Three hundred and sixty characters

Here is the sentence I have said in every after-action review I have ever sat in, and I have sat in a lot of them. The alert worked. The information did not.

Every single tool in my kit is an alerting tool. The sirens carry a tone that means go inside and find out more, which is fine until you ask people what they actually think the tone means and discover half of them think its the noon test and a quarter think its a tornado regardless of what the actual hazard is. WEA gives me a headline. Reverse-911 gives me the stale contact list. Social gives me an algorithm.

None of that is instructing. Instructing is: the plume is moving northeast, if you are east of the river you are fine, if you are in these six blocks close your windows and turn off your HVAC and here is how to do that on the three most common thermostats, we expect this to last four hours, we will come back at the top of every hour, and if you are on oxygen call this number now. Thats not three hundred and sixty characters. Thats twenty minutes of a human being talking, and it changes every hour, and it has to be in more than one language because a fifth of my city speaks something else at home.

For twelve years the only tool I had for that was a press conference, which reaches the people watching the news at the moment I hold it, and a webpage, which reaches the people who go looking. Neither of those is the person standing in their kitchen at nine at night wondering if they should leave.

What we have now is a standing channel. Its been up for two years, it has a QR code on the side of every city vehicle and on the utility bill and on the sign outside the EOC, and we use it constantly for boring stuff — council, the parade, the leaf collection schedule — specifically so that it is not a strange new thing on the worst night. That was the single best decision we made and it was not a technology decision. A channel nobody has ever opened is a channel nobody opens during an incident.

The translation piece is the one I did not anticipate. I assumed it would be a compliance box. It is not a compliance box, it is a completely different relationship with about eighteen thousand residents. They are not getting a summarized, delayed, secondhand version of what I said. They are getting what I said, when I said it, including the parts where I am uncertain and say so. That is not a small difference. I have had community leaders tell me it is the first time the city has talked to their people instead of about them, and I did not have a good answer to that, because they are right, and it took us far to long.