
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 37 Listen to the elders - mass casualties and lessons learned from the Lahaina wildfire with Michael Brogan
How does one navigate the chaos of a natural disaster while ensuring cultural respect and effective communication? Join us as we dive into the compelling and heart-wrenching story of the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii through the eyes of Michael Brogan, a seasoned public affairs expert. He recounts the sheer devastation he witnessed in Lahaina and the complex, multi-agency recovery efforts that ensued. Michael shares the challenges of communicating the EPA's mission in an environment where traditional information channels were obliterated, offering a vivid portrayal akin to his deployments in war zones.
With over three decades of experience in the Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, and the EPA , Michael's journey from childhood inspiration to achieving his dream role at the EPA in San Francisco in 2022 is nothing short of remarkable.
In another gripping segment, we spotlight the critical role of cultural training and sensitivity in emergency response, particularly in Hawaii. Michael discusses how mandatory cultural training, led by a local Hawaiian elder, was pivotal in ensuring respectful and effective operations. He provides insight into the emotional and political turmoil faced by local authorities and federal teams, stressing the importance of understanding, humility, and grace. Michael’s reflections on working with exhausted local staff underscore the human element in crisis management, making this episode an essential listen for anyone interested in emergency response and public affairs.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we deliver that through interviews, storytelling and lessons learned as shared from experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. It's great to have you back with us again today and I want to welcome in my colleague, mark Mullen, who's here again. Mark hi.
Marc Mullen:Hello Tom, Happy to be here Looking forward to the program today.
Tom Mueller:Our guest today on the podcast is Michael Brogan, who worked as a public information officer during the Lahaina incident in Hawaii. Now you may recall that was a massive wildfire that consumed that community on the island of Maui and it just left the community in tatters. But it also created a number of very unique issues that public information team and the emergency responders had to deal with around the cultural, archaeological and historical artifacts that are just everywhere in that community. So I want to welcome Michael to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today.
Michael Brogan:Well, T om and Mark, it's really my pleasure to be here today and to have a chance to talk about what, for me, was a very significant opportunity to be a part of the response, to have a chance to help the wonderful people of Maui recover from what was really just an incredibly devastating fire. Yeah, it was just a once in a lifetime, once in a generation opportunity.
Tom Mueller:Michael, before we get into the details of working the incident, can you just give us a quick thumbnail of your work history and background
Michael Brogan:Yeah, interesting. I spent about 30 years with the Department of Defense 24 of those in uniform, working in public affairs, tv, radio and then traditional public affairs as well. And then I spent about three years with the Veterans Administration as a public affairs officer, and that was in Reno, N evada. And then I actually was able to have a lifelong dream come true working for the EPA as a young boy in the early 70s I'm kind of showing my age, but folks may remember that there was an ad campaign that involved a crying Indian. It was the Keep America Beautiful campaign and you know, as a young boy, that made a big impression on me and that was really the start of the whole environmental movement and also the birth of the EPA. And, just like I said, it just kind of planted its seed and I always wanted to work for the EPA twice, to live in San Francisco as a younger boy and then as a young man. And so, you know, coming back here after a career in the military and working for the VA, it was just, you know, a dream come true quite literally, and I joined the EPA in the summer of 2022.
Tom Mueller:So you were just a year into your role with the EPA when this horrific fire came through there on Maui. I wonder if you can give us a sense for what you were walking into when you got the call and said hey, we need you to come to Lahaina and support this effort. Tell us a little bit about that. What were you walking into?
Michael Brogan:Yeah, I mean, first off, the EPA responded. I think we had an initial team on the ground within, I want to say, four days of the fire. I did not get on ground until about three weeks into it. But you know, responding to these kind of natural disasters is part of the wheelhouse, of what the Environmental Protection Agency does. It's just part of the national response system.
Michael Brogan:When I got there, we already had about 140 EPA members there and our primary mission was recovery and removal of what we describe as hazardous household materials, which are, you know, most people don't. You don't really think about it all that much, but it's the cleaning supplies that are in most houses, you know the Lysols and the Cloroxes and all that stuff. But Lahaina, I mean, a significant part of that town, had been literally wiped out. The fire had just gone through and burnt everything down, had been literally wiped out. The fire had just gone through and burned everything down, and so we had teams that were, you know, going through and just sorting through the ash to recover all this material. And then, of course, there was also the commercial district as well that we had to contend with.
Michael Brogan:And we weren't the only agency doing this, you know we. We had other federal agencies there as well the US Army, corps of Engineers, small Business Administration, the Red Cross. You also had state state agencies there as well. There was this huge effort. But you know, I went there as part of the EPA emergency response and I went there as the public information officer and my job was to kind of gather up you know what the communication environment was like and let the public know what we were doing. And it sounds, you know, speaking about it. Now it sounds kind of like a simple undertaking, but literally, when the town itself is, it's, you know, all the normal means of disseminating information are destroyed. It's not so simple.
Michael Brogan:Tom, f or anyone who's ever been to Lahaina, you know we're all human beings, first and foremost, meetings first and foremost. And you know my time in um, in uniform, I I've deployed to war zones and, uh, I it's. It's not hyper hyperbole to say that when I crested the hill and caught my first sight of L lahaina, when I the first time I flew in and drove in, it literally took me back to my deployments into war zones. The devastation was as far as I could see. It took my breath away. And I had been to Lahaina previously, while I was in the military in early 2000. And so that was my frame of reference. And then what I saw, you know, after the fire I just literally took my breath away and it brought tears to my eyes. I just the devastation was just utter. And then you know, but you still have a job to do and you've got to focus on that job, that mission.
Michael Brogan:And you know we were living and working. You know we're staying at a hotel working. You know we're staying at a hotel and the staff that's working at the hotel, a lot of them have lost everything. You know, I mean the hotels employ locals and a lot of the locals literally had their houses burnt down, and so you feel that and you see it and it affects you and I'm glad that I was exposed to that because it really I know for a fact that it affected the entire EPA team. It affected everybody who was part of this response and it really just gave us clarity of purpose in what we were doing, seeing up close and personal and having a chance to speak and we did speak with the family members of the people that suffered through this. It just, you know, we worked long hours, but those long hours paled in comparison to what, you know, the people had suffered and we just we found strength and inspiration in in just being part of that and sharing with them their, their experiences.
Marc Mullen:So I think many times as we roll into a response, we put on a protective veneer. We're there to do a job and we focus on the words between the lines and the graphics. But it sounds like it was inescapable in this case that you weren't there just to talk to media. You were there to interact and commune with every person that you came in contact. That was much more personal.
Michael Brogan:Yeah, you know, you, I mean, these are our fellow Americans and, like I said, the devastation, just you know, we're all human beings and, yes, you've, you've got to you. You want to put on your armor and just focus on the mission at hand and, at the end of the day, you want to just decompress. But, my god, you know, um, you can't do that and and, as a matter of fact, I I didn't want to do that because it made me a better public information officer and it really informed my ability to better understand and better do my job, because it gave me insight into the unique cultural aspects of the Hawaiian culture that I needed to understand it and appreciate in order to communicate effectively. Because there is so much uniqueness to Hawaiian culture, to Maui culture, that if you don't have insight into that and if you don't respect that, and if you don't have insight into that, and if you don't respect that and if you don't leverage that uniqueness, you're not going to be effective in trying to find ways to effectively communicate and effectively to inform the local populace about what it is you're doing to try and bring relief to And, like I said, you know the communication landscape had been totally wiped out because of the fire, and so when there's an information vacuum, it's going to be filled. And what I discovered three you know, when I landed the first time three weeks after the fire was that there was a lot of misinformation filling that vacuum. Understandably so, and especially when you have federal agencies descending. You know, and we have the best intentions, but we're so focused on getting to work that it doesn't matter what your intentions are. If people don't really understand what it is you're doing, it's easy for that to be misinterpreted. And so that's where, like, my job comes in is to help explain what it is we're doing, what you know, and, like the cultural aspect, it was such a challenge, especially early on, because, like in Hawaiian culture, family is everything. if you think about it, the ash well, that ash contained the remains of loved ones. The remains of loved ones, you know, not only did it have wood and metal and the remains of houses and commercial entities and cars and everything, but also the remains of loved ones. And here we are having to go through all this ash looking for, you know, household hazardous material. But we had to find a way to do that in accordance with local cultural practices. And so how do we do that? Well, the smart way of doing that was to listen to the locals, listen to the elders, seek guidance from the locals, and we did that. But we wouldn't have known to do that had we just gone in there and not been culturally attuned to that need.
Tom Mueller:That's a huge aspect of this response that most of us who would deploy to an incident somewhere in the United States, you know you don't really have to deal with that much. You can really partition yourself off a little bit and focus on the job, but every day, with the role you were in, you were in people's homes, right, and so this was a factor that you had to deal with every day. I understand there was actual cultural orientation for responders who were coming in to sort of help them understand some of the issues that you've just highlighted f or us. They are the sensitivity of family and remains and the cultural issues that are all so important there.
Michael Brogan:Let me just touch upon one aspect that I think is really, really important and it harkens back to my experiences being in the military, and anybody who's been in the military will understand, like anytime, whether we're talking about a deployment or just being stationed in an overseas environment.
Michael Brogan:Part of your in processing is you will go to a class or classes that involve cultural training right, it's, it's a.
Michael Brogan:You get inculcated and educated on the local culture so that you're at least initially exposed in in in, so you don't make a fool of yourself and you understand what the expectations and the norms of behavior are. We did that with everybody who was on the EPA team. It was mandatory training when they arrived and some folks were just doing two-week rotations, others were doing 30 days, but everybody that rotated in on the EPA team went through that training and that training was provided by a local elder Hawaiian elder and it was mandatory and it was tracked. So everybody, everybody got that training Because it was so important to EPA leadership and it was so important from the top on down that we wanted to be sure that we were in tune with the local sensibilities and that we were following the local customs and traditions as we went about our mission Because we understood we weren't. The mission was not going to succeed if we were not, if we were not acting in partnership with the locals it's easy to tell that this profoundly impacted you.
Marc Mullen:How does that translate and what would you tell somebody first of all that was having to go to that response and what would you advise them as part of your own onboarding with them? But second, how do you take that now and apply it to perish the term, but a more limited or more normal response, how does that translate to PIO and members of a joint information center to be able to do their communication job better with real affected people?
Michael Brogan:Again and I'm going to sound like a broken record right, because I'll refer a lot to like my DOD training. I got some fantastic public information officer, public affairs officer training in the DOD. You know you've got to know the environment that you're operating in and part of that knowing the environment is knowing the cultural environment that you're operating in, is knowing the cultural environment that you're operating in. I think, like with Hawaii, hawaii is such a unique culture within the construct of the United States. It's not. I mean, there's a lot of places, lots of states within the United States that have unique cultures. Alaska would be another one. If you're operating in tribal lands within the United States that have unique cultures, alaska would be another one. If you're operating in tribal lands within the United States, that would be another one. But just like pulling back a little bit, you definitely want to understand the culture in which you're operating. Perhaps you don't have to have it to a certain degree, maybe you can dial it back a little bit, but that needs to be part of your overall site picture, going into whatever area that you're going to be operating. I just think in the case of Hawaii, you really had to dial it up to the nth degree, you know. But yeah, that's just understanding the culture. You've got to factor the culture into whatever JIC you're setting up.
Tom Mueller:I want to take you more into operational mode now a little bit, M ichael, and thinking about. You know, as I kind of remember hearing the early news stories around this, there was lots of issues being raised about alerting the public, and you know why wasn't there more warning? And there were all kinds of political issues that seemed to be just swirling around this response. So you step into a unified command, setting a joint information center, and how was the environment there? And you know, did you feel any of that? How did you work through it? J
Michael Brogan:Yeah, boy, you hit it on the head. I mean, I, you know Maui County, Hawaii, each island it's like a county, right. So Maui County itself had not seen a natural disaster like this, if memory serves, I mean, I think it was for well over 20 years. So they, by the time I got there, they'd been dealing with this for three plus weeks, and it's a small staff to begin with and they were running on fumes. They'd been at this 24-7. By the time I got there, they did have a unified command ostensibly stood up, you know, and, like I said, there were federal agencies that were part of the JIC along with state, but there was, I think they were.
Michael Brogan:You know, especially at the county level, there was a lot of shell shock and the federal partners, you know, we actually talked about it amongst ourselves. We understood that we had to. The politics side of it was not ours, that was not ours to own. We had to stay focused on the operational stuff. That's what we owned, right, and the politics side, unfortunately, was something that the county had to deal with along with the state. So the county did a lot of shepherding back to Honolulu, back to this state, and you know, um, I used the the term grace a lot with my chick partners and my uh, federal partners, just in discussions amongst ourselves, just to remind everybody that we have to approach this all with a sense of grace and a sense of humility, because I I know what it's like to be operating on on empty for an extended period of time and the county had been operating on empty for a long time and they were just overwhelmed, so tempers were short, people were impatient, those kind of things.
Michael Brogan:Yeah, yeah, you know, and I mean they. You know Hawaiian culture is so beautiful, it is some of the most. It encompasses some of the most gracious human characteristics you'll ever want to be a part of, and so that was just like my North, my North star. I just always wanted to keep that in mind as I, as I went through my days and and just kind of let things go and stayed focused on the mission at hand and understanding that I was dealing with a lot of tired people. I was dealing with a lot of tired people. I wanted to do what I could to help and not, you know, not let not let the ego get in the way.
Tom Mueller:Y ou're not saying a lot by what you're saying there, M michael, in terms of you know what was going on in that JIC, in that overall unified command response and and, of course, when you step back and look at it, an entire community had been decimated. There were more than 100 people killed in that community and just the tragedy of people not being able to escape from the flames and the fire, and there's just so much for people in leadership positions to process In the meantime, you've got to communicate, you've got to get the job done. D id each agency do its own thing to keep communications moving .
Michael Brogan:In this case, it was not that tightly of an operationalized JIC like others that I've been a part of in previous scenarios, and understandably so. The agencies we would operate independently as much as possible to minimize the burden on, say, the county, and then we would utilize the traditional JIC channels when absolutely necessary, channels when absolutely necessary, and I think that was just a way to kind of divide and conquer understanding the operational environment that we were in, given the situation, and I found that it was a good and effective compromise that allowed folks to get some sleep and some rest much needed, certainly on the local side while still meeting, you know, the operational needs of the agencies and the needs also of the media, both local media as well as national and international. I mean it was we were getting inquiries from all over the world.
Tom Mueller:That's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us today. If you like what you're hearing, then please like and subscribe to the podcast and please tell your friends and colleagues about us as well. We'll see you again soon on another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.