Emergency Management Communication

An Emergency Manager’s (EM) job is to deal with disaster and catastrophe and do so with the most effective and efficient manner of protecting against, responding to, and recovering from such incidents. When disaster response is warranted there are many challenges that are faced by the EM, one of those challenges is effective communication. The most thorough and understandable means of crisis communication to the broadest audience must be found, and then how this communication is received, interpreted, and comprehended by all parties involved with disaster response efforts (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2011).

Emergency management has been defined by Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola as “a discipline that deals with risk and risk avoidance”, this

The ability to distribute timely and accurate information to all customers, including the media is vital to the successful response effort. Effective communication for preparedness, prevention, and mitigation with all parties is imperative for the emergency manager to successfully reduce a disaster incident’s impacts. The importance of the emergency manager’s conveyance of priorities, goals, and policies, to all affected customers, further strengthens the overall response effort and enhances the emergency management program as a whole. Unfortunately, despite the importance of communication, it is identified over and over again in after-action reports for disaster events as needing improvement. This perhaps may be best explained by Broom and Sha which imply that communication and dissemination are often confused. In dissemination, information is sent out to customers, whereas in actual communication there is an exchange of information to persuade, instruct, or “inform”, based upon common meanings or understandings. The breakdown occurs when the sender of information believes that communication has been successful when in actuality there has only been a dissemination (Broom, Sha, B.-L, & Seshadrinathan,

According to our text, “the PIO handles all inquiries from the media, the public, elected officials, emergency public information and warnings, rumor monitoring and response, media monitoring, and other functions to gather, verify, coordinate, and disseminate accurate, accessible, and timely information related to the incident, particularly regarding information on public health, safety, and protection.” This position handles all the communication efforts to and from the actual incident allowing for the incident commander to deal with the emergency at hand and not have to think about media relations, etc., identifying relevant information to be released to the public, prioritizing information release so as to not overwhelm the receiving audience, verification of information accuracy prior to release, and utilizing the most efficient and effective means available when releasing incident information (Haddow & Haddow, 2009, p.