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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
PUBLIC & MEDIA RELATIONS BY JAMES DRAGO
MR. NEMMERS: Good afternoon. I am Charles Nemmers with the University of Missouri in Columbia. My first experience with earthquakes was in 1971 at the San Fernando earthquake where I did disaster surveys for the FHWA on old Tujanga Canyon Road. I was fortunate to work with Mr. James Cooper for sometime and learned more about earthquakes and their roles and impacts not only tin he United States but worldwide. The technology part of earthquakes is really interesting to me. But it´s really the other side of the coin, the policy, the public perception, and the information communications parts of these disasters that are really important to be effective in making sure that the technical parts really get to work.
We´re really pleased to have two journalists with us who are going to talk about the role that the public media and information in disasters but earthquakes in particular.
Our first presenter is Jim Drago from the California Department of Transportation. Jim started his career working as a reporter and editor at newspapers on the West Coast. After the newspaper business, he got heavy on work and light on some of the rewards so he shifted over to CALTRANS. He was fortunate on his first day, in that, earthquakes came about the same time. He´s been with CALTRANS for about 15 years and has led the media and the public relations parts of CALTRANS through Whittier, Loma Prieta, Northridge and another earthquake just in the last two weeks.
I know Jim more from picking up the Engineering News Record magazine and there is an article about something in California affecting transportation. They always say, "CALTRANS spokesman, Jim Drago says"
Jim, we´re anxious to hear about disasters within a disaster.
MR. DRAGO: Thank you. It´s sure a pleasure to be here with you. Isn´t it interesting that we´re talking about earthquakes and I thought what better way to help me introduce my presentation than for California to have an earthquake. So I brought Monday´s copy of the Sacramento Bee and there is the headline of a predawn earthquake. This was a minor one. I mean, we didn´t blink on this one, but goes to show you earthquakes are news.
I would like to talk about the fact that earthquakes are disasters and where people like me come into play is what I always like to refer to as the disaster within the disaster. What you find in an earthquake are multiple stages.
We got pumped up about earthquakes after I arrived at the Department of Transportation and sometimes I wonder whether the two events were connected. Maybe there was some sort of a seismic event there.
We kind of had a practice earthquake in 1987 with the Whittier quake. Most of the country didn´t even know we had it. That was a pretty bad earthquake. We´re talking magnitude 6. We had one bridge that had a problem, a connector between the Interstate 5 and the 605 in southern Los Angeles County. We had a column that literally blew out but it kind of maintain itself upright so it kept the freeway bridge up. A lot of people in our department were breathing a pretty good sigh of relief.
So that kind of underscored what our technical people were warning us about on strengthening the earthquake program. That earthquake really kick started and got us into full gear. For us on the public information side, it was a real good wake up call. We realized we needed to really be prepared so that when the earthquake hit, we would be ready to respond to questions. Over the last two days you´ve seen a lot of pictures of the damage in California. It is really traumatic. When you see it up close and personal, it´s just amazing the power of Mother Nature. When that happens, you´re kicking yourself into full gear.
Our job in the public information side is to get two things correct. We´ve got to get the information right and we´ve got to get it fast. That sets you up with is a dilemma. We refer to it as the Gulf War Syndrome. Information has to be immediate. People have gotten the idea that it´s TV program: a Gulf War that we fight and watch on television. We watch from our home; they cut to commercial; and the war is over in 30 days. That´s pretty immediate. So what we found is that people are demanding and requesting information. They want the answers immediately so there is a real tendency on our part to try to give them everything we´ve got. Sometimes when you do that, you find out you´re not saying the same thing. You´re getting it wrong. The message is getting convoluted and then you end up taking a bad situation a lot worse.
Jim Roberts was here yesterday and I always use Jim as great model of what happens when disaster strikes. Many of you in this room, I´m sure, know Jim or at least know of his reputation. I have to tell you that from a news reporter´s standpoint, Jim Roberts is absolutely from heaven. I mean, when you think of a bridge engineer, this is the face you could think of, crew cut, the whole nine yards. He just exudes credibility. The media love him because he´s just a real down to earth very honest, very straightforward person. The first time I met Jim back in the mid 1980s, I thought, wow, if we ever get in trouble, this is the guy I want to go to war with because he´s very, very good.
After each earthquake, we set up our press briefings and press conferences. These were done to help reassure the public that we have technical experts out there who know what we´re doing in taking care of the recovery and the response. It´s real critical in identifying who you want as your face and the message you want to put out there.
When the earthquake initially hits, there is the basic demand for updated information on what´s happening. This is where we get some help from people like Ken and the rest of the media. They´re able to help us get the message out about what kind of shape the system is in, what´s the problem and what you do to deal with it. So that´s very critical for us right in the beginning. It allows us to get the up-to-date information to the public so they know what is going on.
That also makes it important for us to make sure that the communication lines are open. You heard Erol Kaslan this morning talking about the response from the technical end. It´s critical that you keep those communication lines open between your field people and those of us whose job it is to get that information out. It´s also important to keep a line open to the media so that they, in effect, can act as your agents in helping getting that message out.
A lot of disaster response people tend to look at the press or news media as being the enemy. That´s really not the case at all. They have a job to do and it´s an important job as agents for the public. We have tried over the years to develop a good working relationship with the reporters so that they´re acting as our agents to help us get the necessary and accurate information out to the public: immediately after the event and the following weeks. With all of this comes rumor control. Some of the stories that get put out there are just off the wall. You really have to deal with it from who´s to blame to who wants to be the martyr. It runs the gamut. Rumors always tend to be a problem and so it´s important that you folks, particularly the folks in the technical field, are working closely with what I´m going to call your messengers. If there are rumors or inaccurate information out there, you need to drive a stake in it as quickly as you can.
After the initial shock, you run into what we call the blame game. This has happened in every one of our earthquakes, primarily the two big ones: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1994, Northridge earthquake. With in the first 24 to 48 hours after a disaster hits, people start pointing fingers and saying, you should have done this, you should have done that. Case in point. The night of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the World Series was that day, Oakland A´s and the Giants were getting ready to play. Some of you may have been at the game or some of you probably saw it on TV. They eventually tracked down the then governor of California, George Deukmejian, who was in Europe at the time. He was in Germany at his hotel room in Frankfurt. Now George Deukmejian is a really decent human being and a very, very nice fellow. Like anybody else, when you get hit cold with something, sometimes you make some remarks that aren´t necessarily the most political. When George Deukmejian was cornered by some of the press, his reaction was, geez, the engineers at CALTRANS didn´t tell me there was a problem and that this was a danger. Well, come on, governor, nobody had any inkling that that earthquake was going to hit; that those structures were in any kind of vulnerable position; and most of all, that it could collapse and people would get killed. Not the most political of remarks. You would be surprised what that sends through an organization. It´s pretty tough when you´re in battle to begin with and suddenly your chief executive is putting a stake in your heart. So that´s pretty tough.
And then you run into is the press. And Ken, by the way, was in California for our two major earthquakes, so we have kind of a long history going back and forth. And he knows that as a reporter, he is getting pressure from the editor. This certainly couldn´t just be a natural disaster. It had to be somebody´s fault.
I will always remember the first press conferences we had at the Loma Prieta where we trotted Jim Roberts out and Jim was answering all sorts of questions. One of the reporters, a fellow by the name of Dan Weintraub was working for the Los Angeles Times and he now works for the Orange County Register in Sacramento as a capital correspondent for them. Dan is a very smart, good writer, and a real tough questioner. Imagine a small room with about 50 reporters just crammed in. There was no place for Dan to sit so he sits right at the foot of the podium where Jim Roberts is standing answering questions. The press conference is going back and forth, real give and take and pretty tough, and we´ve prepared Jim for everything we could think of, every possible question you could get except one. Dan looks up at Jim, now you´ve got to imagine, Dan is sitting on the floor and he´s gazing up at Jim, and he looks at Jim and says, "Mr. Roberts, how do you feel knowing you had a hand in killing 43 people?" This was a pretty tough question but Jim´s pretty tough himself. I´m thinking that this guy´s a rock. I figured, well, he´s going to do one of two things here. He´s either going to just completely break down because he´s under a lot of stress or he´s going to reach over and grab Dan by the tie and yank him up and hang him on the wall. Jim took a deep breath, and he said, "You know, I was in high school in the East Bay when that freeway was built, and the fact of the matter is that they over designed it." Jim was prepped. He knew what had gone in that freeway at the time they built it and it was over designed for the criteria that were in place at the time. It was a good answer and he was ready for it. Some times you think there are some places people won´t go and then all of a sudden, there´s a tough question. Now, was Dan out of line by asking the question? I don´t think so. It was probably a question everybody else was thinking and wanted to ask. It´s tough, but you´ve got to expect these kinds of things.
You always run into "brush fire" control. It is really tough where you get misleading information and put it out. It runs the gamut. There is a tendency by people to put out information that isn´t really accurate; it´s a little bit off and next thing you know, you´ve got all kinds of problems. So whenever you have an event like an earthquake, you´ve got to make sure the information is getting out in a timely manner and it´s right. If it gets out and it´s wrong, that"s an awful hard thing to correct. It takes on a life of its own and you end up fighting it during the anniversary where someone pulls something out from the newspaper morgue and reminds you of some untrue "fact."
Under the blame game -- we who"s at fault? The media tends to want to point the finger because you always want to find if there´s somebody responsible. It"s like the old Perry Mason shows where it was always at the end where they would confront the guilty person and they would just blurt out their confession, "of course it was me, I did it." But that´s not the real world. But there is a tendency of wanting to point the finger of blame.
Second is outside critics. You´re always going to run into them. People see opportunities where they can make a name for themselves and they´re outside critics. After the earthquake in 1989, we had a construction executive from New Jersey who was quoted in one of the major engineering publications, pontificating about what had happened at Loma Prieta. This person wasn´t even an engineer; he was a construction executive. This guy had no more right or expertise to comment on this than I do. I don´t have a degree in engineering.
Another thing you´re going to run into are people trying to talk about things they don´t know. When the earthquake happened in the Bay Area, we saw a highway patrolman explaining to one of the state senators who´s on the transportation committee about why the Bay Bridge failed. They do a beautiful job and helped take some of the elected officials around to some of the damage but that was it. It says traffic officer on his badge not bridge engineer. What he was giving the state senator was wrong. We were there so that our people were able to get the state senator in touch with a design engineer. He explained the bolts on the bridge were designed for 500,000 pounds of force and they were hit with an estimated 2 million pounds of force. Even I can figure out what happens on a situation like that.
You always run into what I would call internal martyrs, the people who see this as a path to sainthood and they don´t want to wait to die and go through the canonization process. They just want to go ahead and get it done now. In 1989, we had a guy who had been a junior civil engineer working on the construction of the Cypress Freeway in the 1950s. He went to the press and said, "You know, I worked on that project and I should have seen it. I had the plans right there, and I could have seen that the detail was weak and that I should have pointed it out and how could I have done this." So right away, he´s now trying to say it was me. That´s very bad for us because that´s pointing to negligence. In the 1950s when they designing this, nobody had an idea that double deck structures with this particular type of detail would fail. It just was not on the radar screen. So for him to accept the blame was just not right. But it feeds this whole idea that the Department engineers were negligent at the time.
The former chief designer of the job was living in Sacramento at the time and was in his eighties. Jim Roberts went and got him and brought him into the office two days after the earthquake happened. He sat him down and went through the plans and saw that in fact the bridge had been over designed for the criteria at the time. So if he had done anything wrong, it was over designing the bridge and we actually needed a rebate. He owed the public some money.
In dealing with the brush fires, you have to keep informed with your technical experts. It is very critical your technical people keep that line of communication open with you and it´s really a two way street. We were fortunate in that we had a practice run with the 1987 Whittier quake. That event tended to get our technical people a little more attuned to the idea that they have information we have to share. In 1989 we were able to develop a pretty good working relationship with the technical field staff so we were able to get information from the field to the messengers and out to the public. Coordination and agreement on how the information is to flow can be done prior to a disaster. That´s where the training and the preparation really come into play. You identify the key contact people and how to get in touch with them. You set up a process and you find out that it really works when a disaster hits. Unfortunately, we have gotten a lot of practice on this. We get earthquakes off the northern California coast and that generates questions on the weekends. We´re able to run through the information sharing steps.
The other thing you have to do is to anticipate the media hot spots. The one thing that we´ve noticed in the California is a disaster can happen in one place and we´ll get bombarded with media inquiries three and 400 miles away.
Great, case in point is Los Angeles. Its a huge media center, so is the Bay Area. Sacramento is big; San Diego is big. So when we have an earthquake in the Bay Area we´re getting a lot of questions in the LA office about structures in LA even though it´s hundreds of miles away. In fact, when there are major earthquakes around the world, you´d be surprised how many questions we get and stories that get generated based on us. When they had the terrible earthquake in Kobe, Japan, we got questions because people wanted to know how California design compared to Japan´s and which one was better. Well, it´s not a question of better. It´s a different approach to try to get to the same goal. It´s really those kinds of things where we try to work with our technical people to identify what are some of the media hot spots will be when one of these events occur.
I can only tell you that planning does pay. If you´re not ready and you don´t have your process in place with a lot of the data and information, it´s too little to late. You just don´t have the time to collect the information and then give it out. I´m a big believer in planning and being ready. In a major earthquake you don´t really have time to go in there and read the emergency preparedness plan. You have to know what to do ahead of time so read it ahead of time. You´ve got to use a lot of common sense and not panic. If you do those two things, you´ll get through it in one piece.
Also, it´s so important to have information on hand. We´re trying to put more and more background information on our internet home page because it makes it a lot easier for the reporters to access information. That really is more conducive to their deadlines. It also helps them focus their questions on what´s happening now. It helps us too since we don´t have to find that information but just refer reports to the internet address. For example, when we have an earthquake, we´re going to get questions from Canada´s former colleagues in California asking how many bridges we have retrofitted. We don´t need to go back and dig that out, we´ve got that on there now. We can even give him a list and the whole shooting match. It just makes it a lot easier. It gives you a little breathing room, a little elbowroom.
Again, communications is really the key and everybody in the organization. We try to underscore with our people that they should only talk about those issues that they´re familiar with.
We had Erol Kaslan here this morning. And Erol is a top-notch engineer and he´s very good and we like him to talk to the media but on issues he knows. If they start digging into funding and policy questions, we´re not paying Erol to answer those questions. He could probably answer them but we´re not paying him to do that. We want him to stay focused on his area of expertise.
Now, after making sure your communication is in place, you´ve got to make sure that you have adequate staffing at the scene. It is important for your messengers to work with your technical folks at the scene and where you would expect the media to go. For example, our structures maintenance unit was in Sacramento after the 1989 earthquake. The earthquake was hundred miles away in the Bay Area. We have people at the scene and we have people at our headquarters complex ready to handle the media. The one place we didn´t think about was out at our structures maintenance office. This is about two miles away from our main building. Lo and behold, a fellow by the name of Angus McKenzie who was doing some research for ABC News shows up there at 5:30 in the morning. He wants to go through our bridge book that is the log of the history of every single bridge on our system. And to their credit, our bridge maintenance called me and said what do you think. And I said, "Put him on the phone." So he gets on the phone, and I said, "Angus, you´ve got 30 seconds to get out of the building or I´m going to have you arrested." Because the last thing we need is this guy rifling through our records and possibly walking off with something that we´re going to need.
So we had to define the boundaries. It´s important that you identify where these critical locations are and to make sure that everybody´s on board because otherwise things have a habit of disappearing. There are documents and material information that our technical people are going to need in responding to the disaster.
It´s also important that you have district command centers. Jerry Baxter talked about this yesterday. It´s one thing to have the policy discussion being driven from on high from the political side of the department and another to have those hands-on people who are out there every day so that they can talk in terms of traffic control, detours, and all those sorts of things that directly affect people. They are our customers. So it´s really important that you have the district command centers adequately staffed.
Finally is the headquarters: the policy folks need to be part of the overall process. You don´t want policy decisions being made by people out in the field. Those are really being driven from on high. We have internal reporters in both our headquarters building and our district. They help gather information and they also disseminate information to the outside people and the management in the district and headquarters and vice versa. Sometimes there is a disconnect and we tend to focus more on the media and forget about our own management. They all need to be part of the process as well. It´s so important to keep top management and the political administration informed of what´s going on. They may get double headered, but it´s always better to tell them more than once than not enough. You will find that that really eliminates a lot of problems for you.
Again, we try to have daily press briefings and have them both in the affected area and headquarters. This allows us to feed the hunger pangs of the media. Accept the fact that people like Ken and his colleagues have a job to do and their job is as an agent for the public. They help us inform the public on the state of their highway system, the repairs needed, and what you´re doing about it. It´s a good opportunity to reinforce to the public that you have capable, dedicated people who are out there working on their behalf. So there´s a real opportunity.
We also try to do have district and headquarters offices brief our affected staff. Sometimes they get disconnected from the overall response and it´s important to bring them in because it is a team. One person´s not going to do it.
I was particularly interested this morning when I listened to part of the presentation about stress and the toll it takes. That´s also a real cathartic exercise for all of those involved. You really are helping to draw strength off each other and we found that to be very, very valuable.
It comes down to spreading the message and how do we do that really. We have media conferences. We put together media packets of information. We´re using the internet more. We do news releases and, of course, we answer questions. In our Sacramento headquarters in the four weeks after the Loma Prieta earthquake, we took over 600 phone inquiries from reporters seeking information. And that´s everybody from the local folks to those around the world. I mean we were getting everybody because it´s so dramatic that the information is just there and people want it and they deserve it.
I was born in New York City so I´m part Coney Island so what I call the hot dog syndrome is real familiar to me. The hot dog syndrome is potentially one of the worst things that can happen to you and it´s something I never expected. People see disasters as their 15 minutes of fame. They´re going to try and garner the limelight. There are two different elements to this. One is what we´ll call the bureaucrats or the career employees. The second group is made up of the political people who see disasters as their opportunity for a PR event. We´ve seen that all over recorded history. Even funerals are becoming PR events. That makes it very difficult
We had problems in both of the earthquakes in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles. Some career civil servants were viewed as being too visible. That got to be a real pain in the neck for those of us in headquarters where political people were sitting next to us asking, "Oh, wait a minute why is he garnering all the attention, when it ought to be my boss getting it?" This is something to be very conscious of. It is a problem you need to deal with. In the whole scheme of a disaster you´re thinking, "Boy, what a waste of energy." But you will find that as you get farther and farther away from the disaster, it becomes a big deal. I wish we could take that hot dog with relish and mustard, put it in a bun, and eat it at Coney Island and leave it out of disasters.
So I´m done, and I would be happy now to turn it over to Ken. Thank you.
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