Whew. We made it through what was for many a harrowing and stressful week. In northern Nevada, we’re used to news about wildfires, air quality alerts and hazy summer days blanketed in wildfire smoke. What we’re not used to is two fires within weeks of each other leading to power outages, evacuations and—in this past week’s case—firefighters from across the country descending on our community in an all-hands effort to protect people’s homes.
The firefighters are doing an incredible job.
People were anxious, as seen in some of our social media comment sections, but also filled with gratitude. We love that. In a week with a presidential debate when politics could’ve dominated, it didn’t. In these times, that’s pretty miraculous.
This isn’t to say that there wasn’t grumbling. More than a few people complained about the lack of communication in the first few days of the Davis Fire. We complained about it too. We actually pre-complained about it in our subscriber newsletter after last month’s Gold Ranch Fire.
We felt validated this week when many community members echoed our concerns—that using social media exclusively to share emergency information isn’t a great idea, especially when NV Energy shuts off the power, cell signals are overwhelmed and evacuees are trying to save their cell phone charge.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Facebook is deleting emergency-related information. News publishers say the same is happening to their news reports. Important content is disappearing, so it’s an unreliable platform for critical news.
We’re digital, so we get it. If readers can’t access Facebook, or Facebook posts, they may not be able to access This Is Reno reporting either. But this week, even the local TV stations had broadcast outages. Channel 2 broadcast from KNPB for a time. If emergency communications teams aren’t even keeping a media contacts list updated because they’re so focused on a single stream of algorithm-driven messaging—this week sandwiched between memes about eating pets, no less—then, when a situation arises that limits access to that medium, they’re unprepared to cast a wider net to the many news outlets in the region.
We know it’s easy to sit back and armchair quarterback the communications coming out of local government offices. It’s much harder to do the job on the fly in an emergency, but it’s something we’ve been doing for years, as reporters—as far back as the Washoe Drive Fire in 2012.
It was particularly maddening, therefore, to see the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District tell their readers on Facebook that they would not respond to questions in posts, only to see those posts followed by numerous questions. It wasn’t until state and federal officials stepped in that the community got clearer, regular updates.
The best source of information in the early days of the fire was Reno Reddit. Despite social media’s propensity to amplify misinformation, Reno’s Redditors do a good job of tamping down hostility and unsupported nonsense, while helpful commenters and their posts get to the top of threads. If anything, there was a glut of repetitive but important fire updates being regularly posted. The Watch Duty app is also excellent.
We hope that of the positives that may come out of this week’s events one of them may be that public information officers take a look at their own emergency communications plans, identify gaps and opportunities for improvement, ask for feedback from local media, and invite partners to the table as part of a support team during emergencies. We’d love to see improvements, not because we want them for ourselves, but because our community deserves them. As we mentioned in our editorial on this same topic a few weeks ago, this is life-saving information.
Also, even if you weren’t impacted by the Davis Fire, we highly recommend you check out the resources compiled for getting fire information and preparing for wildfire. You may not need them now, but you’ll be glad you bookmarked those pages and prepared a go-bag. Apparently, we all need a wind-up emergency radio now, too.
—Kristen Hackbarth & Bob Conrad
