After Hurricane Matthew, a 48-foot raw water main serving southeastern North Carolina failed. More than 12.5 million gallons of daily supply serving 300,000 people was being lost in a location made difficult to work in by flooding, trees, and poor soil conditions. The three affected utilities immediately mobilized to protect their remaining water supply and to plan for the days ahead. A series of emergency response plans were instituted to handle the repair and inform the public. Over the following three weeks, the utilities used a Unified PIO under the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to proactively push out important information while reacting to rising customer concerns. News releases, interviews, photos, videos, posts, feeds, and threads were used to inform the public at all hours of the day and night, even with limited staff. These channels also proved to be essential in keeping the media actively engaged AND away from the sensitive work scene. Because of the greater transparency and information flow, the entire utility community earned overwhelmingly positive reviews for their levels of emergency response and customer care.
Learning Objectives:
_Communicate in a crisis, both during the hectic initial hours and over the course of several weeks, coordinating with the news media and social media.
_Apply the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to your emergency communications in a manner that both rapidly responds to concerns and proactively puts forward positive information that reassures the public about the good work being conducted on their behalf.
_Prepare for future crises by identifying any gaps in current emergency response plans when it comes to public communications and to seamlessly coordinate efforts with the work of public information staffs at the city or county level.
Contributor/Source
Mike McGill
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