
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 30 Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Review of the Communications Response
On this episode, Tom and Marc review the communications coming out from the various parties involved in the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore.
This is a complex response involving numerous federal, state, and local agencies, with communications coming from several different groups. Tom and Marc parse through the communications and offer insights for crisis communicators monitoring this large scale response that has more than 20 persons staffing the joint information center. We have also seen communications from the US Army Corps of Engineers, the State of Maryland, local entities, and the ship management company. How does it all blend together in this high-profile incident response? Which crisis website technology platform is being used to run the online communications? Tom and Marc offer their observations and insights.
For more information about the podcast, reach out to Tom and Marc:
tom@leadinginacrisis.com
marcmullenccc@gmail.cocm
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we deliver that through storytelling, interviews and lessons learned as shared by experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. With me again is my co-host, Mark Mullen. Mark, welcome back.
Marc Mullen:Thank you, tom, it's good to be back.
Tom Mueller:On today's podcast we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into the Baltimore Bridge collapse. That would be the Francis Scott Key Bridge that was taken out by the motor vessel Dolly back on March 26th, and what we're going to do today is just kind of talk through Mark and my reactions to the communications coming out of there, and we'll talk a little bit about the Unified Command and the Joint Information Center, how it's operating and what observations we can make from that, about two weeks into the incident now. So we'll start with just a quick recap. Many of you will be aware that it was early morning on March 26th when the container ship Dolly, which was leaving the port of Baltimore, apparently lost power or lost propulsion and collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing a significant portion of that bridge to collapse into the river. Now the ship was carrying about 4,600 containers. It was actually being guided by two river pilots at that point in time. So you've got a very interesting scenario shaping up there, where isn't just the ship personnel on board and managing operations, but the pilots there as well.
Tom Mueller:Now one of the really amazing things coming out of that incident is the fact that the crew was able to alert onshore authorities about the potential collision and get traffic stopped crossing that bridge, and I'm certain that that saved lives in the process, although, as we know now, there were a number of construction crew members working on the bridge at the time of the collision, and, as of current information today, it's presumed that six of those workers died as a result of the collision and the bridge collapsed. By all accounts, it's a horrific incident just because of the death toll, but then the economic impact of shutting down the shipping lanes into the Port of Baltimore are just huge and significant, and so there's a lot of pressure on the response agencies within the unified command there to get that debris cleared out, get that ship relocated and get that port channel reopened. So there's a lot happening there. Mark, as you have sort of observed this response shaping up over the last 10 days or so, what are your initial thoughts and reactions to it?
Marc Mullen:My first thought and reaction was watching the video of the ship going dark as it approached the bridge and just realizing that, with two pilots aboard, that all the precautions that are planned have been taken to safely guide the ship out of harbor. And then you have this completely unforeseen event occur and there will be a long investigation into what exactly happened. But the massiveness of the ship striking this bridge and then seeing the bridge completely collapse, it's just, it's almost unworldly to see it. And then, as you mentioned, to consider the impact. The impact of this is going to be so extended, it's going to last for such a long amount of time and there's going to be such a high level of damages that we'll probably be viewing this, reading about it and learning from it for months or years to come. My heart goes out to the families who lost loved ones. I agree with what you said on the praise for the fact that the ship was responsibly notified, protecting who knows how many additional lives. They're in for a long-term communication process.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, it certainly will be, and the complexity of the response is evident just by the number of responding agencies who are working to clear the bridge, re-establish port operations there.
Tom Mueller:If you go to the official response website, which is keybridgeresponse2024.com, you can see all the communications that have come out of that unified command to date and they've been fairly prolific, posting every day or every other day with updates from various agencies. Mark, one of the things I found interesting in doing some research for this podcast is you had multiple sources of information coming out. Initially, the first couple of press releases came out from Synergy Marine, which is the ship management company, and within the first, oh about four hours after the incident, they had a press release issued and then another one a few hours later during the day. And then the Unified Command Organization stood up later in the day after the incident occurred and started its communications. But I've also seen communications from the US Army Corps of Engineers who have a critical part in engineering and working to clear the channel, clear the debris there. So, as happens in many types of responses, you've got multiple channels of communication coming out, particularly in the early stage of the response.
Marc Mullen:Yeah, and it looks like again the Unified Command has formed well with good cooperation and apparently the rules are being followed where the Unified Command information is presented through that website and any other ways that Unified Command reaches. The media and the other sources are starting to give that ground to Unified Command so that if they do post, it's complimentary regarding their own operations.
Tom Mueller:You have multiple federal, state and local agencies involved in this response, and so there's a lot of communications happening at the local level too, and even legislative activity happening in the state of Maryland to provide benefits and resources for businesses and individuals who were affected by this. If we turn to take a look at the Unified Command now, they are operating today out of the Maryland Cruise Terminal, which is sort of line of sight to the actual bridge itself, so they can look out their windows from the Unified Command and the Joint Information Center and see the activity going on out there. And, as is a best practice for unified command, they've got everybody under a single roof there, so nobody's staffed in a separate building away from the operations center, and that's a good thing. Now the Joint Information Center. Mark, you've worked a lot of Joint Information Centers over your career.
Tom Mueller:This one has I couldn't even count how many agencies involved six or seven different ones, as you can see just listed on the crisis website. In addition, I learned today that the US EPA is also involved. They're not even listed on the crisis website as a responding agency. What's your take on the complexity of dealing with a unified command with that many players?
Marc Mullen:Well, that's what you plan for and that's what you practice for, because if we could have a guarantee that we wouldn'd need more than three agencies in the room, it would make our jobs a lot easier. But large accidents with this level of impact are just going to have a lot of agencies involved and it appears again you can only look at what you see in the releases and so on but it appears that there's a good level of cooperation. It appears that there's a good level of cooperation. I think what happens when you get more and more agencies, the default methods become more and more for lack of any other term conservative. That may be why so far the focus has been on press releases only.
Marc Mullen:I noticed that, for example, the Maryland government has more information on their site, but again it's following the rules. It's not talking about the incident, but they're putting up things like alternate routes and so on. So it looks like there's been pretty good delineation of who's going to talk about what. But I'm pretty sure that it's taken a while for that direct to form and get into a flow of reporting, meaning they get through the who's going to draft it and who's going to review it? Who's going to approve it? Because approval is a challenge with this many agencies. But given that they managed to sustain a daily reporting, it seems like they've made it through those critical first hours and days and now they're functioning together.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, I think that's right. I spoke with someone in the Joint Information Center earlier today and certainly got the impression that things were running smoothly there, even with the complexity of the multi-agencies that are involved. They've got their approval process down and they're getting those press releases out on a relatively steady basis. I asked how many folks they've got working the JIC today, and you know at this point in there still have 20 people staffing up the JIC, so it's a very large response. In the early days they had many more people than that, but it has settled back in now to that. So you're working a JIC with 20 people. There's a lot going on there Now. Somebody's going to be focused on writing press releases, somebody else is going to be focused on collating visual elements to this response and there's a lot of visuals around this. Mark, as you sort of think, what you've seen on the visual side, what's your impression of how they've been able to inform us and the public through visuals?
Marc Mullen:Well, first, I think the visuals they have are pretty good quality, and they've done a good job of captioning them for understanding.
Marc Mullen:They've embedded them in their press releases, so if you want to look for imagery, you have to go back through every press release and scroll down, and even at that, just due to the fact that they do one release a day, it can only be so long. So I think there's high quality images, but there's not a lot of them. A lot is a relative term. In this sort of event, I think there's a high demand for as much imagery as possible, and so it may be that, as that accumulates, they're going to have to add another tab to the website or something where they can start just putting a lot more thumbnails of images so people can continue to access them and pull them up. But it's funny, really good quality, and again, that's I'll give a kudos to the coast guard when they're involved, they train their people very, very well and because they're at the response location, right in the middle of everything, they can take really high quality, compelling photographs that really tell the story, and I think they're taking advantage of that.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, that's an excellent point that we are really just seeing the visuals embedded in press releases. Now that's a bit unusual. We would normally see another tab on the website that offers those visual elements that news organizations can go in and download and use. I asked this morning - on my call with the JIC - there where the images were coming from, if it was mainly Coast Guard producing that, and said no, it's really a multi-agency effort there. So you've got multiple agencies who are working on different aspects of it. They're all collecting video and sharing that, then back to the JIC and then there's kind of a collation process that's happening there on site and deciding on, you know, the final versions that are being embedded into the press releases. So that's good, it's fascinating visuals. Any way you look at it. Just with the, you know the tangled mass of metal from that bridge collapse, this massive container ship, you know, with the bridge laying over the top of it, thousands and thousands of containers stacked up on top of that and you know each one of those containers was bound for a customer somewhere in the world and the logistics for the shipping company of even, you know, tracking, notifying all of that for those 4,000 containers will be a bit of a challenge as well, but all in all, I think you know we're impressed with what we're seeing on the visual side of that, so kudos to the multi-agency teams who are working that and delivering that in Mark, we've been talking about the website a little bit, and you and I are familiar with some website technology that is very good for crisis response, in particular the Jetty system.
Tom Mueller:But the system they're using to run the Unified Command website here is not that technology. It's a different thing, called Crisis Pigeon. If you're interested in that, you can find it at crisispigeon. com, but it's another crisis website technology that might be worth looking at if your company or agency is considering using or keeping a crisis website dark and on standby. Looking at the press releases, we've only seen one press release in Spanish language of all the ones that have been done. Does that strike you a little odd?
Marc Mullen:I was relieved to see it. That would be, I would think, a need identified early on, and I guess what that makes me want to talk about a little bit is when something like this happens, what does your list of needing translation of content for the affected population? And obviously, in this case, the sensitivity is that they've realized that the victims are Hispanic and so they've made the decision to provide information in that language, which I think is good. It could have been thought about a lot sooner perhaps, and we need to be really careful here. It's so easy to Monday morning quarterback, but I was impressed to see it, I was happy to see it, but it did come after a significant amount of time had passed, when they had all the facts to know that it would be a good idea to start sharing information in Spanish.
Marc Mullen:And the next part of it is again is that robust enough? Should there be more? How long is that interest going to last? Where is that interest coming from? And there may be a need for more, not just more content, but there may be a need for more languages, not because of the individuals that were unfortunately impacted by the collapse, but there could be other population groups that maybe they're clients of the shipping line. Maybe, as you mentioned, maybe they're containers.
Marc Mullen:There's all sorts of ways that interests of this could diffuse globally. And then it's your real question about what's our commitment to ongoing communication.
Tom Mueller:I asked about the Spanish language press releases when I spoke with the JIC this morning. One of the points they made was that there are multiple sources of information now, particularly local resources for those who've been impacted by that, from the municipalities or the city or the state, and I think a lot of those conversations are happening in Spanish. The JIC does have several Spanish speakers there and available to do interviews in Spanish or provide information in Spanish language, so they are ready to respond there, but we're not seeing it proactively in the press releases, which was a bit of a surprise for me.
Marc Mullen:On that, and again, once you make a decision like that, you sort of set an expectation and probably from the point of your first release you should be planning resources to basically provide that function for every release from that point on. They've obviously decided to do it specifically around the issue of the people that were on the bridge when it collapsed.
Tom Mueller:Mark, let's talk for a minute about the press releases coming out from Synergy Marine, the early press releases that came out. I looked at those and was just a little bit surprised and pleased, actually, with some of the language there I'll kind of tell you my likes on that where some of the language included that they deeply regret that the incident has happened. So there's a language that I think is very worthwhile in using in those communications. But oftentimes it's difficult to get past the lawyers but simply acknowledging you deeply regret what has happened around this incident or doing everything you can to make things right. The other words that I really liked in those early press releases were they expressed deepest sympathies to the families of those who've been impacted there, the families of those who'd been impacted there, and it came across as genuine in those early press releases and I was very pleased to see that kind of language in there.
Tom Mueller:There was one other issue I thought was a bit of a miscue there and in the second press release coming out of there where it said the six people were presumed dead on the same day of the incident and that surprised me a little bit, just because search and rescue operations generally continue for a couple of days and it takes a while before anyone's willing to sort of stand up and make that announcement, so that I thought was a little bit premature to sort of stand up and make that announcement. So that I thought was a little bit premature. And they came back just a little bit later with another press release to clarify that they hoped there'd still be positive outcomes to that. So, mark, as you look at those press releases, what were your early thoughts?
Marc Mullen:Well, first of all, overall, I appreciated that this release is posted on Synergy's website to show a real, good and solid understanding of the process of unified command, of how these incidents develop.
Marc Mullen:They had all the key things that you coach people to put in the release, but they also maintain identification that it's unified command response and I also appreciate it. On their website On these releases, they made sure they included the unified command website as soon as it was available, which was pretty quick. For example, that was up within two days. It was up and running. So they did a good job of referring to it as soon as they could. They had a strong focus on their own activities, which when you're in Unified Command, if you're participating in Unified Command, you have to make sure that Unified Command's Joint Information Center is carrying the freight for the response itself.
Marc Mullen:And to me they did a good job of differentiating that in that they talked about their own crew aboard. They talked about some of the care for their crew which they could talk about, because that's what they're doing. It's not part of Unified Command. They pledged cooperation, cooperation which is important, um, and I I do appreciate, as you did, that they they expressed their deepest sympathies. They also include a couple other uh, to me a little slightly gratuitous quote the one about um that the president and the governor were both really appreciative that they made their phone call. The president and the governor were both really appreciative that they'd made their phone call and been able to stop other people from being on the bridge. That's all true, but again, complimentary best spoken when somebody else says them about you.
Tom Mueller:I did think that it was creative to include those mentions from the president in their press release, just highlighting the fact that there was a proactive effort made to to save, save lives and to protect people on the bridge when I was reading the early news, really news stories that was already out there.
Marc Mullen:So and and it was good of the president and the governor to say that. But again those things are said, they're in public public consent, already in public consumption. That that was my only point with. That is um. The other thing that was interesting is they. They removed um, the spokesperson contact information by virtue of how they posted. It's a single document. They continue to add to. So if you go to the first release, it has contact information for the spokespeople for both US and UK, and the second release, the second update, they've taken that away. The other danger of not doing that is every phone number you have as an organization is out there somewhere and you steer people to a single phone number, not just so that that's where the spokesperson is, but so that all of your phones don't ring when people call in with questions.
Tom Mueller:So all in all, a very complex response and many different moving pieces around this between the shipping company, the local emergency responders, state agencies, federal agencies, so much going on. But as we sort of step back and look at the communications side, I think generally, Marc, I'm impressed with what I've seen from the initial shipping communications and then the ongoing Joint Information Center response. You can tell there's a team of professionals on the ground there who are working hard to not only communicate but to manage the incident operationally and to keep people informed.
Marc Mullen:Yes, they're doing a good job keeping people informed.
Tom Mueller:Yes, they're doing a good job, you know. I'd asked if there you know any efforts toward compensation and that from the shipping company to offset, you know, expenses for people who've been impacted, whatnot, and it was just referred over to state and local resources that are being made available to support families and businesses that are being impacted by that. I think we'll wrap it up here, Mark. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights into this bridge collapse incident. As always, it's a pleasure being with you.
Marc Mullen:That was great, Tom. Thank you.
Tom Mueller:That's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you like what you're hearing, please like and subscribe to the podcast, and please tell your friends and colleagues about us as well, and we'll see you again soon for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.
Marc Mullen:Hi, this is Mark. We all know that in a crisis, nothing is more important than doing the right thing and making sure people know about it. In recognition of this reality, your organization has both a physical response plan directing response actions and a crisis communication plan guiding communication efforts. These plans should work together to enhance your ability to do the right thing and to make sure people know about it. But do you know these plans work well together? I can help you be sure by reviewing both plans to ensure that they do. A small investment in this review can yield a large return in the effectiveness of your plans. If you're interested or want to learn more, please email me at markmullenccc at gmailcom.