I am struck by the irony of such an effort to manipulate public perception and then, at the same time, release the document on line that discusses the agency's effort to manipulate the public perceptions.
Here are the talking points:
- When speaking with the media regarding facts:
- Use non-threatening terminology such as “precautionary evacuation” or “temporary closure”.
- When talking about size of the fire or number of acres involved use percentages rather than numbers.
- If evacuations are in place, distinguish between “voluntary evacuations” and “mandatory evacuations”
- Stress that any closures are “temporary” or “only partial closures”
- Accentuate the positive. Fire does have a natural role in ecology.
2 comments:
Wow, that was an enlightening post. I'm surprised they actually made that info available to the public.
How is your first summer in NY going??
I think the evacuation points are very important. When Rita came through Houston, my area was under mandatory evacuation. But because it was just on the tails of Katrina all the little counties north of here issued "voluntary" evacuations. Now these counties are well above sea level and not at risk of flooding like the place I'm at. Tornados and heavy winds are a problem, but general hurrican philosophy is to "run from the flood, shelter from the wind". Anyway, because they weren't clear on the differences between voluntary and mandatory (and partially because of Katrina-induced panic), all those places north of the city started evacuating when they shouldn't have, creating havock on the roads for people who really need to get out of town (like Galveston Island, or where I live - places at risk of being flooded by multiple feet of storm surge). Ironically, we evacuated to a suburb north of Houston called Conroe (150 ft above sea level and a few dozen miles inland). Normally an hour drive it took us over 6 hours to get there in traffic. When we got there, the neighbors across the street were loading gas cans on their hum-v to evacuate.
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