Internal comms in a real disaster

Photo Credit: Salvatore Vuono

Sitting here in the relative comfort of Melbourne it's hard to imagine the devastation flowing through Queensland following the record floods. With a surface area flooded the size of France and Germany combined, more than 40 towns isolated or flooded, a rising death toll and an estimated $5 billion damage bill, it is a crisis of mammoth proportions.

For the agencies involved in responding to the emergency, it is easy to get caught up in the here and now and overlook the menial yet important tasks - like internal communications.

Without been there I can't speak for what exactly is unfolding in Queensland, but from my experience in major emergencies there are a number of internal communication challenges:

• Staff are spread over diverse location, making face to face communication to large numbers hard
• Employees spend the majority of their time in the field, nowhere near a computer making electronic communications (intranet, email, etc) essentially useless
• Staff are not only responding to the crisis and dealing with the emergency workload, but it is highly likely that they will be directly affected themselves, either with personal loss or property damage, or that of friends or family. The need for communications to also act as a support network becomes vital and to remind staff that it is okay to feel affected emotionally and personally. 
• A crisis like the floods has lasted for three weeks so far. It becomes very hard to sustain the necessary communication staffing levels and overcome the associated fatigue and burnout for such a prolonged period of time.

I've found that in a crisis more than ever for internal communications it is all about getting it back to basics. Find out where staff are going to be, how can you improve information flow to them and how you can make their lives easier.

In the past, like during the 2009 Victorian heatwave and Black Saturday bush fires, I set up 24hour phone hot lines for staff to ask any questions or to make requests for welfare, sent managers out to wait in hospital emergency bays with bottles of water because it was the one spot I knew paramedics would go and used external media to communicate essentially internal messages because every one was listening in for radio updates. It requires innovation and a rethink on standard communications, but it is the least that can be done when dealing with a crisis.

As I say, I don't know what is happening in Queensland yet, but I'm certainly thinking of them at this time and hoping that the crisis passes soon and their communication systems are working seamlessly.

JH