Crisis Calls: Navigating Remote EOCs

Tim Conrad (00:18):

Welcome to the Wildfires, floods and Chaos Communications podcast. I'm Tim Conrad, president of Butterfly Effect Communications. Our team of information officers will take you through our experiences navigating the ugly 2023 British Columbia wildfire season, along with lessons from past emergencies. I'm happy to introduce you to Leila Daoud in this episode. Leila was an information officer in the Squamish Lil'wat Regional District virtual or remote emergency operation center, and also supported reports and plans for the Columbia Shuswap, EOC, as well as the pathways to preparedness project in the Caribou Regional District. Here's more about Leila.

Announcer (00:56):

Leila Daoud is a public relations professional with more than 15 years of experience in media relations and crisis management. Leila is a media trainer, published author communications workshop leader and panelist. She holds a bachelor of arts degree with a double major from the University of Alberta and received a postgraduate public relations certificate from Matt Royal University. After several successful years as a public safety spokesperson with law enforcement and disaster management organizations, Leila embarked on an entrepreneurial journey and founded her own public relations consultancy, dynamite public relations. Through her consultancy, she has helped diverse portfolio of international clients to enhance her reputation, increased visibility, and navigate complex media landscapes.

Tim Conrad (01:34):

So you started with Squamish Lil'wat Regional District in the summer of 2023, which was operated as a fully remote EOC, so an emergency operation center. We're going to say that EOC quite a bit, and that's the sort of hub of where things happen on a local government level in response to the emergency. And in Canada, those local government, regional districts, in this case, they run all of the evacuations and then coordinate all of the resources for all of the residents that are evacuated. So Squamish Lil'wat regional district used teams email and SharePoint to run their emergency operation center from July until all the way until October. They were still functioning in some level in October, and you joined them for several weeks from August to September. I supported them just the week before that you arrived, and we were transitioning then as you came into a larger team, and we were really happy to support them. And this was actually my first time doing a true remote EOC. I'd done some hybrid ones before and didn't have the greatest experience with those. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on a fully remote EOC. Certainly a unique situation. It's not

Leila Daoud (02:58):

One I was used to prior to this particular response. I tend to be on scene in the thick of it, getting to know people that I've never met before while we are dealing with an emergency and trying to make sure that everyone stays safe at first. It took a little bit of time to get used to, I've seen the first day or so I thought I really wish I were there. As time went on though, I really did see massive benefits of having a fully remote EOC because we were able to swap people in without necessarily needing to bring them in. So we had people that were fresh, they were on scene, they were able to get up to speed very quickly because when you're not relying on just being in the mix of it, you have to have really good handover, really good notes that people are taking during that event, which can be helpful as we know afterwards as well.

(03:48):

What I really enjoyed about it too was having that backup system. If something happens to your EOC in the emergency, and we know that that can happen, you can be fully set up, ready to go, and all of a sudden everybody's got to bug out, you've got to evacuate and everything has to be taken down. Or if you may have a Power S failure that goes on that's planned or unplanned water, any number of things can have an emergency as we know. So having people that are away from the situation who are able to come in calmly deal with things, not need to worry about some of the infrastructural issues that we can sometimes deal with in the EOC, very beneficial. We had no problem with coalescing as a team. We had meetings constantly. I mean, I was on Zoom, oh, I would say 11 or 12 hours a day. I mean, you're working at the same time, but there's people talking in the background. There's video conferences happening, there are updates happening from wildfire, from Drive bc, people like that. So really it was phenomenal for me to see everything come together so smoothly. I really enjoyed it.

Tim Conrad (04:57):

Yeah, it was really, I mean, I was also not so sure at first, but then the entire team was bought into it and it just worked extremely well. I found, and I was having a conversation with Mark, the EOC director for most of that a little bit ago, and just commending them for the work that they did and making sure that they still maintain that structure that we rely on in an emergency operation center to support the information role, which we refer to a lot in our conversation as communications. But yeah, so I'm curious on your thoughts. Things don't always go smoothly in an emergency. We often see perfection sneak in. It has a place in a disaster. Can you tell me what happens in an emergency? Is it as smooth as some believe it is?

Leila Daoud (05:55):

It's a difficult question answer in a way because it's an emergency. Nothing is smooth in an emergency. There are always, it's high risk. There's a lot of adrenaline going on. There are a lot of people with very strong emotions and beliefs about what should be happening in the moment. But I would say that although we can never know what's coming down the pipeline or what's going to happen in the next minute, everybody within an EOC is professional. There is a level of expertise that is being relied on there that enables communication to go out smoothly. There may be, I hate to say a typo, because three or four of us will look at something before it goes out, but in the heat of an emergency, if something is really going on, we need to evacuate. You've got a hundred kilometer an hour wings that just happened here, cross the road.

(06:44):

We need to get that message out. It's going to get out. It might not have the nicest graphic, it might not have the prettiest wording. It might be a little bit clunkier than we'd like it to be, but the word is getting out. So I would say that the communication itself is smooth. The delivery, if we had three or four months to finesse the wording and the graphics and make sure everything looked great, there was not so much pixelation on a particular map, then we would go for those things. But in the heat of the moment, I would say that there is reliance on the expertise that makes things go smoother.

Tim Conrad (07:17):

And I have to find it's controlled chaos, really. Things are changing all the time and perhaps some that have never been in an emergency, don't realize how much is changing all the time and how much impacts your decisions and what also is going to go for information. So back in 2017, which was a phenomenal year for wildfires, we were dealing with 220 wildfires in the region I was in and just having this stack of evacuations. At one point, I remember I had seven I was working on, and we actually had three computers working at the same time as whoever was in that point role where we would have everything queued up and we were just constantly changing the order of which one was going to go next. Yeah, so it's it's got a lot of interesting twists and churns as you go, and you're constantly learning new information and adjusting your approach.

Leila Daoud (08:18):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can be working on something for weeks that you've been planning and that downgrade comes in. All of a sudden there's wind that comes up or another fire that has migrated over to a sign of mountain that wasn't expected to, and those are all canceled. So all of those lovely graphics, all that information has to be on hold and now we're doing evacuation orders instead of downgrades. And it's one of those things where you really have to be able to pivot on a moment's notice and be comfortable with that, and you really have to just have to thrive chaos it away. It's our job to make things chaotic, orderly to bring order. But yeah, we absolutely have to be able to turn on the done pivot.

Tim Conrad (08:59):

Yeah, it's so true, isn't it? It's just like you just never know what the day is going to do some days. And yeah, that quick adjustment that you have to make is quite something. So Stories and Strategies is the most listened to podcast in the world. Expert guests from around the world explaining crisis communications, nudge theory, generative ai, communications, leadership, and the psychology of why we buy. You'll hear me in the episode, how to communicate when people won't Evacuate. And what makes this podcast different is it focuses on stories, not a download of information. And I've been a listener right from the beginning stories and strategies with host dug downs on all podcast directories and YouTube. So as we know in an emergency, there's just tons of media and social media attention. It grows massively. I often get reports of impressions that are in the billions. That's with a b billions. And so can you tell me your thoughts on what we see in media and social media and how they're connected and what we're seeing in that world today?

Leila Daoud (10:10):

Absolutely. So I would say that there's a discourse right now where people talk about the mainstream media not being as influential as important within the communication space, and therefore there's this idea that communications isn't getting out as much as it used to. And I think it's actually the opposite in an emergency because we have so many eyes focused and fixated on that one particular area, it's not enough to, we used to be able to do things like we will have a media availability at three and another one at six if something happens. And that would be all that we really needed to do. And nowadays we have to send it out to the local media. We have to make sure we have something to send out to the local Facebook groups that are disseminating our message to those who, because if you're on the road, you're not checking the local news station, you are listening to friends, family, you're checking your Facebook, you're checking Twitter, you're checking TikTok.

(11:11):

For some people, I think it's now the second most used search engine is TikTok. So it's not enough to just have that one piece of communication. We have to be ready with multiple pieces of communication for multiple different platforms. It has to be platform relevant. You can't just sit and read a press release for TikTok. It's not going to work, and you can't ignore them either. So it's not a situation where, hey, we've given our update at 3:00 PM next one will be at six, and sorry, there's no information in between. If we have a rumor that's popping up on Twitter or Facebook or wherever at four o'clock or we've got video that's purportedly being taken from a particular area that is, it's relevant for a particular reason, and it could be for numerous reasons. It can be erroneous information, it can be fire that's spreading whatever we need to be able to respond almost immediately and having that backup, having that remote EOC, having the communications back up to help, it's so crucial now where before perhaps you could get away with one or two communications people in the EOC and it would work.

(12:23):

But now when we got the website, for example, that we were working on, I think was built and designed with the idea that 60,000 people wouldn't go to a main website in one minute. And what we saw was that millions came in within a minute. And if you are not ready to handle that kind of traffic and what happens if one of those things isn't functioning the way you want it to, or you're not able to get that graphic uploaded or whatever it happens to be, or X happens to be down that day for whatever reason, you need to be ready and ready to disseminate that information in a million different ways. We saw what happened with Facebook, for example, where there was a change in how mainstream news was being disseminated on Facebook. We had to be ready to handle that, to deal with it. That's the role of the communications people and the emergency communications people specifically.

Tim Conrad (13:18):

Yeah, and what you're talking about, just to make sure that everybody that's watching this is aware, in Canada, the government of Canada came down with legislation that they wanted to get some funds out of the large players being meta and Google towards our news organizations, which have absolutely been decimated with the advent of social media. They've seen their advertising revenue just vanish. And so what happened at this stage is Google did come to the table and negotiate and brought a hundred million dollars to the table to then be distributed to news organizations across Canada. Meta just banned news across all of their platforms. So in Canada, we can't post any news from any source anywhere in the world. We're banned from doing that. You can't see news from other parts of, we can't just put a link in there and share it. So that's all blocked. So it's quite a big, big thing, and this is our first experience with it this summer. So can you tell me about the importance of having the right spokesperson for example?

Leila Daoud (14:27):

Again, I do want to go back to one other thing as well in that because we have this defunding of the media, which is, it's really tragic and it is beginning to impact global news and provincial news across our country. What I would say is that it's even more important, and this is linked to choosing the right spokesperson because it used to be that you do one interview with one local newspaper and they had a distribution of five or 10,000 in your community. And if it wasn't the best interview or if it was absolutely just not a good interview at all, the damage was somewhat contained. It's not great to ever have that, but it was contained nowadays because we don't have as many independent newsrooms, we have newswires. So for example, if the Canadian press does a one-on-one interview with your spokesperson, that interview isn't just going to Canadian press, it's going to go across your province throughout all of your community newspapers and across Canada.

(15:26):

We had one interview where it was one particular interview in the middle of the disaster, and we had, I believe it was 98 different hits on that one interview in 98 different news sources. So it's really important to choose the right spokesperson and to have them really well trained, have those key messages and practice with them. I know that there is a propensity to choose a person that is the most senior or person with authority. To me, the spokesperson, while we always strive for that, it's not necessarily the best choice. If you have somebody, for example, who was an elected official, there may be politics at play there where there's certain opinions that might not be the opinion, the prevailing opinion of those that have been hired into the EOC to handle and manage this crisis. There's other situations where some people just don't really like being on camera, don't like being in the radio.

(16:31):

And there's another situation we also have to be really conscious of, and that's that this is happening to people within their own community. It's very hard to have an objective, I hate to say emotionless, because we do want to communicate emotion and seriousness, but there does need to be a little bit of detachment in some ways when we're getting important information out to people about evacuations and things like that or about the state of community. And when we have that have certain attachments or any number of things that just don't really qualify them to be the best person for the interview, we need to make sure that those things are handled and talked about well in advance of a disaster, and that whoever is selected has that other person, that communications person who is willing to tell them that's nothing best message that you could have. Maybe we can word it like this. How about we use these key messages sometimes when we have people that are internal, if somebody's bought us, for example, it be really hard to say, oh no, you're really bombing this one. You're really not doing the message that you really need to get out here. Or you're really just babbling and we need to, having that outside help really does help strengthen that communications message.

Tim Conrad (17:49):

It does. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just jump on the couple points you made the media training, and you can call it media training, you can call it spokesperson speaking training, whatever you want. Highly important for people that are going to be doing this role. It's over and over and over again. I don't think people realize how much you end up repeating a lot of interviews and things like that and the run of a day, and it takes that sort of rigor that you go through in that training to get used to that and how that happens.

Leila Daoud (18:22):

So I'll say that I've been doing this for 18 plus years. I've done, at this point, more than 2000 interviews, I think, and I train people. I provide media training. I am still nervous when I go on camera or when I do an interview with a journalist. And I think that that's really important to know. It's not that I'm not confident, it's that I know that this has to go well to get the best outcomes from my client and for the community. It's really so important. This isn't a community event, it sales. Well, that's too bad. The lives are on the line, properties are on the line, two communities are on the line, and it has to go so well. So the idea of, well, I've already done interviews before, that's okay, I know what I'm doing. I think that that can be a really dangerous sentiment to have practice, I won't even say makes perfect, but practice is absolutely necessary. Having those key messages and having that disinterested in a way third party is so important to making sure that that message gets out and is clear.

Tim Conrad (19:30):

And it comes back to that. We hear from people all the time that talk about, they say the messaging is confusing, and if you have a spokesperson that goes on in each interview in a run of a day, they say something a little bit different. That's where that comes from. Some of it. And again, with I media training, I'm like you, I get nervous when I'm doing interviews and I find that the more nervous I am, the better I end up doing. It's just interesting thing. But I like feeling the nerves when I feel the nervousness. I see that as a good thing. And I just want to add too, I've done media training at least a dozen times, and so I do it as often as I can, and I try to get as much practice in, I like that grind that you go through in a media training session. So it's really good. It's terrific. So

Leila Daoud (20:20):

There's always something to learn.

Tim Conrad (20:22):

Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm curious as to your thoughts around graphics too, because as we talk about social media, that becomes really important and we're starting to see that being a little bit more important to media as well. So tell me about your thoughts on graphics.

Leila Daoud (20:38):

Absolutely. I really like graphics. I'm a big fan of something that's called snackable information. Well, and good to put out something that's three pages long with all of the information that possibly come out has come out so people can review it. But there's a point at which people, there's information overload. And I think that we have to be cognizant of the fact that this is a highly emotional, highly stressful situation for people. Overload of information isn't your best bet. Clear, concise, really brief visuals or talking points are your best. It helps people to really understand it. If I tell you we need to have grab and go kit, and here are 37 different things that you can put in it, and by the way, you should probably have your kids be involved, let them know what's going on and oh, does your spouse know what's going on and whose truck are we taking? And is the truck gas up and which gas station still has gas in it? It becomes all too much where people just can't handle the process, their own emotion, let alone getting everything ready. Whereas if I put something up says, here's one or two things you can do right now that will really help you.

(21:54):

People are much more likely to follow through with that, stick with it. And then there's also that shareability factor. If I put that statement out, it's five minutes long. No one's going to share that on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. But if I have a little graphic that says, here are the top three things you can do right now to make sure that you are prepared or a little better prepared, share with all your friends, your family, with everybody, that's going to have much more shareability and potential to go buy in that moment. And we know that, I think that we have to be really cognizant of the fact that there are people who are not communicators, who are not officials and who are not influencers. They become the influencers in the moment because of what they're sharing on social media. It's not the best video, it's not the best audio, it's not the best graphics, but it is out there. And if we want to be seen as the authority in that situation, you can trust the information that we are putting out there. Then we have to have really solid graphics, solid information that is really shareable, just like these videos and folks.

Tim Conrad (23:04):

Yeah, absolutely. And graphics help people that are having everything from cognitive issues to language barriers, they help to augment that, and that's important for people to understand. And then it's just a consistency with those graphics too, to make sure that they look similar and the same if they're coming from the same organization. Absolutely. And that's kind of stuff that you have to do in advance. It's hard to do it in the fly, especially depending on what you have for resources. So you've said a few things that this conversation that really take me back. And one thing that you had said was press. And so I'm from the era aging myself a bit here, but when I entered the business, I often tell the story of how I sent my first, I wanted to send my first news release via fax facsimile. I couldn't use email because reporters in those days didn't use email and they certainly didn't want, if they did, did not want a news release in their email. And so the facsimile though, the fax was expensive to send and they didn't want to do that. So I ended up hand delivering my first press release. And we've gone through iterations. We call it a news release and some call it a media release today. I like the term media release because it kind of does a little bit of everything.

Announcer (24:32):

Here are some quick stats, butterfly effect communications activities during 2023 season of emergency preparedness and response, 10,000 kilometers traveled the equivalent of 24 weeks, worked in emergency operation centers, 12,000 residents evacuated 49 public engagement events where we had over a thousand conversations with residents. 9,000 KN 95 masks given to residents, nearly a mask for every person in that region, 2,600 videos and photos, 1,300 spokesperson mentions in one month reverse media coverage from significantly negative to positive in just two weeks. Over 1 million words written or reviewed. Zero lives lost. Now back to the podcast.

Leila Daoud (25:32):

Yeah, absolutely. So you've been on a number of roles when it comes to disaster management communications, and I'm wondering, you've seen evolution in how we communicate. How do you think it's different today than it was even five years ago, and where do you see it going in the future? Do you think that there's ever going to be a time where AI replaces communicators for example?

Tim Conrad (25:57):

That's a really good question. So yeah, I mean it has changed tremendously. My first disaster was actually 20 years, 21 years ago now. And one of the things that happened then that does not happen today was I was at the time living in Nova Scotia and we were about an hour outside of Halifax, which is the capital city. That's where all the media are based. And we had an ice jam in my hometown and the media came down and showed up within an hour of our event starting with satellite trucks, and we're beaming the message back to headquarters. And we are on the national news live doing live hits constantly. And that's one piece of media that's changed significantly. You very rarely see a satellite truck. Now we have technology that can do the same thing. So you tend to see that, but you don't see them doing a lot of live hits anymore.

(26:57):

They do a lot of just slightly before prerecorded hits. So that's different. I don't know if that's good or bad, to be honest. I haven't really noticed anything one way or the other. One of the big ones that I've noticed in the last five years is how radio has changed. And you talked about that a little bit earlier, about the media landscape and how it's changed. And we're seeing so many closing, and we have actually since summer of 2023, seen a significant amount of media layoffs by several thousands of people have been laid off from the media business in Canada and a number of different news organizations have closed. And with radio, the newsrooms are almost all gone. And if they do exist, they're centralized newsrooms for a number of different stations. So I know of one in western Canada that one news director does all the news for nine different radio stations across two provinces. That's really different. So they don't have that in-person connection or ability to be there and see that event. We used to have, when I remember when I was young, the radio person was standing there at the fire that was burning at somebody's house or wherever, and you were getting live reports every 15 minutes. And that's been a big gap that I certainly miss that because it was a great way to communicate with people in an emergency in that moment.

(28:35):

Where are things going? Boy, the thing that kind of, I mean, AI is there and AI is a great tool that we are using in emergencies now. It's handy. You still have to have that human intervention with it. You can't just feed it in and then spit it right out from there. You have to adjust things, but it's a handy tool to sort of move you along and get your thoughts out there a little faster and get your messaging maybe more concise. But the one that's really kind of nagging at me is trust. The trust the public has and organizations, particularly governments and media and so on, and what they're seeing and such is accurate. And that's not something we can solve in an emergency. That's something that the organizations have to do themselves. They have to make better decisions, more open with how they've made those decisions to build that respect with the community before an emergency strikes.

(29:39):

Because if they don't do it before, you can't do it in. And we saw that in two of the regions that we were supporting this summer that it caused significant issues in an emergency. And that's the first time I've seen that. And they were very significant issues that really halted operations on a number of occasions because of that intervention with people taking things into their own hands, I guess is the best way to put it, and causing a lot of disruption, which is, I don't want to fault people for doing that. It's not, obviously not ideal for responders and those folks like us that are out there supporting it, but it's a symptom of what we're seeing in this brutal loss of trust. And we really have got to be a heck of a lot better at just involving people in decisions and guiding them along. We really don't do a good job of it. I'm going to be quite hard on organizations, so going forward to be a heck of a lot better than what they are because it's just not good enough. Yeah,

Leila Daoud (30:46):

I would say that I don't necessarily know that we need to, and this sounds harsh, I don't necessarily know that we need to involve people in those decisions, but we certainly need to be very transparent in why those decisions are being made. It's that absence of information where people and those rumors just get started and can be vicious and one thing leads to another. And we've got, like you said, we've got operational closures and shutdowns because of things where people just don't understand. No, yeah, these decisions were made for very good reasons. And I would say that it's so important that we have trust built before, but it's critical really. I mean, the life is on the line of the municipality of the region in urgency and having those communicators there, having all the people at the table who can support them can be make or break when those people flood in and they're there, or even better, they've been brought in in advance, helps support situations. Like we know, for example, that this summer is likely to be quite bad. It's not the time to call on support in the middle of it. It's time to call now or three months ago. And then we can build that support, build that level of understanding with the community. I've never encountered any of the disasters I've dealt with any EOC member that made a decision for personal reasons.

(32:27):

It is always in the best interest of the community or saving lives. It may not be in retrospect, perhaps other decisions can be made, but in that moment, absolutely, it's all about saving lives, saving the community, saving property if possible, but always with the view to saving lives. We are so fortunate that we have had so few fatalities when it comes to disaster, and I worry about the lack of trust that some of these organizations and communities have. And it's so important that brand authority out there, and I don't mean authority as in we will tell you what to do, but authority as in look to us for correct factual information. Don't look to other sources and rumors. We will get that information to you. It will be truthfully, it'll be accurate and it will be transparent.

Tim Conrad (33:34):

Yeah, it is a very interesting time. And yeah, we've had people really questioning the decisions that are made in the emergency operations center, and I've jumped around a lot to a number of different EOCs over my time. And you're right, I've never come across anybody that's making a decision when they've got one of those vests on sitting there and going through that grind that they do that does it for themselves. In fact, quite the opposite. It's the opposite. People realize how difficult it is for a person that's from a community to evacuate that community to see the damage and then to tell people about it as someone from

Leila Daoud (34:32):

Yeah, right.

Tim Conrad (34:34):

It's

Leila Daoud (34:34):

Heartbreaking. They're heart grown when they do it. Absolutely it is. And often they're choosing their community above their family and their friends. They could be with their family evacuating and getting the safety instead, they're letting their own homes burn so that they can save the school, the city hall, the hospital, the RCP headquarters, and yeah, it's heartbreaking for them afterwards and jury.

Tim Conrad (35:03):

Yeah, absolutely. It is. Certainly. It's very difficult. And so I think that's important to note. And I just want to go back to you had made a point earlier about elected officials and spokespeople. My view of them is never, I tell elected officials this all the time. The last thing you want to be is a spokesperson in a disaster because you're going to wear everything that disaster and emergency has as your own. You're taking ownership of it. Save your elected officials for later on because there's going to be policy and support that's needed that that's where they step in and support and can speak to those things. But in the midst of an emergency, rely on your operations team and use them as the spokespeople. I really think we have the best example ever of elected officials not doing a good job as spokespeople in an emergency with COVID-19 and the way the pandemic was handled, look at the loss of trust that we have seen since that. And it was mostly, it was the emergency that was really saw elected officials as the point people, as spokesperson spokespeople most of the time. And so it hasn't done a good job, and we've seen massive declines in trusts. So

Leila Daoud (36:29):

It's their job. In my mind, it's their job to disseminate the information that's being put out by the municipality, by the region, by fire departments, by the official channels. Absolutely. You've got your own audience that happens off emergency, let's get everybody involved pulling towards the same goal. That's where their role is. It's not in commenting, it's not in questioning, it's not in saying, yeah, I don't agree with that either or I don't agree with it either. It's just, I'm sorry to say it's par, the official information. Let's get everybody and make sure they're safe. That's all it's about afterwards, the dissemination, the section of what happens rather afterwards, the dissect of what happens. Absolutely. And they have your own opinions, but in that moment, everybody's fully towards the same goal.

Tim Conrad (37:21):

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, it is important for them to add some of their voice to that and their audience to that information that's getting out and to listen to what's going on and feed that back into the operation center. That's an incredibly important role that they hold. And on this note, emergency communications is different than daily communications we see in organizations. And business continuity is a big problem. Nefarious attention from bad people is becoming way more common. And so what do people that work in the communications world need to know when they walk through the doors of an EOC, be it a remote one or an in-person, one,

(38:10):

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Leila Daoud (38:55):

So I'd say before you even come into the eoc, make sure you're the right kind of person. You've got to be able to pivot really quickly. You have to be able to commit time. It's not a nine to five. You will be there as long as you were needed. Goodbyes, goodbye deals, goodbye. Wellness and balances. They just don't exist because there are more important dates. It is a huge responsibility that you are being entrusted with. It is the very lines of people in some cases, making sure that they have evacuation words, clear information. So it is a huge responsibility. What do you need to know when you're in it that sometimes getting it out is better than getting it perfect. So if that evacuation order needs to get out, what's the most important thing about that message? The address that it's affected where people need to go.

(39:51):

The fact they need to leave now. Everything else is extra when you'll be back answering those questions of we're doing everything possible. You'll want to make sure that people know we're doing this. Save lives, lives aligned, you need to leave now. And understanding that difference of pretty communication and essential communication. I think those are really important. And just that thought, I mean, we always talk about AI or the new trend or tiktoks or things like that, but sometimes those things just aren't available in an emergency. If power is out, if cell phones are down, people can get your beautiful video because they're in a low data amount, for example, where they don't have all the bars, they don't have the data and it's down. The cell towers have burned out. So what do you do? How do you get your communications out there? We laugh about facts, but if facts gets it out, that's what we do.

(40:51):

See, I have done posters at post offices and grocery stores. If you told me we're going to do emergency, high level communication, how are you going to get it out? Grocery store poster probably would be on my list. And yet it was one of the most effective ways that we got the message out. Everybody needs groceries, everybody needs, so where we go where people are going to get that information. So it's just that being resourceful all hands on deck, you could absolutely say, I think that this would be better. Or I think maybe if we said it this way, it would be clearer. But there's pepy order in an emergency, almost militaristic or their are hierarchies. Whatever the EOC director says goes, you don't like it, that's too bad. Keep pushing what you think is right. Sorry, make that case. But at the end of the day, they're the director.

Tim Conrad (41:54):

Yeah, absolutely.

Leila Daoud (41:56):

Totally different.

Tim Conrad (41:58):

It is a very different style. And the interesting thing I find with it too is that there's a lot of people that jump in there from regular communications roles and they get stuck into a tactics vortex where they're just slapping out different things, communicating, hoping that they're going to work. And you really do need to overarch it with strategy. You need to take that time to think about it. And it's hard when you're making decisions so fast and it's so quick. I've had a conversation with one person this summer and I gave them information and I said, okay, what's the decision? And they go, well, I need some time to think about that. And I said, I just gave you the time to think you've had enough time, but I have to get this going and that that's the way it is. And it's looking at your team as well and just ensuring that you've got the right people and thinking way in advance and thinking worst case scenario a lot of the time, that's one thing that we don't do. The

Leila Daoud (43:02):

Worst thing that can happen will happen. We know that we've seen multiple systems come down.

Tim Conrad (43:08):

So looking at that, and you mentioned earlier, you go back to paper and in an emergency, you do really need to think about that. You need to stop thinking of technology because a lot of people lose their technology the moment they leave their home. Think about all the things they lose. They only have their phone left at that point. They're working off of that and perhaps the radio in their current. So how are you going to reach them and how are you going to get information to 'em? So you just really do need to think about them different. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Leila, it's been great to speak with you about your experience in 2023 wildfires. You bring a lot to the team, and I really appreciated having you on the team.

(43:52):

Little did I know that when we had a chat, we bumped into each other in the hallway at the CPRS, Canadian Public Relations Society National Conference in Whistler last June, and had a great chat in the hallway. And who knew that we would be working together so much later that summer, right? It was just kind of crazy. And we nicknamed, we came up with this nickname for a team after a while called the Frass, and you'd have to look that up to understand, but I'm going to leave that there. And I wanted to thank each of you in your own unique way, so I had a friend do an illustration that I'm giving to you now. Hope you enjoy it and keep an eye out for additional podcasts from us. We're working on some others. And thanks, Leila. I really appreciate you joining me today.

(44:42):

Thank you for joining us for the Wildfires, floods and Chaos Communications podcast. We are so appreciative of all of those who we work alongside, who take time from their lives and communities to help others, and we are loaded with pride for how responders react and residents respond. You can catch longer versions of this podcast on the YouTube channel for Butterfly Effect Communications, which includes photos, videos, and sample graphics from last summer. Thanks to the team at Stories and Strategies podcast, my friend Mike Brown with the Dark Poutine Podcast and Kendra Stoner for voicing the guest bios. For more podcasts, learning opportunities and resources, visit www dot butterfly effect communications. That's also how you can connect if you'd like to hire us for disaster emergencies, crises issues, or hey, even the fun side of public relations. We like that too. Thanks for joining us. Oh, hey, I forgot something. Do one thing that's this week. To get prepared for an emergency at home, try this one. In case of emergency ICE in your device, put ICE one behind the last name of your first emergency contact and ice two and ICE three, so you have some backups. The Wildfires, floods and Chaos Communications Podcast is a 2024 production of Butterfly Effect Communications Incorporated. Make sure you share it with someone and go back and listen to another episode. Okay, thanks.