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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
NEWSPAPER REPORTER'S PERSPECTIVE BY KEN LEISER
MR. NEMMERS: Thank you very much, Jim. We'll have Ken talk next and we'll have a little time at the end for questions.
We're real pleased this afternoon to have not only someone from CALTRANS who's been through it, but also someone from the other side of the equation. Ken Leiser has been a journalist for about 15 years. He grew up working on the West Coast. He was working in the San Francisco Bay Area when the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred. When he moved down to Torrance, he was working in the Los Angeles area when the Northridge earthquake occurred. And two years ago he moved to St. Louis. I'm worried he may have brought an earthquake to St. Louis.
Ken is now a transportation reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch which is the signature newspaper in this neck of the woods and probably the signature newspaper in the state of Missouri. It's a large paper and has a lot of influence in the St. Louis area and the region as well. So Ken has an area of influence that's very large. He also has a perspective of getting good information. One thing I would like to highlight that was mentioned was the link with public affairs and the media and linking it now as opposed to after the disaster. Ken, we're going to ask you to present what is important from your perspective.
I know maybe what some of you may be thinking right now is what's the press doing here, why do they have a speaking part. I'm not used to being on this side of the microphone but I jumped at the opportunity. Since the Federal Highway Administration, MODOT and IDOT brought us all together, they consider keeping the public informed by assuring the flow of information to the public as important as I do. I think that's good news for everybody.
I did have a supporting role in covering a couple of earthquakes: one as a very young editor in Northern California during the Loma Prieta earthquake and one as a reporter in southern California. Because this is a highway conference, I'm going to keep my remarks focused on the highways.
In California, as Jim might tell you, earthquakes were some of the biggest transportation stories of the late 1980s and 1990s. Not only did you have the initial events that occurred in Loma Prieta and southern California with the disruption and the damage but also the aftermath.
These earthquakes really sped up the seismic retrofit program in California to what it is today. I think they have retrofitted up to 2,000 bridges at significant expense and at the expense of non-retrofit projects.
Here in Missouri the story seems to be always lack of money for highway projects. It's no different in California. They just placed a major emphasis on retrofitting their existing structures and rightfully so.
I also worked covering politics in the state capital and a lot of the transportation slash earthquake stories. What we covered there were really political stories. We had all those bridges that were vulnerable to major earthquake. Which ones do you start improving first: the ones in southern California or the ones in northern California? You open up a can of worms on some long standing geographic risks that were out there.
I committed a sin that you'll probably never see a reporter do. I neglected to put my name on some of my papers here. If you need to contact me after the conference or my phone number is (314) 340-8119, and my E-mail address is Kleiser@post-dispatch.com.
If I do anything today, I want to at least give you some windows into how a reporter thinks. That might seem like a scary thing after some of stories you heard about significant disasters. After a catastrophic event, our collective role is an extension of the public. We're basically out there to inform people that Jim referred to as your customers. They're your family members; they're your neighbors or fellow citizens. My job is to give them the best information on the fly that I can in the event of an earthquake. That is not always easy, especially when you've got widespread damage and a lot of facts coming at you very rapidly.
To reemphasize, the public has a hunger for this information. You'll see TV stations dump their programming and devote all of it to an earthquake. You'll see newspapers put out special sections devoted entirely to the coverage of the event.
During the Loma Prieta, I was working at a small newspaper in Palo Alto, which did get damaged to some degree. A lot of the damage was further to the east and to the north and to the south of us. We were a very small operation. We had a lot of reporters to put out in the field. I was the night city editor. As all of you know who were watching game three of the World Series that year, the earthquake occurred in the evening, right in the middle of my shift. All the editors stayed on board and we all tried to develop a game plan. What became immediately obvious was that we had no plan. Even though we were in earthquake country, we were caught completely off guard by the magnitude of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the damage. I'll kind of echo what Jim said on the rumor mill. We started tuning into a.m. radio that became a bulletin board for information in the minutes and probably the immediate hours after the earthquake. Well, the stuff that people were phoning into the radio was amazing. At one point it was broadcasting that half the Golden Gate Bridge had fallen down. This was obviously a reference that had been passed along two or three times about the Bay Bridge where one section had collapsed.
This taught us about the quality of the information that was coming out. This was one of those good news-bad news things. The bad news was that the original death tolls were very high: 200 to 250. The good news was it wasn't as high as those original forecasts and a big part of the reason was they were using traffic calculations based on an average rush hour during the week. But we the World Series going on and a lot of people left work early and traffic wasn't as heavy as it normally would have been. So again, the good news was the death tell wasn't that high but for two days that information was out there.
The Northridge earthquake resulted in widespread-highway damage in southern California. There were reports of commutes of four hours for some people in the New Hall pass area. When some of the freeways were knocked out and when the Santa Monica Freeway was closed, gridlock occurred. I was a general assignment reporter and I ended up going out to the King Harbor Pier in Redondo Beach where the piers were built on fill. There was a lot of liquefaction so there was widespread damage. The nature of earthquakes created severe damage that "hop-scotched" around southern California. We got major damage in the Northridge Grenada Hills area where it was centered. There was major damage in Santa Monica just down the road from us. We were largely spared.
We had a saying in journalism school that you get the "who, what, when, where and why" questions asked as a reporter. Some of the really basic and obvious things we look for in the hours after an earthquake are the human casualties, the property, infrastructure damage, where was it centered and the magnitude. I also wanted to focus on the human element. Jim talked a lot about how you can get the word out on some of these other facts but there is no shortage after an earthquake of human drama. We really saw that with the Loma Prieta earthquake where we had an entire section of highway fall down. People got out of their cars, ran in from the surrounding neighborhoods, and started rescuing people. It was really amazing. As reporters, we will go out to talk to people because we're also telling a story and that's a big part.
You can go out and ask any 100 non-veterans after an event like this, what did it look like or what were your impressions. Fifty of them will come back and tell you that it looked like a war zone. Obviously, everybody has an image of what a war zone must look like. Their quote always ends up in the paper.
We want to know where the worst damage is and what kind of damage we're talking about. Northridge earthquake, I believe, rendered 46,000 homes uninhabitable. For power outages, people want to know when their power is going to come back on. I heard somebody talk earlier that they have partnerships with power companies in terms of responding to earthquakes. That's valuable because there is nothing more isolating than having your power out.
We want to know how many people were injured, how many are missing, and the list goes on and on. We have our own checklist, although it's probably more mental than something written out in a game plan. We want the best information, as much as we can get as soon as we can get it including regular updated lists of closures, and detours. Our sources include the office of emergency services, Department of Transportation, hospitals, police, city officials, utilities, and airports. We'll go down an entire list. We all cover some things. We all cover hospitals; we all cover cities: and we all cover police departments. We will just go down our sources and start calling people.
I believe bridges have provided some of the most enduring images of those two recent earthquakes in California. I remember three nights in a row you had the big three anchors televised live in front of the Cypress structure which had collapsed. The things people remember. They were also the site of incredible property and loss of life. That's basically why a reporter like me, especially now that I cover transportation, will probably gravitate towards toward people who deal with the press on a regular basis, your departments of transportation.
There are some incredible challenges that I don't think are special to the newspaper or broadcast news business. The information you get is initially really incomplete but it is evolving. You really have to watch how you putting the information out there as preliminary or as tentative. You aren't going to get the whole picture or the whole story in one day. It took two or three weeks before they found out the full extent or the fact that the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a major sports venue, sustained about $35 million worth of damage.
When we reported on the Loma Prieta earthquake, our power was out for half of the night and we had reporters out in the field. This was before the days when everybody was carrying cell phones. We sent reporters out in the field in every which direction based on some of those radio reports that were as wrong as they were right in a lot of cases. It's difficult in the immediate hours because phone lines get flooded with calls or as you have outages to contact your regular news sources. We also suffer from the same limited mobility that everybody else does.
I heard somebody mention this morning that people in your agencies and our newsrooms are victims too. We have friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers who are affected that we have to attend to.
I was glad to hear Jim mention that in California they not only have the centralized communications in Sacramento but also hold news conferences and have media liaisons out in the field. That's very important. In California, Missouri, and a lot of the States, you don't have television reporters at the capitals any more. Television has basically pulled out of the state capitals and so getting that information and that live person out on the scene is critical because that's where the stations are. You look at St. Louis. You have the concentration of the electronic media here. You don't have the same presence in your state capitals.
The aftermath, I would classify this as a couple weeks out. It is easy to look at us in the media to jump out and assign blame. As an extension of the public, we're asking a lot of the same questions that the public is. When they see a collapsed structure or a buckled section of highway, they want to know why. They pretty much assume it has something to do with the earthquake. They want to know why things are happening and a big part of our job is to try to explain to people why events occurred. The best source of that information would be the inspection reports which you keep on file. Be ready to answer the questions about the status of the seismic retrofit program. CALTRANS always has an update on the seismic retrofit program. And that's a good thing to have. People and reporters will want to know, especially in an area like the Midwest.
We found public agencies in California and the West Coast were very well prepared because they got better prepared over time to respond to these major events. The one group that's really poorly prepared is the public. A lot of people don't take the necessary precautions to brace themselves for an earthquake. That's in California. Now, shift over to the Midwest where things like earthquakes don't happen except in places like conferences. They are not on people's radar screens as much as they are in California. Being able to give the information out to people who are totally shell shocked by an event like this is just critical. We appreciate whatever regular updates we can get on the post quake highway repairs.
It was almost a tale of two cities in California. In Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake you had a lot of those highways up and rebuilt in record time. And in northern California, for reasons, some of which I think are political, I don't think you had that same level of repairs occurring as quickly.
I worked for a very small newspaper in Palo Alto. It was struggling. It was having a very difficult time and we were having trouble keeping newspapers on the racks after that earthquake. I was stunned. We were surrounded by the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News: two very large papers. They were also being bought up in record quantities. I talked to some of my friends in the broadcast industry and they said that a similar thing happened to them. Just like after the Gulf War. We had people tune in and they stayed tuned in. People in the broadcast industry view this as an opportunity, not necessarily to boost ratings or generate ads, because they don't run that many ads during this late broadcast. They see it as an opportunity to build credibility with the viewers. That's a very important thing in the competitive broadcast industry.
Radio news stations were flooded with phone calls with news tips from people who became bulletin boards for the community.
Jim talked a little bit earlier about the sort of adversarial nature of our relationships. I wanted to spend a minute on some of the similarities in what you're facing and what we're faced with. You're trying to process a lot of information very quickly. You have your front line people like Jim, Linda Wilson of MoDOT District 6 and Sue Cox at MoDOT's Headquarters in Jefferson City. You have your front line people talking to your technical people trying to get all that information together in a meaningful way that the public can use and you're trying to do that in a very short amount of time. Meantime, you've got the press clamoring for updates on almost an hourly basis. I didn't know that you got 600 calls a day but that doesn't surprise me. We were working long hours in both the earthquakes that we covered. It became an around-the-clock operation with people going home when they had to finally get some sleep. When they were working, they were basically fielding all the calls from the public. You're getting calls from the press and your customer service people will also be getting calls from the public. And again, we're all facing the same logistical problems.
This portion of the presentation was supposed to be titled, "How to Stay Out of Trouble with Reporters." I prefer to refer to it as just how to avoid conflicts between your front line press liaisons and the media. They're pretty obvious. The first one, being open and honest, that goes without saying. Being able to know as a reporter that you're getting all the information that's available at that time. People in Jim's shop always had a very good reputation in California for being straight shooters and getting that information out there. Be accessible, we already talked about that, having people out in the various places where the focus of the media attention is occurring, very important. Being accessible over a long period of time, mindful of the tight deadlines that we're under. Our friends in the electronic media face a lot more regular deadlines that can be more forgiving because as information comes out, they can get it out there immediately. Don't play favorites. It doesn't happen very often, but when a reporter can't get through to an official that he needs to talk to for information and then seeing that official's beaming face on the six o'clock news is a little hard to take. Remember, you're going to get calls from all over the country if this is a major event. You're going to get calls from Washington DC, New York Times, and a lot of media outlets. So you can be talking to Diane Sawyer one minute and a reporter from the New York Times and then somebody from a ten thousand circulation paper from some part of your state that you've never heard of. People should all be treated equally.
A lot has happened since 1989. We have internet web sites. It's a good clearinghouse for information not only for the public but for us. A lot of things in the media are now being covered with the aid of regularly updated web sites. For instance in Missouri, the election results come down to the secretary of state and they're posted immediately. This has allowed us to cut out a lot of phone contacts that we had to make in the past.
This second item is maintaining current database of bridge inspections and seismic retrofit projects and having something ready to disseminate on a computer disk.
Something that was commonplace in California, but is just sort of starting to arrive here in Missouri is the use of intelligent transportation system equipment. One of the people I talked to before this presentation from the broadcast side, asked me to ask if you have closed circuit cameras out on the roads. It's a helpful tool, probably not the one we're going to jump to first because there is probably one news helicopter per capita in Los Angeles and they can get around and find out where the real damage and real traffic jams are.
Your disaster preparedness plans need to take into account getting information out to the public, very important. I checked around some of the DOTs in the area and they all seem to address it in different ways. The one thing that I would like to stress is if you have a centralized information clearinghouse system where all of it comes out of the capitol, I encourage you to at least think about having a satellite operation where you can have information being given out in the field. And secondly, most agencies have regular disaster preparedness drills and as they do here in Missouri. It would be a good idea if you invite the media along to get an idea of how things will work under the gun. We need the practice too.
The transportation system is very important. It does become a focal point in many cases after not just an earthquake but after any natural disaster. The public demands timely and accurate information about the infrastructure. People do want to know what happened to their cities, their highways, their hospitals, et cetera.
There are logistical challenges that we both face. They do make it difficult. We do try to get the best information out there and it isn't always clean and it isn't always pretty and sometimes we have to come back the next day and correct or revise. But if you're a responsible news organization, that's what you do. When something falls like the Cypress structure in the San Francisco Bay Area, you will get heavy scrutiny and for a lot of reasons. In that particular area of Oakland, there were a lot of older masonry buildings that didn't fall, and it obviously is going to raise questions, well, why did that structure fall and some of these other buildings survive.
Looking at alternative ways of getting information out and providing, the news you can use: the detours, when roads are expected to open again, and the transit schedules. The transit schedule is very important. In California many sections of highways were knocked out and we saw a tremendous initial spike in transit ridership immediately afterwards. Maybe your local transit agency can help get information out that would be helpful.
These natural disasters really do bring out the best in what we do. In both of the California earthquakes, two of the news organizations won the Pulitzer Prizes for news coverage of the events. In the Loma Prieta event, it was the San Jose Mercury and Oakland Tribune. In the Northridge earthquake, it was the Los Angeles Times. Newspapers don't set out to win prizes but they do rise to the occasion as do our brethren in the broadcast news. We try to do it all responsibly.
In closing all we can ask for is cooperation from you. If our talks today can spur any additional understanding of how we work and my understanding of how you work, so be it.
Thank you very much for your time.
MR. NEMMERS: Any questions either for Jim or Ken?
FROM THE AUDIENCE: My question is for Jim. Could you elaborate on how you disseminate information from multiple locations. You mentioned you're disseminating it from Sacramento, you're also disseminating it from the site of the situation, which I totally agree with. Our plan in Missouri is to disseminate it from Jeff City and I'm worried about that and I'm wondering how did you do that dissemination from multiple locations?
MR. DRAGO: That's really a good question. We set up a time every day where we would be in contact with the field office. So that would occur shortly after the technical briefings that would take place. So as soon as they were done, we would get in contact with the field office and then we would walk through the points that we wanted to get out that day. It took us a long time to really get our computer system up to where it is reliable. It now is really easy for us to put information on and just send it out by E-mail to all of our district offices and not to only the one in the affected area. We have about seven different media centers in California and they go everywhere from LA, which of course everybody realizes is big, to places like Bakersfield, Fresno, Chico, and Redding. In all these places there is an information appetite that needs to be fed. First, we deal directly and verbally with the affected area. Then we try to give out summaries of the points that we want to make that day to all of our field offices. So everybody is part of the loop. We also try to define what questions we're going to field and which ones need to be ship off for a policy answer.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Do you have your review and your technical bridge expert with you in Sacramento or with you in San Francisco for the San Francisco or in LA or did you designate somebody from that district office to be your technical expert on the site?
MR. DRAGO: The answer to your question is both. So often your chief technical people are flying around with the political people. You always want to show the flag. We try to have a daily briefing so even if the top technical people are out of town, their deputies are they are addressing the technical issues with you. The idea being the information funnels out from the home base and it's coordinated with the folks in the districts. What I've found is if you don't ask the same question precisely of every engineer you get different answers and they're all correct. That's very tough. That was a hard lesson to learn and you have newspaper types who don't understand. It's like asking if the sun is shining, yeah, it is. And when you ask the question of the engineer, he's says, well you know, you have a little cloud cover and the whole nine yards. And so it's a little different when they should be the same. So we try to control any differences.
You want the information to be correct and you want to it to be timely. The other issue that you run into is a political filter as well. Facts are facts and they're going to speak for themselves but there are other things that once you start getting into more of a political arena, it's a little tougher to make sure everybody is on to same page and again that's real critical.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Yes, for Ken or Jim, how do you think the advent of the internet would have changed your response in 1994? You mentioned the internet, that you have a well maintained web site. I think any web site could become deluged and possibly overwhelmed after an earthquake.
MR. LEISER: Yeah, I would say that's a tool, not the tool. As far as getting information out, it may have cut down on the amount of phone calls that we were getting, obviously. One thing we do now on our internet site is proving very helpful is we provide links for people. There are a number of other internet sites we're able to refer people to run by the USGS, CALTRANS, MoDOT, etc. that are helpful in getting some basic information out. We don't have all the answers for these people, so being able to rapidly get them to the place they want to go is helpful.
MR. DRAGO: I'm a big believer in technology. This is blasphemy for me because I am a journalism graduate so they'll probably pull my degree if I say this. It's absolutely great to have it and I really wish we had it then because it allows us to piggyback over people like Ken and go directly to our audience. They're not the only ones reading these internet pages. The public is reading them. As the public gets more and more attuned to that, you now have the opportunity. It helps you defang disreputable reporters, people really out there trying to stir the pot. They don't care about being precise and accurate. That's the minority. You get one of them with the wrong information and the next thing you know you've got a difficulty. Controlling the distribution of information helps you pick the technical people who you out on a press conference. You're able to drive the daily press briefings. In fact, you're kind of trumpeting it.
These kind of disasters are 24 hour a day stories. You might think the five o'clock news is on, that's it. The Post Dispatch has gone home and to bed. The problem is, like in California, you're right. The Post Dispatch has gone to bed but now the Times has their morning deadline coming up. CNN is going 24 hours a day, so there is no chance to really take a deep breath. If you have a vehicle to take your information and it's accurate and it's correct, you can present it in your way and drive some of the coverage and that's pretty good. You get a little more sleep that way.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Ken, you're asking for openness, honesty, and access. And in responses I hear Jim talking about political filtering, filtering and spin. Do you have a reaction to that?
MR. LEISER: Well, as one who gets spun quite a bit. I heard where Jim was coming from and I don't think he was talking about spinning the facts. Maybe just changing the order in which they come out. That occurs all the time. As a reporter I don't have a preset game plan. I have a pretty good idea of what the public wants to know and I'm getting it from whatever source and whatever order I can get it. Does it trouble me, no, because, you know, I've been in the business for 15 years. Everybody wants to put the best face on the information. I talked a lot about what we want. As somebody who gets telephoned by the media, you probably have a right to deserve a reporter who's open, honest, and fair. If they're starting to put out information that's inaccurate, you have every right to complain. It really is a two-way street and I'm not troubled by what Jim said.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: This is for Jim. What is your relationship with the FEMA public information people when there is a national disaster?
MR. DRAGO: I guess they are kind of like relatives. You see them at grand holidays. We really don't have much contact with them except when a disaster hits. We tend to work very well but more separate from one another because they're pros and they're trained in it. They deal with their area and we deal with our. We seem to mesh pretty well. I really can't tell you why. I think they have been through a zillion disasters so they don't panic. They're pretty rock solid with their feet on the ground. So I think overall the thing works pretty well.
MR. NEMMERS: From my time when I lived in California there was a disaster d'jour all the time. It was either a flood or a forest fire or an earthquake. The state is so big with a variety of different geography. There seems to always be a disaster of some sort so you work together on a regular basis. There is really a need to court that working relationship to keep it good.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Quick question, Ed Gray, Missouri Emergency Management. Two phrases you always hear, off the record, and what about the open mike syndrome.
MR. LEISER:I mean as far as your first question, the off the record thing. As a reporter, off the record to me means you're giving me some information that you don't want attributed to you. You don't want your name next to it. It's helpful for me as a reporter to maybe on a very rare occasion to go off the record just to help my news gathering. I don't do it too often. I think that if I can't give it to the public, why bother. And with regard to the open mike syndrome, I guess I need clarification on that.
MR. DRAGO: I'm glad you mentioned off the record. I should use that more but unfortunately, I tend to be the other way. I tend to say everything on the record because I tend to get myself in trouble. So I will share one anecdote with you, we have a minute. We were in the process of retrofitting the Carquines Bridge in the east San Francisco bay. The bridge was built in the 1950s and they were going to be replacing the rivets in the bridge with bolts. The subcontractor who got the subcontract contracted with a firm in Shanghai, China, Shanghai Fastener, to make the bolts. Sometimes when you do business in China, the message doesn't always get conveyed correctly. They didn't go through the normal quality control we insist upon. The bolts have to be tested for strength and toughness. Instead, they got the fasteners done and they put them on the boat. The boat comes over to the San Francisco Bay and they put them right there. They unload them at the dock right there at the Carquines Bridge. Our technical people say they have to be tested. They take them over to our laboratory, test them, and voila, they fail. They failed the strength and toughness testing. So 240,000 bolts are basically garbage. So, the Los Angeles Times find out about this because it's become quite an issue involving ironworkers and American made steel. I knew the reporter very well. We were talking and the reporter really boring in on me, like, how can the Department of Transportation and CALTRANS buy this junk, spending millions of dollars and just getting garbage. I said, listen, we have a procedure. Until we accept the material, we don't pay for it. It's on their ticket not ours. You know, the fact is, they used scrap metal to fabricate these bolts. The reporter keeps pressing me and I finally said, "listen Virginia, we think Ford Falcons ought to be on the bridge instead of in it." I thought it was a pretty funny line, ha, ha, ha; well, guess what, she prints it. Some of the people are thinking, you're poking fun here at something that's pretty series. They kept trying to make a point that we insist on quality. So next time, I'll remember it should be off the record or maybe I'll just think it.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: This is a question for Jim. Just wondering how you coordinated with your national media, the CNNs, the Today Show, NBC, ABC, what extra steps did you take to accommodate them and also make sure they had timely, accurate information?
MR. DRAGO: Boy, that's a good question because we really got hit with the whole load with the likes of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, CNN and everybody. It's just a matter of taking them one at a time. After the Northridge quake, we got called by Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America. They just take the phone and say, "Okay, you're on," and so you just kind of stumble through it. We are very fortunate in California because dealing with the national media is just an extension of what we face every day in LA and the Bay Area. When you're dealing with the LA Times, a lot of NBC and CBS are picking up stories that run in the LA Times. The bar is pretty high. We're very fortunate in California as well, that overall we have pretty good media in terms of ability and talent. Most of the people working out there are pros. That's not to downgrade anybody else but there are certain steps you go through from the little weeklies to the daily to the major metros. We're talking major newspapers and major broadcast media, television and radio, all over the state. When the Cypress Freeway failed in the 1989 earthquake, we had all sorts of people showing up and not just the big media. We had the Reverend Jessie Jackson show up and all sorts of others: real famous people who bring in an entourage. It becomes a Hollywood syndrome and almost everything is like a big production. We are fortunate in that we face that almost on a daily basis so it is almost routine for us.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: One question for James and one for Ken. How do you handle the questions that might seem unreasonable? For example, the bridge in Oakland that failed and the houses that were underneath are being studied by the engineers or other professionals. It's not just a simple answer.
MR. DRAGO: " No comment, your question is out of line." Basically, if it's a question that we can't answer, we'll just point blank tell them, " Can't answer that question" or just point blank say, " We don't know." "I don't know" is a good answer to a lot of questions. If you don't know, you just don't know. Now, I can try and check and get back to you, sure. If the question is really inappropriate, then you pretty much just handle it and say, you know, " The question really has no value" and we just kind of move on. You're going to find that most reporters for the most part, they're going to ask good questions, particularly in press conferences, because they're not going to get that many opportunities. If you wait and try to corral somebody after the press conference, it's usually a little hard. When I was a reporter, I never liked to share my good questions with my competitors because usually they would get the answer and they would come up with a good follow-up question. It's my hard work that somebody else has leaped on. I didn't particularly care for that.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: My other question is for Ken. I'm for the media. You indicated that you need, after two weeks, all the inspection reports and you're asking for a text for the people. I don't think the people need these detailed inspection reports of the 550 bridges. How much are you really looking for?
MR. LEISER: I'm not talking about a fishing expedition on every bridge. I was talking mainly on targeted incidents like the part of the Cypress Freeway viaduct that fell. That was a specific instance. I'm not necessarily going to get every bridge inspection report on every bridge in southern California. I might want just one, two, or three.
MR. DRAGO: After Loma Prieta, took the material on the affected bridges and put it in a reading room in our building. We let them all come in, sit down and go through it. We had a copier there for the visitors and we had somebody there to make certain things didn't go out the door. You don't want to say, " We want everything." We had a number of reporters after the fact, months, in some cases years later, say, " I want to know how you do your retrofit program and I want to see it." And I kept telling them, I said, " You know, it's not automated." At the time our bridge book was not automated. Basically it's paper plans, it's stacks of plans. And one of the reporters from southern California just didn't believe it, so I said, " Okay, why don't you get on a plane and come up." They came up and we took them in there and we showed it to them. They couldn't believe it. He just sat there and said, " Wow, I didn't realize that what you were telling me is really true." And I said, " Well, it's kind of the way this works." We try to accommodate them.
MR. NEMMERS: Seeing the earthquake results in Los Angeles, all I saw was the Santa Monica Bridge laying down. That was what CNN, ABC, CBS and other showed. The real story to me was the loss of only like nine bridges out of what, 5,000? Nine spans went down and 5,000 spans didn't. The real news was that if the area had been retrofitted, there was not a disaster. That nine out of 5,000 is small potatoes. How do you get this real story out?
MR. LEISER: I guess the word there is perspective, right? The fact that so many bridges didn't fail should be the story. But the umpteen thousand bridges that didn't fall don't get mentioned. We do try to give our readers or viewers, some perspective. It's a good point.
MR. DRAGO: It's funny in Northridge we had 60 structures that had been retrofitted within a 50-mile radius of the epicenter. All 60 of those performed as intended. But you know what, that's not a good story from the media standpoint. It's not glitzy. You remember the pictures back in 1989 of San Francisco that showed the marina district, San Francisco up in fireballs. Ninety eight percent of the Bay Area was unaffected by that earthquake. There were inconveniences but a lot of areas were not damaged. You would not have thought there was an earthquake. What more dramatic picture can you have than that of the sandwiched Cypress Freeway? You can just see it; it's so real and very dramatic. If somebody got up and said, " They had a 7.0 earthquake in California and they had 3,000 undamaged homes." And meanwhile there are 14 that failed and ten people got killed out of a population of seven million. The positive side doesn't make good or dramatic press. Public demands that there be no deaths and no injuries. The public expects the transportation system to function and when it doesn't function, there is a natural inclination to say that somebody must have messed up.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: I think a lot of reporters want to lean over your shoulders, learn some stuff, and just be right in your face at your command centers. How much access do you allow to the reporters and how do you control that?
MR. DRAGO: That's a really good question. We don't allow the physical access until we really get our act together. The problem is you get a lot of raw footage that's going out and it really needs to be organized. We don't give them much. We tell them right up front, we'll answer questions, phone us, we'll take care of it, and we'll schedule briefings for them. To let people roam is a mistake. I'll go back to the 1989 earthquake. I was dispatched to the state the office of emergency services to set up a central command post. They had just completely shut off trying to gather all the information. When I walked in, some reporters knew me and corralled me. I was not allowed to talk about the disaster in general. I just covered the transportation component. So we were able to get information out to the reporters about our specific piece. The simple answer is, be sure you take a deep breath and start the flow of accurate information. Otherwise, you end up with a free for all. That doesn't benefit us and it doesn't benefit the reporters either. They will get all sorts of information that's wrong. One thing a reporter hates to do more than anything is to have to write a retraction or go on the air and say, " Guess what, I made a mistake." That kills their credibility.
MR. LEISER: I've never made a request to go behind the bowels of the command center. I don't know what would be gained from that. I thought for a moment you were talking about access to the damaged structure. That's fair game as far as we're concerned, as long as the police and rescue people say we can cross, we'll cross. I don't think that request is generally made to go into the back rooms.
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