross dressing hashtag
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 1:27 pm
“Radio – people were told to listen to their radios for any local evacuation instructions. I think at some stage this strategy may have to be revisited.”
This is a major issue – for CD and for individuals. TV and Internet are fine if they are operational, and you have power available. But in many Civil Defence scenarios power will be off. So you need a battery powered radio. I think I could get something like that working in a few minutes if I have light – car is probably the most reliable. But I have no idea what radio station to listen to, AM or FM, local or national.
Is there a local warning signal? I have no idea. If I am anything like typical then the general population is not prepared at all.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Paul Henry was castigating the Head Sherang of Civil Defence this morning. Apparantly people were told to listen to their local radio station by their local Civil Defence boffin, but the radio stations were unable to contact anyone from National Civil Defence and received no briefings from them.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Most of the negative feedback seems to have been coming from Paul Henry & Co at TV1 Breakfast. I was listening to that show. It all seemed to be going fine, with an expert predicting arrival times, etc. (though he acknowledged he was not the official CD person).
But then Colin Feslier (haven’t we heard from him obfuscating the missing Peters ministerial car last March or thereabouts?) came on for Civil Defence. He seriously bungled the situation and totally made a fool of the fine folks at Civil Defence. Like the car issue, seemed to me he tried to spin the tsunami into a non-event to put the media off the scent. Got his priorities totally wrong. If he had just said, “look, we are not quite sure yet but make sure you are well clear of the beaches and secure your boats before the likely arrival time at XXX” everything would have been fine. Instead he provocatively described the tsunami as a rumour when everyone could see there was a very serious situation developing.
There are probably some other issues, but I reckon this one was the boil burster.
The answer? Get rid of the PR spin man and put up a senior expert to speak to the media, even if he is a busy man. Sheez, when I ran a big company emergency response team years ago that was already well known as the best way to deal with these situations, because the media response is absolutely critical and needs to be informed, positive and helpful. Some corporate memory lost from Civil Defence over the years, I guess.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Totally agree with rod. It got to the point where Radio stations were laughing off the warning. All that needed to be said was “tsunami might happen at this time…. we’re still working out the details and stay well clear of the beach”. Easy and simple to understand and there is NO WAY Paul Henry or any other media organisation could have stuffed that up!!
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 3:05 pm
They kept saying “listen to your local radio sattion”
But what is my local radio station in ChCh?
The rock?
Broadcast from Auckland
radio Live
ditto
ZB
Vote:oops ditto again.
October 1st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I was astounded yesterday morning to hear that Civil Defence had advised Makara Beach residents to move out, via Justin Du Fresene’s Newstalk ZB show, at 9.40ish. I live in the area and no such warning had been issued, in fact it was my call home and to neighbours that alerted them. Apparently nothing official came till after 10.30 and then still nothing at the beach except locals telling people to get out of the area.
I am wondering if it is at all possible to set up a system via text to send out alerts to affected people? This system could always be paid for at the receivers end so no taxpayers money is used.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Texts would be no good for me, I don’t usually have a cellstone around my neck. But for others? Would you have to register your number somewhere if you wanted CD warnings? And how would they know where everyone who could be affected was? Or can they do broadcast texts?
Radio is probably the best but everyone would have to be listening to get the message. And if most people are still asleep as may have been the case in Samoa no warning may have been effective enough.
We do have to accept that we can’t be guaranteed to get sufficient prior warning of tsunami, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes, that all the right people will hear about it and that everyone will have the best response.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I thought the old fashioned way worked pretty well. This guy ran up Lampton Quay screaming “Run for Liiiiiives”.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
9/10 for CD. Word got out well and people had plenty of time to get down to the beach and nab a good spot.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Next time there is a crisis I’m going to switch of TV and listen to the “Wireless” (Steam Radio)
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 6:50 pm
“Colin here …. yeah yeah I know we need to do something, but how the hell can we teach people to swim in one hour?”
Vote:“Nobody will ring me and tell me what to do, I have phone numbers but they should ring me so I know who is calling”
“Actualy I don’t like strangers ringing me, so I don’t give my number out”
October 1st, 2009 at 8:22 pm
As we’ve seen with Manawatu today, there are some issues around SMS that can cause significant delays. It might be timely to drag up some reports that MCDEM had done on Public Alerting last year as part of their Tsunami Risk Management Programme that some people here may like to read to better understand some of the technical and financial issues associated with public alerting. Type 2 cell broadcast would be ideal, but Telcos don’t have a routine business use case for it, so if we want it, it is pretty much a case of we, the taxpayer, will have to fund it. How good do you want your public alerting to be?
MCDEM Public Alerting documents
Twitter is useful, but it cannot be relied upon – it has this nice habit of going tits-up under high load because Ruby-on-Rails has trouble scaling (so I hear).
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Actually CD did not get a lot of things right. They sent out mixed messages, their top guy knew less than the questioner on TV (and that’s saying a lot because Paul Henry knows so very little), etc. Their regional office often knew nothing, the airports that were supposed to be in the loop weren’t, etc., etc., etc.
The only reason everyone knew about it was the news – tv, radio, stuff, … – and passed the word around. It’s almost as if CD were so far out of the loop, they were getting their information from everyone else.
Oh, and as for the CD guy’s comment about “rumour”, I suspect it’s because he hadn’t caught up with the news, and/or was told by some advisor not to trust any reports that came in from individuals they did not know or who were not in some official capacity. In that sort of situation, I would not be expecting the local officials to be thinking “Must call NZ CD.”
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 8:38 pm
that local control aspect really doesn’t work.
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I’m not 100% sure, but it may be possible that the person that went on TV was not operational MCDEM staff, but rather a general DIA comms person. Does anyone else have more info about this?
Vote:October 1st, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Well, I found out at 9:10 from kiwiblog! Went to the TV – nothing – not even a crawl across the bottom of the screen. Not TV1, TV3, but Sky News had something from an Australian perspective. “Oh, NZ is preparing to be hit by a wave, on to more corruption in politics reporting.”
Stuff.co.nz, nzherald.co.nz, and finally twitter were the best sources of info.
I didn’t see Paul Henry on Breakfast, but when TVNZ finally got Peter Williams back into makeup, the on-the-half-hour bulletins weren’t enough to cut it.
If we’re at risk of being hit by a tsunami, I want at the very least a crawl across the bottom of the TV channels – too much to ask?
Vote:October 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 am
Twitter – hah, honestly how many kiwis use Twitter? And how many people who are at the beach will have access to Twitter? Now that I have that off my chest…
The one big hole in the CD process as I see it is that they feel they only have to provide information at a national level, ie that there is a tsunami and the approx times it will reach certain areas. They then argue that it is up to local authorities to provide local warnings.
I find this to be very naive, how the hell are local authorities supposed to get their message out? Even the MetService provides fairly detailed local weather forecasts. No reason why CD can’t provide a more detailed tsunami warning.
For instance whilst a 1m tsunami may be of little consequence on a long open beach, it could be a very different matter in a narrow inlet where the wave could become several meters high and present quite a serious risk to those in that local area.
They could very easily have text alerts sent to every phone that is ‘connected’ to cell towers that are considered to be within the tsunami risk zone, these could even be ‘localised’ based on the location of the cell tower.
Vote:October 2nd, 2009 at 1:23 am
I maintain a twitter feed of New Zealand earthquakes ( @nz_quake, see http://twitter.com/nz_quake ) and yesterday I sent out a few notices about the tsunami. I found it very frustrating that the Civil defence notices were not available on the website (which did get some updates during the day) and I had to point people at newspaper articles instead.
Looking at the website it has an archive of media releases but no obvious way for people to subscribe to them.
From memory yesterday I found out about the tsunami a little when I first got into work and then via kiwiblog’s post. I then had to check stuff to find the text of the release and link to that. All this didn’t happen until a good hour after the release was sent.
It is very easy to setup a mobile phone on twitter and you can then only have one or two important feeds actually forward to the phone.
Vote:October 2nd, 2009 at 11:41 am
I don’t think they did particularly well. In fact, I’m annoyed. Here’s why.
Vote:October 4th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I think the CD effort was a disjointed mess and nothing has been learned from the last time, when it was a disjointed mess.
Vote:The best way of looking at it’s effectiveness is to pretend that it had been an actual serious tsunami, considering the predictions are – as a GNS scientist pointed out – imperfect, and this is a natural event, if it had been real, people would have died.
I was in a position where as a volunteer fire fighter I got to hear the radio traffic, there was a lot of confusion and in the end the emergency services got on and did their own thing regardless of what CD was saying.
The information CD uses is actually publicly available (https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/) and this is in fact where CD get their alerts from – you can subscribe to it yourself on email. As in the last alert, this alert took place but CD took ages to respond and issue a coherent warning.
The problem seems to be with a centrally based office hours type setup, it just seems a silly way to organise things and the staff just seem confused and unable to make quick decisions – I don’t know why this is, but it is happening and it shouldn’t.
For example the Rodney District Councils emergency response team was prudently still evacuating people from beaches after CD dropped their alert – this lead to confusion from people who had heard that CD had dropped the alert, but RDC was still evacuating people.
RDC was erring on the side of caution, sure, people may have a laugh afterwards, but what if it turned out someone sitting in Wellington in an office with only half a clue got it wrong?
A lot of people fail to grasp the seriousness of these events, more of us live in low lying areas and we have not experienced a true major civil emergency within most people living memory.
The appalling apathy both publicly and in the politics and poor organisation at Civil Defense will see people die needlessly when (not if) a major event occurs.
One things for sure, I would not be relying on Civil Defense alerts (or lack of) for my personal well being!