No fatalities or injuries were reported despite the loss of 150-year-old trees, and numerous vehicles and buildings were damaged or destroyed. The $40 million in property damage reported early on was expected to grow substantially as more communities reported losses. More than $20 million in damage was reported in Pasadena alone.
The activation brought together many different elements of the city’s response to the devastating winds, validating the facilities, equipment and services, and providing invaluable experience for the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department (EMD) team to manage a sudden influx of responders.
Emergency communication began for the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) public affairs staff while the wind was still roaring through the region. By the time the storm communication wrapped up, the small team of communicators had distributed nearly 90,000 emails to the media, city officials and residents, plus published 230 tweets representing nearly 900,000 messages delivered to their rapidly growing Twitter followers. Visitors to the ladwpnews.com website dramatically increased to 35 times normal traffic allowing tens of thousands of residents to directly access the most immediate and up-to-date information about outages and power restoration.
Lauded Effort
A power outage on Los Angeles’ Westside in the earliest moments of the storm shut off power to Los Angeles International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest airports. The outage, plus debris on a runway from the storm, required the diversion of about 20 flights with some flights delayed by 10 or 15 minutes. However, LADWP crews were able to restore power to the region, including 56,000 customer locations, within 55 minutes. It was the beginning of a remarkable and lauded effort by LADWP crews to restore power to the 210,000 public utility customers that suffered outages. The other major utility, Southern California Edison, suffered nearly 400,000 customer outages and due to delays in power restoration and inadequate customer communication is facing investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission.
In addition, the communicators had issued an urgent water conservation message in Northeast Los Angeles because the power outage had affected water pumping infrastructure. Residents in several neighborhoods were advised to use water only for drinking and sanitation. This “urgent water conservation” message was one of many message maps that the public affairs department had prepared in advance for use in emergencies. The conservation messages were translated into Spanish, distributed to Spanish speaking media outlets and published on the news website along with the English version.
Because LADWP uses a Web-based communication management system for its daily media, neighborhood and public affairs communications as well as crisis communications, the approximately three-mile move to the EOC did not disrupt the agency’s communication.
This was also how members of the public affairs team collaborated during the night from their homes to draft, edit, approve, publish to their news site and distribute the thousands of emails. The EMD communication team uses the same communication platform, aiding coordination and mutual support.
The public information officer on duty for the EMD, Veronica Hendrix, responded to media inquiries and published EMD releases about the activation and valuable guidance for residents, including food safety advice for those residents with longer term outages that faced loss of food in refrigerators and freezers. In addition, Hendrix updated the city’s 311 public information line, a heavily promoted means for the public to get information about emergencies. Callers were advised to call the LADWP to report outages and directed to LADWP for safety information about downed lines. Hendrix also used Twitter and Facebook to expand the audiences for the documents published. These documents were also referenced or republished by many other departments and agencies in the region including LADWP.
After arriving, the DWP communications team continued to develop, publish and distribute a continual stream of power outage updates, now including the number of customers where power had been restored.
Social Media Use
Twitter has become a key element of LADWP communication as it has with some other city departments. All tweets submitted by the authorized LADWP users appear instantaneously on the ladwpnews.com website, multiplying their distribution. Altogether, staff sent 230 tweets during this event and saw the account’s followers increase from about 1,300 to almost 4,200 by the conclusion of the storm event. Monitoring made it clear that most of the messages sent by LADWP on Twitter were retweeted; the impact of those messages went far beyond the nearly 900,000 delivered directly by the staff to the more than 4,000 followers.
Twitter was also used extensively for direct engagement with individuals — both those who sent LADWP direct messages and when comments or rumors required some intervention. This direct engagement with individuals goes far beyond Twitter for LADWP. The news website that is powered by the Web-based communication management system includes numerous interactive features, including inquiry management that allows the communicators to receive inquiries on their smartphones, collaborate in responding, select from pre-staged answers, send responses directly back to inquirers, and closely monitor all activities of the team. More than 50 people directly communicated with LADWP using the website inquiry form.
The direct interactions from Twitter and the news website enabled LADWP staff to quickly identify the emerging questions on people’s minds. These questions included queries about submitting damage claims to LADWP for loss of food because of the power outages; about how restoration activities were prioritized; and how to know whether the thawed food was safe or not. Fact sheets and frequently asked questions documents were prepared with the answers, and approved answers were added to the inquiry system allowing the dispersed team access to those approved answers when responding to inquiries. The Q&A documents were also used to answer questions posed on Twitter and were published and distributed to more than 5,000 individuals. By publishing and sending answers to questions even as they begin to emerge, staff estimated that the team can reduce the number of incoming calls by two-thirds, enabling a stretched team to be highly efficient.
By 6 p.m. the participants in the EOC began to thin out even as the hum of activity continued. But the coordination work was not completed. EMD Director James Featherstone presided over a conference call late in the afternoon that included all city departments from the EOC’s manager’s room — as he had throughout the day in regular intervals. LADWP staff continued to operate in the Joint Information Center until midnight. The next morning, with the threatened high winds failing to appear, the activation level was changed and the EOC was deactivated.
Gerald Baron blogs for www.emergencymgmt.com at Crisis Comm. He is a nationally recognized expert in crisis and emergency communication as the Founder of PIER System and author of Now Is Too Late2: Survival in an Era of Instant News. He was in Los Angeles during this event and witnessed the LADWP’s communications and the city EOC activation. He is CEO of Agincourt Strategies and senior adviser to O’Brien’s Response Management.
