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 50 Wildfire Response: The Life of a Wildfire PIO
Wildfires are not just a devastating force of nature; they are a crisis that tests the limits of communication and collaboration. In this episode, we engage with Katy O’Hara, a fire management specialist with a wealth of experience in crisis communication and public information. Katy sheds light on the challenges faced by public information officers during wildfire emergencies, especially in high-stakes situations like those we've witnessed in the Pacific Palisades, where urgent evacuations and tragic losses occurred.
Listeners will gain insight into how communication strategies evolve in response to the demands of affected communities. Katie discusses the tools she uses—from social media to grassroots conversations—and how her training helps bridge the gap between complex firefighting jargon and relatable messaging for those in affected areas. With the stakes as high as lives and homes, understanding how to convey accurate and timely information becomes paramount.
Moreover, the episode underscores the undeniable importance of teamwork among various agencies responding to wildfires. Katie shares valuable lessons on how to navigate the intricate landscape of interagency communication, allowing the public to stay informed while fostering trust among community members.
Reach Katy O'Hara at Control Line Communications https://www.control-line.co/
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. I'm Tom Mueller. With me again today, my friend and co-host Marc Mullen. Marc, how are you?
Marc Mullen:I'm well today, tom, thank you.
Tom Mueller:Quick reminder if you want to email the show, you can drop me a line at tom at leadinginacrisiscom. On the show today we're going to delve into the topic of wildfires.
Tom Mueller:Wildfires have dominated the headlines here in the United States in recent weeks owing to a just tragic fire that broke out in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. In the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles we saw stories of homes destroyed. They're estimating 11,000 homes were destroyed, something like $30 billion in damages there. So just a tragic and horrific fire. But it was punctuated by these urgent evacuations and stories of residents fleeing their homes, surrounded by fire on both sides of the road.
Tom Mueller:We wanted to kind of jump in and take a look at the communications aspects of dealing with a wildfire like that, which would present pretty significant challenges if you were a public information officer or a liaison officer challenges if you were a public information officer or a liaison officer. So we're going to kind of dive into that today with our guest, and she is Katie O'Hara. Now Katie is a fire management specialist at the Bureau of Land Management, which is a US government entity. She worked many large fires over the course of her career and has a number of stories to share with us around her experience as a PIO and a liaison officer. Katie is also founder of Control Line Communications, which is a crisis communications consultancy that she and a partner have recently launched. So we're going to be watching Katie to see how that plays out in the coming months. And Katie is also a Naval Reserve Officer in Public Affairs and has had deployments in Afghanistan and other locations. So some interesting stories to share from all of that experience. Katie, welcome to this show.
Katy O'Hara:Thanks Tom, thanks Marc for having me.
Tom Mueller:Katie, I gave a brief biography of you. Anything else you want to put in context before we get started?
Katy O'Hara:No, I think that's great. I think hopefully I can share my experience from both the Navy and the wildland fire perspective. I've had the pleasure to serve as the lead public information officer for Southwest Area Team 1 for the last five years, five seasons, and that's one of our type one or complex incident management teams national teams here in the country so do a lot of traveling all over the country and globe, including Canada and Australia in years past.
Tom Mueller:Dealing with firefighter response.
Katy O'Hara:Yes.
Tom Mueller:Okay, all right. Well, how did you get into firefighting?
Katy O'Hara:Oh man. So I affectionately call this as my stumble into the career. I affectionately call this as my stumble into the career. As a young high school graduate, I was fortunate enough to have a full ride Navy ROTC scholarship to Oregon State University, go Beavs.
Katy O'Hara:And in that time frame, looking at that summer, I was sitting as a bump on a log at home, actually had no intentions of getting a summer job and my dad, who is a retired college football coach, did not like that option for me and gracefully told me I had two weeks to find myself a job or he was going to go find one for me, and so I took that as a little bit of a personal challenge. What could I go seek out and do? That was a little bit outside of my comfort zone, probably way outside of my mom's comfort zone, and be outside Spent a lot of time as a kid growing up out in the National Forest, camping and all that stuff. So this was back in the day when you could walk into an office and and just fill out a paper application and you would be hired the next day.
Katy O'Hara:Sometime May, june, timeframe of when I graduated from high school uh, was able to take the initial pack test, which is the physical fitness requirements, uh, and go through a little uh fire school, uh, and get my um, uh, firefighter type two certification, uh, and start on a on a hand crew Uh, my tool of choice at that time was a shovel and I took my place in the line and started digging line and this was back in 2002, which for folks who are in the wildland fire community I know, was a pretty significant and impactful fire season that year. So that was my rookie year and tiptoed into it. Did that for all four summers while I was in college and then had the opportunity to come back to the field after a four-year stint on active duty after I graduated from college, so fell in love with the community, fell in love with the whole fire family concept and just kept doing it ever since.
Tom Mueller:So that frontline experience has got to come in really handy now when you work as a PIO or liaison for a big fire. How does that help you?
Katy O'Hara:Absolutely so for me. I feel like that allows me to be able to translate operational jargon to the real world. What do community members and I always like to phrase it in the like what is my mom going to understand? What is my sister going to understand? Who don't work in this environment? Never really been around it, and so I can take those operational briefings and that information that our division chiefs or hotshot superintendents on the ground are talking about and turn it into something that will be useful for the public in terms of understanding the story of the fire, right, like I'm not just trying to tell them you know, we're digging line over here. We're doing this thing. We're trying to build the whole story of what's happening in that firefight and all of the resources that are there to support the community that's being impacted.
Tom Mueller:Now you're typically you know you don't have a command post of brick and mortar typically that you're working from when you're, you know out working a wildfire. So what is your office look like, katie, and what are your communications tools when you're there?
Katy O'Hara:Yeah, absolutely so. Our offices can be anything from the front seat of my car, which is usually a rental vehicle of some sort, all the way to a yurt or a desk out in a trailer in the middle of a fairgrounds location or something like that. So it really varies from location to location. Assignment to assignment flexibility I call it the Semper Gumby. You know approach. You have to be ready to just work wherever it is.
Katy O'Hara:Coffee shops all across the country have been offices for many, many public information officers. As we try to figure out what our strategy is going to be, and tool wise, I like to talk about it from sort of a spectrum of tools. We've got everything from super low tech, which is you and me having a conversation in front of a grocery store, to the high tech end of things, where we're posting, you know, complex video stories on social media and trying to get things out that way. So we always look at it on the scale of what is the community that we're trying to serve and meeting them at the best place possible to get the information across. It's never cookie cutter, it's never the same from one location to the other and it's just having that toolbox kind of built for ourselves to figure out which is the best for where we're going.
Tom Mueller:How about technology wise? You know, if you're out in a national park or remote area you typically aren't going to have Wi-Fi. Internet connectivity is going to be a challenge. What kind of technology are you using to keep in touch?
Katy O'Hara:Yeah, so we focus on, like I said, trying to figure out what it is where people are getting their information from in the first place. So the more remote the area if we're talking smaller communities then we're going to focus in on resources or tools that they have access to. When we do have the options to use social media, that kind of stuff we're nowadays especially after this last fire season, fire year, because it really never ended we're using a lot more satellite technology. So those low orbit satellite infrastructures where we're able to get high-speed internet services in extremely remote conditions has been very, very beneficial for us, especially from the perspective of being able to hear what's happening out in the field from our operations folks and getting it to us so that we can then relay it out to the public without having to wait to that you know 24 hour cycle of when we would normally do a daily update type of thing. Now we can sort of pick up that speed due to the resources that we have with that satellite technology.
Tom Mueller:Is that part of your go kit then?
Katy O'Hara:Starting to be. We haven't quite got there yet, but that's more. That's more due to just um, contracting mechanisms, um across different agencies and where we go Um. We're focusing in on trying to have, uh, some of those tools on hand, especially with our operations folks when we initially mobilize Um, but usually within a day or two we'll have full connectivity up and running.
Marc Mullen:So you've got your people scattered all over the place. You're not all in one place, so you're scattered between towns and parks and everywhere else. So obviously you run a virtual jet all the time. How does that work? And do you centralize some of the functions, or do you just land in coffee shops, as you said?
Katy O'Hara:So we will tend to have a centralized location as close to possible as our incident commander is. We'll have our main, you know, command and general staff in one location. One of the benefits sort of post-COVID has been our ability to use virtual resources more, so I don't need to bring a public information officer all the way out to the middle of nowhere. Who's going to be responsible for managing social media for me, right? I can have them stay at home in Utah, you know, and the fires in California, it doesn't matter and they can manage things for me from there, and so that's been a huge benefit for us to be able to disconnect some of those things. It also makes it much easier for us to manage across, you know, connectivity issues. If we were to have connectivity issues at the incident command post, I have resources that continue, you know, sort of that continuity of operations outside of it.
Tom Mueller:So how do you find the approval process, for you know getting statements approved and that you know again, in the remote kind of setting that you are, are you able to sort of walk a statement around? You got a printer in your backpack there to print it out and walk it around, or how do you manage that?
Katy O'Hara:Oh, that is that has evolved over the you know-something years that I've been doing this work. Now, when we show up into a new location especially if it's sort of an interesting dynamic depends on the national forest or the host agency right, when an incident command team is mobilized, we work for that agency. So we become agency agnostic ourselves, right, I no longer represent the agency that I work for, I'm representing the agency that has brought the incident command team there, and so we work very closely with their leadership, their agency administrators, with their public affairs staff, if they have them, to identify what is the best process for them that allows us to get the messages out in an efficient and timely manner, especially when it's critical, and allows them to have some buy-in to the messaging. My hope is that forests and national parks and agencies and organizations are planning ahead for these kind of things, that they're thinking about the messaging that they want to have out there and sort of preloading some of that.
Katy O'Hara:But a lot of the times we're having to sort of work with them and find those you know, left and right limits of what they're comfortable with in terms of sharing. Often, you know, we'll go through a process of where it's emailing drafts back and forth for the first couple of days, getting them comfortable with our writing styles, getting comfortable with where their lines are, and then it just sort of you know trickles into a thumbs up text message, which is my hope by the end of the two week you know assignment, when a federal IMT is there, that we get to that just sending it with a thumbs up. My poor incident commander has gotten very used to me just screenshotting a Word document and sending it to him for approval, because I don't want to travel with a printer anymore and we have enough technology that you don't have to do that kind of stuff.
Tom Mueller:So do you often know the incident commander that you're working with? Are you working with different people along the way?
Katy O'Hara:So on the federal side we have let's see I'll go with last year's numbers because this year's not completely set yet we have 44 federal incident management teams, and those incident management teams, their core command and general staff, are all set positions. So we apply to those positions every year and so those core teams are set. So, my incident commander, this will be the fourth consecutive year that we've worked together, which I find to be extremely beneficial because that relationship, that trust relationship, is built, that sort of small team, you know, forming, storming, norming type of thing. We're allowed to go through that. And then it's at the point that I, as a communicator, I know where his lines are at and I can build products that are going to be easy for him to say yes to, or when I need to go, you know, outside of his comfort zone. I know when to go ask those, those questions and when to raise those flags for him.
Marc Mullen:So how many deployments are you on in a typical year?
Katy O'Hara:The average number of mobilizations is three to four per incident management team. Last year my team went out, I think, five times six, including the fact that we were actually out on a wildfire in Arizona over New Year's this year, a wildfire in Arizona over New Year's this year. So we were just north of Phoenix on January 1st 2025 on a large incident, so the bad news is you're never home, but the good news is you get better and better at working together.
Marc Mullen:Yes, yeah, absolutely. And that's rare because in a lot of industries and a lot of disasters it's a one-off.
Katy O'Hara:I think that's one of the bonuses of how the federal incident management teams are shaped, and I know California is a good example. Oregon also does it this way where their state-led incident management teams are formed. They're organized and they're consistent over a certain number of years. Kind of depends state to state how they look at that. But that consistency allows us to, like you said, build that relationship with each other and so we're not having to figure each other out on day one. You know we're focused on the mission of supporting those communities and not having to learn what my IC how to spell his last name right. I don't want to have to worry about that.
Marc Mullen:So how soon do you end up in agency soup, where there's a whole bunch of agencies responding and you're getting those multiple levels of involvement?
Katy O'Hara:That is basically every wildland fire for the last decade. Okay, it is very, very rare that you end up on an incident anymore where there isn't multiple agencies jurisdictions that you're representing that are all part of that delegation of authority when you show up and they sort of dole out who's responsible for what piece of land and what piece of business. So that is always a challenge because you also then have to balance out what their missions are, what their communication strategies are right, and make sure that you're not upsetting the apple cart too much from one agency to the other as you're there. But that's also why we do not wear agency paraphernalia as an incident management team, because we are not representing one agency, we're representing everybody.
Tom Mueller:Right, Nice. Well, Katy, you are hanging out in the danger zone when you're out on the front lines there. So have you ever sort of you know? Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to evacuate your command post because of shifting fires or anything like that, or?
Katy O'Hara:anything like that. So personally, I have not been in that exact situation, especially in the last couple of years, but I've been very close to, we've been in incidents where we've taken over a fire or been in a transition where there has been an incident. So a good example is back in oh gosh, this would have been 2019. If folks remember, in Oregon there was a large oh God, it was Labor Day weekend and there was a massive wind event, talking 90 plus mile an hour winds, and you had three fires that were on different sides of the Cascades that all sort of picked the wind up and emerged extremely rapidly, probably some of the most dramatic that I've seen up until 2022. At that point it was definitely the most dramatic command post over outside of Detroit, oregon, where actually the public information shop were the only people that were in the command post at that point in time.
Katy O'Hara:Others were out doing meetings at other locations and the PIOs were the ones responsible actually started digging fire line around the incident command post trying to save it. They went and grabbed tools out of their trucks. The key there is there's a reason that PIOs still have to go through yearly refreshers, at least from the federal perspective, to remember how do you use your fire shelter, how do you use a tool, whether you know, looking for those basic LCES, so the lookout, communications, escape route, safety zones and what's your plan if something bad were to happen? You know PIOs are not safe from any of that. We're often out in and about fire areas and communities. So luckily nobody was hurt. But a lot of PIO laptops did not survive that incident. I think the daily update was delayed by a couple hours the next day.
Tom Mueller:Okay, well, glad everybody got out safely on there. It just underscores, you know, the challenge of being in a frontline support role like that. You know I'm curious too. You're that close to the fire. Typically there's not a hotel nearby. What do you do for sleeping accommodations when you're out deployed like that?
Katy O'Hara:Oh man, Well, it's tent city out there, right? So an incident command post out on the wildfire often turns into a little like virtual city. You've got tents that have all of your basic needs, your food and all of that stuff and for the most part all of us are rolling around with our little two or three person pop up tents and go from there. Now I will admit I'm a little bougie these days and I just put my air mattress in the back of the SUV that I rent and sleep in there. But I will. I will bust out my tent if I need to these days, but often we're nowhere near hotels or anything like that we're. It's a good day if we can take a shower every couple of days and get our laundry done and that kind of thing.
Tom Mueller:Wow, that's amazing. I don't think most folks understand that level of commitment that you guys have to deal with and respond to fire situations like that. So, on behalf of a grateful nation, can I say thank you to you and your team for all those sacrifices that you're making when dealing with those situations. And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Please join us for our next episode, when we'll continue our conversation with Katy O'Hara and she'll share stories from her military experience and, in particular, her deployment to Afghanistan, where she has some good stories to share. See you soon.
