[EAS] The California Fires - Another view

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

I'm always wary when I hear the word "panic" used... it tends to get tossed around freely while carrying a negative connotation.  It's hard for me not to hear it as patronizing of the people at risk as well as vague.

Certainly folks were fleeing for their lives in the face of an immediate dread danger.  And there may even have been some sense of competition for limited opportunities to escape.  The situation did meet the preconditions for panic... but even in such conditions, people generally acquit themselves surprisingly well. 

The word "panic" makes for vivid news copy, though, and usually when it's used it's empty language used for effect, rather than accurate reportage.

That said, why was there such a rush?  Because the fire had overrun folk's situational awareness.  By the time the folks involved realized how bad the situation was going to get, it had already gotten very bad indeed.  And yes, power was out and some cell sites disabled, and I would expect that the cells that weren't destroyed were saturated with calls.

That's pretty much the essence of a disaster, in my experience: A dangerous situation expands more rapidly than folks... be they responders or journalists or civilians... can scale up their information gathering and processing systems to cope with it.  Call it the situation getting inside our Boyd Cycle or OODA Loop, or just call it the "fog of war," but it's the fundamental problem of initial response.

And that's why broadcasting... be it radio and TV, or the "cell broadcast" technology used in WEA... is such a crucial piece of the disaster information equation.  It's the ability to get information to a lot of people simultaneously.  Especially when we're already behind the power curve and playing catch-up.

It's important to remember that we don't need to reach absolutely everybody.  We never will.  Fortunately, people will talk to other people.  Our job is to get the attention and cooperation of a critical mass of people who will then bring their families, their neighbors, and their organizations along with them.  

And our great worry needs to be for people who are isolated from that word-of-mouth, either by circumstance (working late alone) or by remoteness in the country, or by sensory or other disabilities.

Art