PLANNING FOR DISASTER
By Deborah Potter
How to stay on the air and in touch with your audience and staff during an emergency.

As Hurricane Katrina roared ashore last summer, chunks of the Superdome roof slammed into the downtown New Orleans office building where WWL-AM has its studios. Soon, the windows started breaking. But thanks to careful advance planning, the station was able to stay on the air, providing an information lifeline to a community in crisis.

"We planned to broadcast remotely from a local government emergency operations center nearer to the transmitter site, taking the studio out of the loop," says WWL news director Dave Cohen. The station has emergency generators, but managers weren't sure they could get fuel so they picked a location they knew would have power. The planning paid off. While most of the city's other radio stations went dark, WWL's corporate owner, Entercom, put its signal on all six of the stations it owns in New Orleans.

As the flooding worsened, Entercom made a deal with Clear Channel to use its studio space in Baton Rouge, 70 miles away. "The partnership gave us the infrastructure we lacked at the temporary studio, like working computers, phone lines and space," Cohen says.

News managers who have been through disasters say one lesson they've all learned is the importance of having a back-up location where you can get a signal on the air. Managers at KBJR-TV in Duluth, MN, learned that the hard way in 1997 when the station burned to the ground. They didn't miss a single newscast, however; they managed to broadcast from a live truck with a built-in switcher. Today, KBJR has an off-site studio as well as a standing agreement to use the facilities of the local public TV station should the need arise.

One system the station did have in place before the fire made a huge difference at the time. A local service records all of the station's newscasts and keeps them for 30 days, selling dubs upon request. When the station's tapes went up in flames, that archive provided enough commercial inventory, promos and file video to keep the newsroom in operation. "It saved us, totally," says KBJR vice president and station manager David Jensch. He recommends that every station have a similar arrangement.

The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, was the kind of disaster no station could fully prepare for, but it taught local broadcasters the importance of planning ahead. "The reality is that in the chaos or aftermath, there's going to be a time when communications are limited and the ability to move around is limited," says WCBS-TV news director Dianne Doctor. Because of that, she believes it's critical to have a disaster plan and make sure everyone on the staff understands it. "We have held preparation drills as a news department," she says. "We have a pre-rehearsed disaster routine" so people know where to report if they can't get to the station.

The disaster plan at KCBS-AM in San Francisco covers similar contingencies. The 1989 earthquake that killed 63 people in the Bay Area taught the station to expect communication problems. "Phones were overwhelmed, and that wasn't a catastrophic earthquake," says news director Ed Cavagnaro. He's now revising the newsroom plan so the staff knows exactly what to do if they can't call in. "If it's your normal day off, do you come in or wait? If it's daytime and you're the evening shift person, do you come in? If it's a widespread disaster, we'll be reporting for many hours so the call-in may be phased."

Redundant communication systems are critical in an emergency, says Keith Connors, news director at KHOU-TV in Houston. During Hurricane Rita last year, his crews had PDAs and push-to-talk cell phones, and every live truck had a satellite phone. When all else failed, Connors says, text messages did go through. WWL's Cohen says so many people were using satellite phones in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina that service went down. "We're now looking back at ham radio and two-way radios with upgrades so we can communicate if we lose power or if circuits get overloaded," he says.

Making sure you can stay on the air and communicate during an emergency are two of the keys to disaster planning. But it's just as important to keep an eye on your staff. "I didn't do that in Columbine," says KUSA-TV news director Patti Dennis, whose Denver newsroom covered the 1999 high school shootings wall-to-wall. "I didn't realize that people were becoming emotionally involved." To avoid early burnout, Dennis says she now moves quickly to put a work schedule in place whenever a big story hits. "What we've learned the hard way is that everybody wants to participate in the early stages, but fatigue sets in very quickly and thinking is harder to manage," Dennis says. "Managers have to create a cycle of shifts; otherwise, everyone will stay and then everyone's fried."

Joyce Reed says she learned the same lesson as news director at KWTV in Oklahoma City when the federal building was bombed. People didn't want to go home, but she insisted. "It was toughest on the producers in the booth," she says, "because they saw everything." Reed, who is now vice president of strategy for Griffin Communication, says she also learned not to overcommit staff and resources to live coverage. "Don't keep everybody tethered to a truck because they can't go out and get the great people stories you want to be able to tell," she says. To avoid that problem, KUSA's Dennis uses a simple system to designate crews for specific tasks on a major breaking story. "Crew one goes and gets on TV. Crew two goes and covers," she says. Once they know which number they are, their assignment is clear.

Newsroom assignments are just as important as field assignments in disaster coverage, says Jeff Kiernan, news director at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. He makes sure one person watches all incoming video, and another keeps track of information coming into the newsroom. Kiernan also moves quickly to incorporate the web in his coverage plan, beefing up the home page and adding a running blog while soliciting video and photos from the audience. "The Internet allows us to continue coverage in a new way and it also allows another way to gather information and gather pictures that can complement your coverage," he says. "You almost expand your newsroom by engaging viewers and Internet users to help you cover the story."

The disaster plan at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles includes contact information for a long list of experts on everything from tsunamis to terrorism. "When you've got a huge news story, there's no guarantee you're going to get anybody on the phone even if you have good [phone] numbers for them," says executive producer Ty Kim, the station's designated "crisis captain."

"We've made an effort to pick a dozen or so experts in their fields and told them, in advance of a disaster, that we want to bring them in and have them be on the air exclusive to the station." Above all, news managers say that to lead well during a crisis you have to make sure your people know what you expect of them. "Stress to your crews the importance of safety in the field," says KHOU's Connors. "Our job is to alert-not alarm-people."

Patti Dennis at KUSA agrees. "Reinforce the standards you set all the time" for handling scanner information, naming suspects or showing body bags, she says. "You can have a great plan, but if the newsroom doesn't understand the culture, it will break down."

No matter how much you plan, you can't possibly cover everything. WWL had carefully positioned its crew cars in high-rise parking garages before Katrina hit. They were dry, all right, but stranded by the flooding. And sometimes it all comes down to luck. The day of the Oklahoma City bombing, KWTV had brought in its helicopter pilot early to go cover a fire. "Ranger Nine was spooling on the pad when it happened," says Joyce Reed. "We were the only ones to get any aerials before the airspace was shut down."

This article was originally published by RTNDA Communicator, April 2006