Massachusetts Water Resources Authority real-time crisis communications

UPDATE May 5, 2010 -- Less than two hours after I published this blog post, Boston Globe Reporter Don Aucoin found it and contacted me for comment on a story he was in the process of researching and writing about the communications aspect of this emergency. That article Long-honed alert system passes its test run ran on the front page of today's paper and online and included a quote from me.

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On Sunday morning, I was enjoying a cool glass of tap water while relaxing at home with my family. The phone rang. As I did not recognize what popped up on my caller ID, I let it go to voicemail.

The message was from my local community’s "reverse 911" communications system that alerts everyone in town when there is an emergency. The message detailed a water main break in the area that had occurred several hours before. This was the first I had heard of the situation.

I jumped online to learn more. At that point the news was incomplete. But over the next few hours, newspaper Web sites started to report the story and TV stations began to show video of the massive leak.

It turned out that when the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority switched to a backup system to retain water pressure, the water was unsafe to drink, requiring a massive communications effort to millions of people.

The next day, I received a second reverse 911 call, updating the situation. I've captured the reverse 911 calls here.

I am stunned at how well the situation was handled by local authorities, the City of Boston, the State of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

Throughout the weekend, day and night, Fred Laskey, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority was all over the news providing updates. His information was detailed and he was always cautious about saying when things might return to normal.

The MWRA created a special site that pointed to detailed information available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

I was talking to my friend David Henderson this morning about this. David is an Emmy award winning former CBS television newsman who is now a brand journalist. To us, it was clear that a comprehensive real-time crisis plan was in place at MWRA and the state and local authorities for them to have communicated so well.

In many ways the way this crisis was handled by state and local governments was superior to that of many companies faced with crisis in 2010 (Toyota and BP come to mind).

Does your company have a real-time crisis plan in place?

Comments

[David Henderson]

Excellent post, David. In this digital era, real-time communications - crisis messages and otherwise - are essential. There is no such thing as a "news cycle." Interesting, isn't it, how municipalities are doing such an outstanding job, whether the Boston area or here in the DC area, where we have a superb area-wide communications service, Arlington Alert, free and available to anyone. In many ways, their work outshines that of many corporations and PR agencies.
Keep up the terrific work!
David

[Lisa Gualtieri]

I agree with you about the crisis communications - up to a point. I think that a number of channels were used to inform people including highway signs. Although some internal communications were the fastest - in my case I heard about it first through Tufts, where I teach. The part that was missing was the more detailed information about what to do and what the health risks are. Not seeing much online at the few places I looked, I reminded myself of what I was told before traveling to China about tap water. This is part of a broader problem of informing people in an effective and meaningful way what to do to prevent health problems. H1N1 communication was an example of that (http://lisagualtieri.com/2009/08/29/webmd-gets-an-a-for-swine-flu-guide-and-a-c-for-guide-to-never-feeling-tired-again/) where the CDC had current, accurate information, as did many state public health departments, but WebMD did a much better job of actually answering people's questions. Here too, there were many questions that people had that were not being answered as part of this crisis communication.

[AJGerritson]

The MWRA has always done a great job handling crisis. @TomLee451 was their spokesman when the unfortunate deaths occured in the outfall tunnel at Deer Island back in the summer of 1999. That was before digital media but their response was still something we can all learn from. It's interesting to hear Tom's narration and have him talk about how plans today have to be developed with a strong emphasis on digital media.

Here is a post he authored about the deaths and the evolution of crisis communications: http://tinyurl.com/nunfyf

[Fred Kapoor]

I couldn't have said it better than @David Henderson. Nowadays even when the communications are supposed to be complete due to the increasing amount of gadgets invented for that purpose, sometimes the messages are still not delivered in the right way, so communication should be taken into consideration by us all as an important matter.