Emel Ozdora - Reaction 5 – Chapter 20

Risk communication – Before, During, and After Emergencies:

This chapter makes a distinction between a crisis and an emergency. While a crisis is defined as: “a turning point that will decisively determine an outcome,” an emergency is seen as “a sudden or unforeseen situation that requires immediate action.” Crises mostly follow a process, even if it is an undesirable on, and they are not totally unexpected. However, an emergency is random and unexpected. Good examples of emergency situations in the book are SARS and the September 11 terrorist attacks. These events are totally unexpected events that shocked the world community and left people helpless without knowing what to do and predict what will happen next.

Due to the difference in the nature of these two events, crisis communication and emergency communication need to be approached differently. In an emergency situation, the people who are responsible from communication should understand the uniqueness of the situation ad plan their communication efforts according to the unexpected and communicate with a confused and perplexed public during and after the emergency.


People tend to act emotionally during emergency situations, and risk communicators need to keep that in mind and plan their communications accordingly. One point they make caused me to agree strongly with the authors. They argued that people don’t want leaders to hide their own responses to tragedies. This reminded me of an event in Turkey. In 1999, we suffered a major earthquake that killed thousands of people, and almost destroyed two cities and caused a lot of damage in close by cities. After the first shock, Bill Clinton came to visit Turkey. And while he was walking around in one of the cities, he picked up a little child, hugged him, and walked around with him for the rest of his visit in that city. And I think later on, he became the child’s sponsor. This was a very emotional act that people still remember today and think positively about Clinton. I think seeing Clinton’s face and his genuine feelings while he was walking around the ruins made people feel that he was sharing their pain and caused people to have sympathy towards him and this is really important for a leader. People need to see that as a leader, you are deeply touched and that you share their sorrow. You need to make an emotional connection with people.

Establishing credibility and trust is also very important for a crisis communicator during an emergency. Trust and credibility will add to your reputation and make people believe in what you say. You need to tell people what you know, what you don’t know and try to answer questions as correctly as possible and correct misperceptions as soon as they emerge. Being honest and transparent is really important for your trust and credibility, thus for your reputation.

However, you can easily damage or lose your trust and credibility if there is:
- disagreement among experts
- lack of coordination among risk management organizations
- lack of listening, dialogue and public participation
- an unwillingness to acknowledge risks
- not disclosing information in a timely manner
- not fulfilling risk management responsibilities

Even though emergencies are unexpected events in nature and you cannot really plan for them, you can at least have a plan about how you will communicate during an emergency in advance. As a communicator, you can make sure that our organization is ready, that it knows which organizations it can team up with, it has an established place in the community, and already knows the appropriate communication channels. You need to have a consensus on roles and responsibilities and you need to have an internal emergency communication plan like a phone tree among the employees within the organization.