Heck, he said, many of them don't use those media at all.
Instead, Chandler told Wednesday's general session of the National Hurricane Conference, meeting in Orlando, the primary source of information often is a tweet.
That's a challenge to emergency managers, said Chandler, who teaches at the nearby University of Central Florida. Not only are people not getting correct information from the proper authorities, what they are getting could well be wrong — and fatally so.
"That's the problem," he said later. "The fact is, people will respond to a note from their brother-in-law saying, 'We have to evacuate. Let's go.'"
That person might also evacuate to the wrong place. Or, conversely, heed a relative's tweet to stay when he or she should leave. In Superstorm Sandy in the northeastern United States, Chandler said, 147 people drowned, many in areas that had been warned by emergency managers of a flooding threat.
"The audiences have changed," he told the conference. "You've got to have recorded messages mapped out, using multiple strategies, and targeted at specific demographics."
People in the middle of crises "are talking and listening and want to learn information," he told the conference. "It is a foreshadow of what our next hurricane is going to be. I'm suggesting it will be unlike a hurricane of seven years ago. We have undergone a sea change. If social media's not part of what you're doing, my recommendation is to make it part of it."
Chandler called communication "a powerful, complex essential component to any sort of disaster emergency management. You have to understand that it is not just in a box. Just because your radios are working, and telephones still work, you may not be communicating."
Chandler said Sandy "was the first 'social media' disaster. Sandy had some wonderful positives, and significant shortcomings. It revealed some weaknesses."
In Sandy, he said emergency dispatchers were receiving 300 inbound telephone calls and 100 inbound tweets every minute.
"Tweets became cries for help from people in trouble," he said. "People sent them twitter messages [saying] 'Help! I'm trapped. Come rescue. Help! My house is on fire.' It's a whole new world."
In a crisis, Chandler said, reading skills drop as much as four grade levels. With the average person reading at a sixth-grade level, “I cannot hire a Ph.D. from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to write them [advisories] for me. I need someone that can write at the sixth-grade reading level," he said. "It has to be incredibly simple."
More and more, Chandler said, even emailing people might not work; people are so deluged with emails they often delete several at a time without opening them.
And people will read an email or press release for the first 27 seconds or 27 words, Chandler said.
"At that point the first statistically significant group drops out. About every 30 seconds, 30 words, another significant body of people turn it off, press delete, stop listening," he said.
And, Chandler said, "we know probabilistic warnings" — such-and-such a chance a storm will strike a certain area at a certain time — don't work. Most people are baffled and confused by 'cones' of probability. You have to give people practical things to do."
Chandler also said emergency managers "have to plan for the whole life cycle of the event." That means continuing to distribute information during the cleanup and recovery.
©2014 The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Fla.)
