Tag Archives: communication

New disaster communications post-grad course to start!

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Photo credit: Alexas Fotos, Pixabay

With 20% of problems encountered in disaster management related to media affairs and  communication with the community, qualified emergency communicators are more important than ever to a successful emergency management response.

That’s why the University of Southern Queensland now has a graduate certificate for communicators in emergency management.

The Graduate Certificate of Business – Emergency and Disaster Communication is a four course qualification with special flexibility to work around disaster seasons that students are dealing with around the world.  It covers communication for all phases of disaster management, with special emphasis on change communication, community engagement and disaster management.  Social media or crisis communication can also be included in the qualification.

The new program starts in July 2017 and is part of the Master of Project Management, which students can elect to continue once they have finished the graduate certificate with the emergency and disaster communication specialisation.  We also have pathways using these courses into other Masters programs.

Talk to us about credit for skills, experience and previous post-graduate study in communication fields!

Key staff for the program are Matt Grant and Dr Barbara Ryan.  Matt has extensive crisis and disaster response experience with the Australian Defence Force working as the senior communications manager for a range of military operations in the Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern theatres and in 2004-5 coordinated Whole of Government communications on the ground from Banda Aceh, Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami.  He has also been regional news director for WINTV Queensland and has held corporate public affairs roles. He has worked in journalism and public affairs for 25 years.

Barbara Ryan has a Ph.D in how people get information in disasters, and experience in response and recovery communications for bushfires and floods at local disaster management level.  She also spent seven years as volunteer co-ordinator of communication for a district disaster management group in Queensland, Australia.  She was a Mary Fran Myers Scholarship winner for early career disaster researchers, and currently conducts research for agencies in Australia. Barbara is also a co-founder and former director of Emergency Media and Public Affairs, a membership organisation for disaster communicators, and organised the 2013 Fulbright Fellowship with former FEMA Acting Director External Affairs and U.S. Department of Homeland Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Public Affairs, Bob Jensen. She has more than 20 years public relations experience.

The University of Southern Queensland is located in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, and is a world leading distance education university.  We have a 92% satisfaction rating amongst communication post-graduates for their courses!

 

 

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Putting a value on agency communication in disaster

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We’re at the tail end of the disaster season in Australia, with the Queensland bushfire season extended by four months past its usual end, Victoria and NSW working fire business as usual and cyclone watchers waiting for the big one, which could still happen in the next few weeks.

More than ever, community involvement in disaster management is necessary.

Yet my new research shows that more than one fifth of the problems experienced during disasters in this country related to shortcomings in communication with the community. Despite this, less than one per cent of most agency operational budgets are allocated to the communication and community engagement functions.

This one per cent has certainly saved lives already this season – the February heatwave saw catastrophic bushfires in NSW with the town of Uarbry burnt to the ground and others experiencing extensive damage – but no lives lost.

But we won’t always be this lucky.  So where is it going wrong?

I reviewed 22 reviews, inquiries and debriefing documents of events and exercises that occurred between 2009 and 2016, including the Black Saturday bushfires.  The documents covered bushfires (17), floods (3) and hazardous chemical incidents (2).

I analysed 672 recommendations and findings from these reports and found that 20.4%, or 137, concerned community communication shortcomings during the incident.  I did not include agency or cross-agency communication in this count.

This was up 1.3% from a similar study of 2003-2008 reports that was published 2009 with Dr Amalia Matheson.  I’ll talk more later about why this might be.

Top of the list was education and pre-disaster engagement, which reflects the bushfire focus of the documents I reviewed.  They made up 39 of the 137 findings.

This also happens to be the most time consuming function of communication teams, and lack of resources will affect this activity the most. Extensive Bushfire and Natural Hazards Co-operative Research Centre research shows exactly what needs to be done and what dialogue needs to be established to prepare communities and individuals for bushfire, cyclone, tsunami, earthquake and flooding.   We have the opportunity to be effective in this area with just a small amount of additional investment on what currently occurs. Benefits of doing this are tangible.

Next culprit was communication planning, which included strategic planning for incidents where communication had been overlooked – 21 (or 15.3%) of the findings dealt with this.  This is another time-intensive function, but it has no tangible result – it can’t be linked to the outcomes in a specific incident, and only measurement of trends over years can provide solid proof of its effect.

Warnings attracted 20 findings (14.6% of the total), which was most concerning, because the warnings phase of response is where most lives are saved.   Over-represented in the warnings findings were hazchem incidents, with two incidents examined generating five of the 20 findings relating to warnings.  Reading further into the review of each incident, this seemed to be a result of hazchem events falling outside the experience and operational guidelines of metro and rural fire services.  In some incidents, warnings were received  by unofficial means before the official version arrived.

Interaction with the media was also problematic, with 17 findings (12.4%).  These included delays in moving media materials through head office for sign off in fast moving incidents, where any delay can see a media release or information points out of date before it is released; the importance of having media in state operation centres to speed up broadcast of critical information; and consistency of facts given across all media.

Resourcing of the communication function was specifically identified in five findings (3.6%), but also fingered as a contributor to findings relating to lack of communication engagement plans, overlooking specific communication channels (such as social media), media liaison skills, media planning, and messaging skills.

However, the news is not all bad.   Nine of the 137 findings referred to social media (7%), causing an increase in the total findings on 2010. Seven of these related to incidents in 2011, the other two from the Tasmania bushfires review of 2013. None of the 13 later reviews, published from 2013 to early 2016, referred to social media, indicating that agencies have improved social media strategies and resourcing.

In the 2010 study, half of the 12 reviews considered did not include community feedback in the review process.  Of the 22 reviews studied here, 77% used this technique to identify problems for the review process.  With communication being the key link between operations and the community, it would be expected that more findings relating to this aspect of emergency management might emerge.

Overall, communication is a critical component of emergency management that seems not to have the higher level commitment that it should – after all, appointing a new communicator or funding a preparedness campaign is not as tangible or promotable as a new fire truck.

Barbara Ryan is a disaster communication researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia and teaches crisis and disaster communications in the Graduate Certificate of Business.

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Evacuation – who does and who doesn’t?

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With cyclone season approaching in key-west-81664_960_720the southern hemisphere, emergency managers will be thinking about a big one that might lead to evacuations. And it appears that local information is the key to informed evacuation decisions.

What makes people evacuate or not? And who leaves and who stays?

Newly published research from Texas A&M University and the University of Washington, Seattle, investigates evacuations leading up to Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.  The research gives some clues on factors that affect the evacuation decision making and who does what.

Key points from the research by Huang, Lindell and Prater were:

  • Expected personal impact is the biggest predictor of a person evacuating
  • Older people are more likely to underestimate the speed of the arrival of the storm
  • Women are more sensitive to cues of all types and are more likely to want to evacuate given the right information relating to the risk they face
  • Home ownership does not affect the decision to evacuate, but people with higher incomes and levels of education are more likely to evacuate
  • News media is an important source – and if people accessed any news media, they were likely to have accessed other sources as well
  • Memory of false alarms will discourage evacuations, but if people are assured that this is because of the unpredictability of the storm, and not because information will be withheld or errors made by agencies, they will evacuate
  • Only official warnings, the area people live, expected wind impacts and concerns about obstacles to evacuation will lead directly to an evacuation decision – demographic factors, news media, social and environment cues and hurricane experience all need further mediation to result in an evacuation decision
  • People were preoccupied with wind speed, overlooking the potential for storm and tidal surges into their community, possibly as a result of the focus of official information, which provided scant details on flooding

The biggest take home from this is that the storyline that needs to be built about how the cyclone will affect individuals at a local level.

This puts the spotlight on the importance of local spokespeople who can describe the potential impact in local communities – an approach that contradicts current practice in some areas, particularly in Australia.

A second point is reinforcement of current agency practice  to use as many channels to get information to the community as possible – if people use conventional media and their online forms, they are more likely to tap into other channels and sources.

And who evacuates?

The answer is mostly found in the places people live – their level of risk and the perception of the threat will cause people from some geographic areas and residence types to evacuate. This probably leads to fewer older people evacuating because of their tendency to think they have more time.

People who have access to information from local emergency managers who have local knowledge, and because of this are trusted and credible, are also more likely to evacuate.

So it all comes back to the need for a community-based approach to disaster  management.

Barbara Ryan is a disaster communication researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, and teaches crisis and disaster communications in the the Graduate Certificate of Business. She is currently researching how people receive and react to official communications in a bushfire.

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