(PART 3 OF 4)
Following is part of the transcripts from the first COS Roundtable on Emergency Preparedness, held on August 12 at the Centre for Health and Safety Innovation in Mississauga, Ont. COS editor Mari-Len De Guzman moderated the discussion.

Panelists:
John Hollands, corporate account manager, Ontario Service Safety Alliance
John Parish, chief, provincial fire sector, Municipal Health and Safety Association
Andrew Harkness, senior strategy advisor, healthy workplaces, IAPA
Ralph Dunham, board member, Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness
Doug Morton, director, life sciences and business management, CSA Standards
Jason Lakhan, Gowlings
John Saunders, provincial director, disaster management and international response, Canadian Red Cross – Ontario

Moderator: What do you think of new technologies, particularly the popular social networking sites, as modern-day communication tools for emergency or crisis management?

Hollands: I think you need to know your source. One of the values of being a member of Safe Work Associations is that because we are so close to the regulators and regulations, so we have to be very careful as far as what we recommend and suggest as far as information. Both the Ministry of Labour and the WSIB have announced and are communicating information through Twitter, and clearly as regulators they have a very high standard of care, standard information and responsibility.
 
As far as technology, I think people are first in any disaster. Organizations need to express that constantly. And to allow people a very easy access to information and updates on what’s happening within the organization, what support they can get – HR issues, family support issues, advice – is terrific now. Because either through a crisis hotline or through a dedicated intranet or Internet website, the organization and the public sector is clearly taking full advantage of that.
 
We’re still a little cautious about things like Twitter and Facebook because it’s used for so many things it’s hard to feel that there is a standard there. And it’s so easy for someone to click another link and get off to somewhere else. And then they’re not getting the right information.

Jason: You’ve raised an excellent issue with respect to overall emergency management and it’s often overlooked and that is the importance of uniform and responsible communication in the event of an acute situation. Because from a legal perspective, you want people presenting uniform message to the media and not inadvertently or inappropriately admitting legal liability.
 
But more than anything else, projecting the appropriate corporate responsibility stance in response to what’s happened.
 
Harkness: You do need to know your audience and I think that there’s a concern that when you use tools like Twitter and Facebook and the like, that is dealing with a specific demographic. And as such you should look at that as part of the overall communication plan. Who is our audience? What are we trying to get out?
 
I can, again, give you examples from sort of internal concerns. Many of us have spam and virus protection tools and the like that are going on and it’s not uncommon to have, say, an emergency e-mail address that gets caught up in spam so therefore it doesn’t get through, or if it does get through, employees don’t recognize who is sending that message. It’s coming from the pandemic planning committee, well I’m not sure we have one. And I’ve been taught not to open those e-mails because of whatever is there.
 
So with those kinds of issues, too, are looking at – you have two levels of communication: the external, being responsible to our clients and to the community; but as important if not more so is how do we make sure internally that when we run into these types of scenarios, is there a dedicated e-mail or website location or Internet positioning that our people need to be equipped with. And again, it’s a critical piece to make sure that that training and understanding is in play. It can be devastating when you really do think your message is going out and the frustration of (learning that) nobody heard it.

Saunders: That’s a challenge that we found. We’ve been looking at it from different perspectives. How do we do an all-out call-out. We’ve got a phone tree system right now so our 2,000 volunteers of Ontario, how do we notify them when they need to respond?
 
But then we start discussions about that at the municipal level. Let’s say there is a chemical spill, a truck overturns on a highway, a dangerous chemical is released. How do you actually notify people in their homes not to leave their homes? Shy of a civil defence siren, if somebody happens to be watching TV they might see a banner across the bottom of their TV.

But what we found is that there really is no such thing as one solution. We thought of a mass e-mail going out to all of our volunteers, for example, saying that we need you to let us know of your availability to be deployed. We’ve got many of our volunteers that don’t have e-mail, they resent the fact that that is being used so much as a communication vehicle of choice.