Emergency Communication

Emergency Communication

Social-scientific investigation of emergencies arose in the United States in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. Researchers sought to determine how people behave under emergency conditions in order to understand how they would likely behave in response to an attack upon the United States. Emergencies require an urgent response despite that they are often somewhat predictable, in the sense that they are expected to occur (e.g., hurricanes, crime, terrorism, and earthquakes), but it is often not known when, where, or how bad they will be. Emergencies disrupt social routines and can do great harm to people’s lives, property, and the community. More serious emergencies can affect multiple communities or even whole regions and nations and can destroy medical facilities, energy plants, roads, water supplies, and other critical infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina, for example, impacted states from Florida to Texas in 2005, whereas the earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011 affected most of that country and triggered a tsunami that in turn caused the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant north of Tokyo. The 1918 influenza pandemic is thought to have killed up to 50 million individuals worldwide. Emergencies on this scale stretch communication capabilities, often past the breaking point.

Communication is important in an emergency in two primary ways. First, it fulfills the information needs of victims and potential victims so they can make informed decisions about their own safety and well-being. Second, emergency communication meets the needs of responders, emergency response agencies, and civilian authorities to communicate and coordinate with each other. Coordination is very important in an emergency but it has often been cast as merely about equipment issues, such as radios that cannot connect with each other (interoperability). Although the issue of interoperability is certainly important, it is a subset of the much bigger and even more critical question of which individuals, groups, or organizations need what information and how can it be gotten to them? To make matters more complex, communication channels and practices often change abruptly during an emergency. In communication research terms, this means the communication network and channel content changes, often drastically and under pressure, so that new information bottlenecks can emerge. Messages can be misunderstood, what were important nodes may become less so, less important nodes may become more critical, and alternate channels may have to be developed on a moment’s notice.

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