Disaster recovery plan

I heard on the radio that ONEMI, Chile’s national emergency office, has satellite phones in the main cities, but that the batteries were dead, or there were no spare batteries.

On the Juan Fernández islands a 12-year-old girl rang a gong, 80 centimeters in diameter, to warn the island’s inhabitants that the tsunami was coming. Yes, the Juan Fernández tsunami warning system is a gong 80 cm in diameter!

It would seem our country’s disaster recovery plan is something like this famous cartoon:

Apparently a wording problem, an almost semantic argument, persists between the Navy and ONEMI over the use of the conditional in the communications between these institutions about the tsunami: “there could be a tsunami” is said to have been the phrase used.

In emergency situations language must be direct, without ambiguity.

Besides, it’s not enough to write pretty emergency plans and protocols if they are never tested.

Ours is a seismic country, with a long coastline. It’s ridiculous that we don’t have a culture of preparing for this kind of disaster.

When it comes to communications and energy infrastructure, we clearly have big shortcomings.

Public safety has suffered from the delay in deploying the security forces, and from the media’s poor handling of information.

In this age when we are hyperconnected, with many media outlets, and social networks that let anyone spread information, the amount of noise can rise dangerously. Given that, it’s important that the authorities handle information better. It’s not enough to have a minister show up in front of the TV cameras. If people use social networks, these must be covered by official government accounts. I don’t know if there is an ONEMI twitter account, but there should be a twitter account for every ministry and for the institutions that act in these situations. They should also have an official facebook account. Social networks are a new communication medium that demands attention, because they are very vulnerable to rumor and misinformation.

Let’s hope we learn from this, and manage to improve our national disaster recovery plan.