It has been many years since I wrote a book report. But I recently read The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley.  It spoke so clearly to the crisis communicator in me that I felt the need to tell every

Karen Terrill

PIO I know about it. So, I posted the following report in the newsletter of the National Information Officers' Association (NIOA) to share with my fellow members. I'm also a member of CESA (California Emergency Services Association). The author of the book, Amanda Ripley, was the keynote speaker at our annual conference this year. She held the audience of emergency responders in rapt attention as she told them how important the proper information is to the public during a crisis. She described how human beings process information and our brains transfer the information into action, or inaction. The take-away message was crystal clear to me. We must consider not only what we say, but what people will hear. And that is affected by their experiences and their state of mind.   kt


I came across two quotes recently that stopped me cold. One was validating and one was stunning.  They both pertain to public information and they are both from a new book; The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, a senior writer for Time magazine. This book should be required reading for anyone who is involved in emergency response, especially PIOs.

The focus of the book is why some people survive a crisis and some don't.  The book is rich with information about how the human brain processes messages during a crisis and then directs the body to respond. But it reads more like a well-written case study, actually, dozens of well-written case studies.

It takes you inside the stairwells of the World Trade Center, into the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, to fires, floods, and airplane crashes. It isn't grisly or voyeuristic. In many ways, it is uplifting and reassuring about the nature of human beings to survive and help others to survive.

Back to those quotes:

Quote # 1 - "I think (Hurricane) Camille killed more people during (Hurricane) Katrina than it did in 1969". Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center.

Quote #2 - "Since 9/11 the U.S. government has sent over $23 billion to states and cities in the name of homeland security. Almost none of that money has gone toward intelligently enrolling regular people like you and me in the cause. Why don't we tell people what to do when the nation is on Orange Alert instead of telling them to be afraid? Why does every firefighter in Casper, Wyoming (pop. 50,632) have an eighteen-hundred dollar HAZMAT suit--but we don't each have a statistically derived ranking of the hazards we actually face, and a smart, creative plan for dealing with them?" Amanda Ripley.

You can probably guess it was Quote #1 that was stunning to me.

Quote #2 validated what many of us have been thinking and saying for years. As PIOs we have always known that more money needs to be spent on public information. People can die due to a lack of information or the belief in wrong information.

That leads me to explain Quote #1: The majority of people who stayed in their homes during Katrina and drowned in their attics had one thing in common, they were old. They had been middle-aged when Hurricane Camille went through New Orleans in 1969. Like Katrina, Camille was a Category 5 storm, and these people had lived through it. Many of them told their families that they didn't want to evacuate. They could live through Katrina just like they lived through Camille. But according to The Unthinkable, since Camille, "rapid development had destroyed much of the wetlands that had provided a natural barrier against storm surge".

The reader is left to wonder how many lives might have been saved if those people had that piece of information, and of course, if they believed it. I imagined a team of PIOs creating an aggressive information campaign to drive home that single message to these people. Experienced PIOs know the importance of a simple, powerful message...a message that is crafted specifically for a particular group with deliberate attention to their state of mind during a crisis. I wasn't there so I don't know if there was an effort to do this. But the after-action report seems to indicate that this single issue was a cause of multiple fatalities.

The Unthinkable tells the reader what PIOs already know... we must consider how people think during a crisis, and treat them accordingly. We are often told that we should not release this or that information because we don't want people to panic. But, as Ms. Ripley points out, people hardly ever panic, in fact, the first response to fright is usually freezing up, or what she calls the "denial phase".  We have a "normalcy bias". Meaning we expect everything to be the way it always is, so that when we hear an alarm or someone yells fire, or the ground begins to shake, we don't run screaming. We stop and consider, and mill around and talk to others, and delay our actions, sometimes for extensive periods of time. This book is filled with case studies such as both World Trade Center bombings and Hurricane Katrina in which people died due to lack of information, or faith in wrong information.

As PIOs, we are not just practitioners. I believe we should also be advisers. Please consider reading this book, and passing it on to your emergency response coordinators. I think your communities will be safer for it.

Karen Terrill has been a crisis communicator for most of her adult life. She was the Lead Public Information Officer for CAL FIRE where she dealt with fires, floods, earthquakes and other major emergencies for more than 20 years. Prior to that she was a broadcast journalist.  Today she is the president and lead trainer of Media Survival Group, contracting with the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security for PIO Team Training. You may reach her at: [email protected]