What to do When...

I’ve been attending a two-day training on Emergency Communications. It’s been fascinating. I deal with the media as part of my job but usually only tangentiallly; there are professionals on campus whose function it is to do this and we have a truly wonderful person who has been good at getting the word out about the work of the Wildlife Health Center. Since much of it is newsworthy, what with West Nile Virus and oil spill and mountain lion attacks and avian flu, reporters and cameras are part of the horizon.

But the training I’ve just done will equip me, in the event Sylvia is out sick or on vacation or dealing with another emergency or the same emergency if it’s big, to handle the media on my own. In any emergency they’re often on the scene just as the emergency responders are getting there. They need a person to keep them informed, to keep them getting enough so they keep out of the way. I can certainly participate in a large-scale campus or city-wide emergency.

The scenario we were given was that a jet airliner crashed into the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Inside, speaking to a packed house, was Senator John McCain. The building was flattened. Our brief was to set up a Joint Information Center, allocate functions to everyone in our group, and come up with three messages as well as a system of dealing with the converging media city.

Rumor control was obviously a big part of the job, which means someone needs to monitor the news constantly. (I didn’t volunteer for that part. Ugh. Not owning a television almost really disqualififes me from participating in such an exercise…) During the drill we were interrupted constantly by updates and by breaking news flashes alleging terrorist attacks.

The Mondavi Center is about 250 yards from Mrak Hall, where the news service is located. We might have a situation in which the communications efforts for an entire crisis is handled by people who are satellites.

It was interesting, exhausting, and showed up a few gaps in our system. This is why you do drills….

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On a separate note, Tim Lindgren of The Where Project writes of a fascinating book, The Economics of Attention by Richard Lanham. The idea is that “the new economists are the artists, the designers, the rhetoricians because they are the ones best equipped to deal in the cultivation of human attention.” Tim talks about Darfur and how his attention (and with a few notable exceptions) that of the West is firmly turned elsewhere. A genocide is happening on our watch in Darfur, he says. Are we paying attention?