The LA Fires Were a Crisis Comms Nightmare. Why?
As a crisis communications professional who lived through the fires, here’s what could have been done differently.
This piece originally appeared in Inc. Magazine.
“Should we go or not?” That was what my husband and I debated as black smoke, ash, and embers started to fill my Los Angeles neighborhood. Our backyard looked apocalyptic because we were situated between two aggressive fires. We weren’t told to evacuate, but things didn’t look good, as neighborhoods all around us were on standby or were already evacuating. The only communication we received from government officials was a text notice to evacuate for a fire that was over an hour away—much farther than the two causing the smoke. Moments later, we received the government equivalent of a “my bad” text because, apparently, we and millions of other people weren’t supposed to get that evacuation notice.
We essentially were left to fend for ourselves, which we did leveraging the WatchDuty app and a neighborhood text chain—crowdsourcing at its best. Most of us decided to leave. The air quality was poor, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen if the winds kept up—one ember in the wrong place would light us up. It was better to be safe than sorry. Thankfully, the winds eventually died down and our neighborhood remains intact.
As a communications professional, I have counseled major corporations and executives through some pretty bad moments. I also worked in downtown Manhattan during 9/11.
So, I’ve seen a few things.
In Los Angeles, we’re seeing firsthand what crisis communications looks like in a complex urban area operating in a fragmented information environment: it doesn’t look good.
The way we look for information has shifted.
When I reflect on the kind of information we’ve been getting in this disaster, where it’s coming from, and how we’re making vital decisions, it strikes me just how significantly the culture around where we go for information, particularly during a crisis, has changed. This has profound implications for how communications professionals do their work, and for how governments, companies, and organizations make crisis decisions.
While local and national news teams were doing incredible reporting, most of the locals I know here weren’t relying on the news to make decisions during the height of the fires. Why? In short, media consumption has declined for many different reasons. Most people don’t have linear tv at home. They’re not watching the news or listening to the radio en masse anymore. Social media algorithms can’t be relied upon to serve timely information to people. Mis- and disinformation are everywhere.
What about our local representatives? Well, they weren’t that visible outside of a few sparse press conferences. We didn’t get any texts or emails directing us to go somewhere for up-to-date information either.
I’ve been informally polling people, asking where they were getting their information. Nearly every single person said they were crowdsourcing mostly from apps and neighbors.
Houston, we have a communications problem.
Plan for the predictable.
Generally speaking, there are two big buckets of crises that we encounter in life: those we can plan to some degree for—which is most of them—and those that are unpredictable. I put the Los Angeles fires in the “plan for” category. This fire season clearly has been more extreme than anticipated, but in Los Angeles, the existence of fires isn’t surprising. There should have been a strong communications plan in place to deal with a natural disaster that included a way to provide timely information to all residents in the County, comprising 88 cities, not just those in immediate evacuation zones, who had their own communications problems and evacuation challenges that I won’t get into here.
The comparison to my 9/11 experience—a crisis I’d put into the unpredictable category—is stark. It was a different time. There were fewer communications channels. Leadership was more visible. The city and nation had more information on what we all needed to do within a day than I’ve had in weeks here in Los Angeles.
Leaders should be visible.
If we've learned anything over the past eight years, it’s that leadership needs to be leveraging every channel available, particularly during a crisis. People like to see that a competent person or team is in charge. They want to feel that someone cares about them and will keep everything moving. Even if leaders don’t know all the answers yet, people need reassurance that those in charge can bring in the right resources. To those who argue that people can think for themselves, yes, that’s true. But, in a crisis, our leaders should be present, visible, helpful, working together, and not playing the blame game. They should be clearing confusion. Otherwise, why are they there?
Establish one source for updates.
A central news hub could have been stood up and kept up-to-date with pertinent information about the fires, evacuations, traffic routes that were impacted, air quality, and anything else residents needed to know. In the absence of this, residents were left to sift through data and information—some valid, some not—as we made literally life-saving decisions in some cases. Where that information should be housed is a larger conversation for those who typically handle these sorts of governmental resources.
In this case, from a resident’s perspective, that information could live on the LA County website since some of the bigger fires, as Mayor Bass keeps reminding everyone, weren’t within the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles. Worth noting: the Eaton fire isn’t far from the edge of the city, and the smoke, ash, and embers didn’t abide by these political boundaries.
Tell people where to get their updates. Then, tell them again.
People need to know where to go for reliable information, otherwise they’ll fill that vacuum with other sources. An email to LA County residents and a simple text—using geotargeting or existing emergency communications channels for things like Amber Alerts—could have gone out to all residents telling them the most up-to-date information could be found on whatever website was deemed to be “the one.”
Additionally, harkening back to visible leadership, our local officials, the City Council Members, could have been tapped to communicate to their constituents—we haven’t heard from ours once since the fires started. Had everyone worked together to flow information out, Los Angeles city and county residents might not have experienced the total chaos of the past several weeks.
Crises always take various twists and turns. The quality of your leadership and communications at these moments can make or break how you come through them. In an increasingly fragmented information world, we need to adapt and communicate more directly. Leaders must have a complete understanding of the communications tools at their disposal and have a plan in place for how to use them to ensure that all stakeholders are in the loop. When it’s “Go Time,” people need reliable information – and fast. In some cases, lives are literally depending on it.
Lauren Condoluci is a communications strategist and media relations professional who has helped companies, organizations, and individuals plan for and handle some of their most challenging moments and campaigns.
