Tom Mueller: 0:07

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. I'm Tom Mueller. With me again my co-host, Marc Mullen, and on our episode today we are continuing our conversation with Katy O'Hara. Katy is a frontline firefighter and public information officer and also a Naval Reserve officer. On our episode today she's going to share some stories with us from her deployment to Afghanistan as a public information officer. Let's join that conversation now. Hey, I wonder if we can shift gears and talk about your Navy Reserve work. You have told me in the past that you deployed to Afghanistan in support of joint operations there and I wonder if you have any particular stories you could share around your experience there dealing with media or just dealing with the incidents that you're working real time.

Katy O'Hara: 1:09

Absolutely so. I had the distinct honor to deploy as a Navy reservist to Afghanistan in 2017 in support of the NATO Resolute Support Mission based out of Kabul there, and my role was specifically the crisis communications aspect of it. Our esteemed colleague, captain Bill Salvin, was my commanding officer while we were there.

Tom Mueller: 1:41

Bless your heart.

Katy O'Hara: 1:42

Yeah, I have so many more stories that are not related to communications, but different podcasts, right, uh, so he did a really good job of, when folks came in the door, of like taking a look at what do we do in our day job. That's to me, one of the coolest things about being a reservist is that I get to bring my skill set that I've honed as a civilian and, in this case, a public information officer working in wildland fire, working in large-scale incidents, and figure out where that benefits the mission that we're deployed to support, right, and so in this case, it was sort of a combination of supporting crisis communications and taking a look at how we were leveraging social media to support that. Nato mission 2017 perspective wise. Just generally speaking, america didn't have a whole lot of interest, you know, from a large media base, on what was happening continuously there. Right, everybody knew we still had service members there, but it wasn't the constant drumbeat that it was like in 2010. And so it was.

Katy O'Hara: 2:58

It was a pretty big challenge to to figure out how do we talk to the media, how do we make sure people are aware of what's happening and still interested, and the story that comes to my mind that I know we've talked about in the past is there was one incident that really drove home the need to really anchor into what is good public information, public affairs, from the perspective of holding your line and knowing when you can talk and when you can't talk.

Katy O'Hara: 3:34

So I think it was about June, july, timeframe of 2017, we had a pretty large incident that occurred. A pretty large incident that occurred. An adversary I think it was an ISIS event had attacked some of our special forces operators and we had had a number of injuries and killed in action. Of events during this timeframe, tragic, awful to have to deal with. It was probably about 11 o'clock midnight our time in Kabul when we got the notifications and my role was to be the one that came in and started putting together those basic we're aware something has happened sort of responses to start getting out to the media so that we could kind of hedge our bets a little bit on what was going to come about. It was, I want to say, it's an eight and a half hour time difference, give or take, from the East Coast.

Tom Mueller: 4:35

So it would have been morning news cycle hours here in the US.

Katy O'Hara: 4:39

Correct right when it was starting to go, and our biggest challenge that we ran into is that, in this case, our adversary posted some extremely accurate accounts of the incident on their social media and policies and things that we have to follow as US service members, as NATO service members, and then, knowing that our adversary is posting images, details and stuff that are just really not things that we want to endorse or get behind at that moment, and so my job was- Well, katie, let me just ask you you've got issues like family notifications that have to happen in that situation, right?

Tom Mueller: 5:32

So you're really your hands are tied in terms of being able to communicate much about what's happening, then right 100%, and that was sort of that.

Katy O'Hara: 5:42

Next piece is that, as we start posting these initial statements of like hey guys, we're we're aware that there has been an incident in this part of the country. We're working to gather more information. We started getting phone calls from, you know, pentagon correspondents, the normal right, like you said. It's the morning news cycle and they're wanting to get out ahead of maybe getting something for the noon or the evening cycles, and it's two, three o'clock in the morning by this point. And I am the lone ranger sitting in the office there and getting to take these phone calls and having to hold that line of I know, I know names, I know that these people have families and that it's going to take some time for the information to get back to the Pentagon and then out to the appropriate resources to contact all of these family members, and so having to sit and and repeatedly answer the same question of like yeah, but come on, katie, you know that there's more that you can tell me. I just need you to give me a little bit Right.

Katy O'Hara: 7:00

And these reporters are just pulling, trying to pull all those strings. It was one of the biggest lessons that I've ever learned in terms of just hold that line. I don't want to be responsible for a family member finding out that their loved one passed away before the military officially notified them in a dignified manner, right With the resources, a chaplain question or answers to questions that they might have in that time frame. And so it was about 36 hours of answering the phone about every 20 minutes from different reporters. In this case there was one particular reporter who had, I swear, a timer set and would call me every 20 minutes for 36 hours.

Tom Mueller: 7:49

So that reporter was obviously frustrated, but not making your job easy, and it was. It was an emotional kind of incident anyway, right?

Katy O'Hara: 8:01

Absolutely Well and just. I mean you've got to think about those people's families. You don't ever want to be in the situation where you're the one accidentally letting somebody know ahead of time Emotional, because people are tired and we know that the adversary in this case has posted all of this information on social media and I can't I can't retract that. I can't do anything with that other than continue to reinforce that. We know something has happened.

Katy O'Hara: 8:34

We're doing what we can from our side and we'll share more information when we can, and it just, you know, hold that line and I tell that story frequently, especially to new information officers, as they're learning, as they're training, because it was an, it was an extreme case, right, of where you're just getting badgered Because these reporters that are calling you are also the people that you, you watch on the news every night. Right, it's not little names, it's not their producer, it's not their intern that's calling and asking for this. It's big names, popular people, and it would be very easy to give in to that pressure and just give them an answer and give them the scoop and be cool. But I don't want to be that guy.

Marc Mullen: 9:24

Is that a time? And this question if you had prepared because what you're really talking about is you have a different process you have to follow. You don't get to just throw pictures of people up on social media Did you share the process? I mean, I'm surprised that after all the wars we've been in with media questions, they don't understand. There's a process you have to follow, but do you take that and reinforce it every chance you get, or do you just have to live?

Katy O'Hara: 9:52

Every conversation was a reinforcement of the policy and I think probably the frustrating thing for me is they know it, they know the policy and they're hoping. In this case, it very much felt like they were hoping to catch somebody not following the policy right.

Marc Mullen: 10:11

They're hoping you'd break.

Katy O'Hara: 10:13

Yep, which is which is disappointing, given that there are real people involved, that they're real humans and their emotions and those families deserve better than that. But that's the frustrating part. But understanding the policy, I think if you bring it back to as a PIO or as a public affairs officer in the military, in wildland fire, whatever area we're representing understanding what those policies are so that you can follow them and then be able to teach people why you're doing that.

Marc Mullen: 10:53

In our world we deal with that sometimes too. I was at one actual spill where nobody was supposed to release the spill amount because until you confirm it you're just going to be wrong. And then somebody did and I remember at the time thinking, feeling betrayed and feeling like the plans had been broken by this one person. But that was over a little bit of oil. That wasn't a human life or a family. So the stakes are so much higher and the emotions must be so much higher as well.

Tom Mueller: 11:24

Yeah, that's a very extreme example, katy, that you had to go through there. We did some media training with a large client last week and had a really obnoxious reporter sitting across from one of their younger staff and just hammering them with the same questions and, you know, bless her heart, she held the line, but you could just see the perspiration and stuff going on holding the line and trying to do that. So good to you for hanging on and doing that and thank you from all of us, katy, for your service. And shout out to Bill Salvin too, too, for keeping you in line, keeping you safe, hopefully, while you were there. Okay, guys, it's been a wonderful conversation. We're kind of blowing through our timeline here, katie. Any other stories that come to mind around the Fireline or others that you'd like to share with the audience while we're here?

Katy O'Hara: 12:30

Yeah, I think there's a really good one to share that kind of offsets. You opened with talking about the challenges of Palisades. You know, large, large community, very populated, lots of media assets, lots of technology and connect and connectivity and I've got a good story that sort of mirrors that. But on the the side, where there there wasn't a large population, there was a large landmass and a lot of private property and a lot of people, but not the same draw as you get in Southern California, right. And so back in 2022, early April timeframe, there was a Hermits Peak Calf Canyon incident in New Mexico, northern New Mexico, mexico, northern New Mexico and this was my first interaction with that NOAA designation of PDS.

Katy O'Hara: 13:32

The particularly dangerous situation, which is what that we saw during Palisades, right, and that was going around the media pretty heavily of this, is the big wind event and guys you need to keep your head out and this is NOAA trying to flag for all of the responders that something is abnormal here, right, the red flag warnings and all of that.

Katy O'Hara: 13:52

So it was probably day seven or eight on Hermits Peak At this point in time. It was just the Hermits Peak fire and our NOAA weather service incident meteorologist, because we actually have meteorologists that come in specifically for fires dropped into the office and was like, hey guys, this is not going to be good. We have a weather event coming that is nothing that we've ever seen here, like we've been actually trying to recalibrate our equipment because we thought something was wrong and we just keep getting the same models and it's, it's dangerous, it's extremely dangerous, and she was using words like catastrophic and you know things that we haven't seen. And they were predicting 90 to a hundred mile an hour winds in Northern New Mexico, landlocked Northern New Mexico.

Tom Mueller: 14:47

Wow, that got your attention.

Katy O'Hara: 14:49

Yeah, and so you know, you get those those tingly spider senses, especially as a PIO right, like, oh, this is, this is not good. And we had been. We'd had some good luck with our, our interactions with the public. It was very, very dispersed, small communities across this area. We were based in Las Vegas, new Mexico, which find it on the map, about an hour north of Santa Fe, and so small communities, and we had had some good luck just with the low tech sending an information officer out with some handouts and having personal conversations with folks at the feed store strategy, because at this point the fire was about 7,000 acres and about 90% contained. So we're like, we're making like, honestly. I had my tickets booked to go home, my kid was playing in a soccer tournament that weekend and I was ready to, you know, pull the cord and I was packing my bags and heading home and and we started getting this information from the meteorologist and I went and sat down with my incident commander and I was like man, something, something doesn't feel right. You know, my, my gut is telling me that something is not not tracking with this whole thing and let's, let's talk through it, because I think we need to have a plan for if, if this weather does show up, what are we going to tell the community? What do we need to tell them ahead of time? We don't need to be reactive on this, because we've got the modeling and the information ahead of time. And so we we talked through it. We talked through it with our operations folks, we talked through it with our. We have fire behavior analysts who do modeling and can see three or four days out If we get this X wind on the fire. We can do this.

Katy O'Hara: 16:48

Well, within a couple of hours of those conversations, we had a new fire that started just to the north of us, which ended up being named Calf Canyon Fire, canyon fire. And when we started putting the modeling and the winds with that fire and putting them together, the modeling technology wasn't big enough, like the map, literally wasn't big enough to show how far the fire was going to run and alarm bells going off, right. And now we're like, operationally, we got to figure out what we're going to do with our resources. We've 100 mile winds, 100 mile an hour winds coming in. We can't use aviation in that situation. So what are we going to do and how are we going to tell the public this is coming right.

Katy O'Hara: 17:36

And so we start putting out little notices on social media. Hey, everybody, we need you to pay attention. We've got this weather coming. We're doing all this little stuff that we're used to doing and then and then the notices start getting worse. Like this fire is not going to go well for us. We're now talking, we're pulling all of our firefighting resources off the line and back to our incident command post out of safety for our firefighters, and now we need to start telling the community that you need to evacuate. So we're working with the county sheriff. We're trying to get these messages out.

Katy O'Hara: 18:15

The challenge is we could not get a local radio station or any of the major TV news stations in the state of New Mexico to answer a phone call or put us on TV or on the radio. Could not get them. They did not think it was enough of an emergency to get us on TV or on the radio. We ended up doing like a live social media broadcast just on our like incident page, where my incident commander literally stood up and said if you don't leave now, we will not be there to help you. We cannot come save you. We will not come save you the life of our firefighters. Safety of our firefighters comes first. We need you to get out and I've not in five years, never seen him do that. And we couldn't get the news like traditional news, to pick it up, they didn't.

Tom Mueller: 19:13

You were probably in a remote location right and not huge population centers nearby, so just didn't sort of rise to the level. So did your team end up bugging out of there then for your own safety?

Katy O'Hara: 19:27

So our location we were actually our command post was at a community college that was up on a hill and so we were in sort of a protected area. That fire ran 15 miles in three hours. Wow, 15 miles in three hours. We were incredibly fortunate, and there were hundreds of homes destroyed and gone. You can actually they're still in an active recovery process because it's also an incredibly low income part of the state. Luckily, no civilian casualties, no firefighter casualties. Everybody was able to.

Katy O'Hara: 20:09

We were able to get enough of a word out to the smaller populations and just word of mouth and, honestly, just the sheriff's department driving every street he possibly could with a bullhorn telling people to get out. But I don't think it's. It was just a very frustrating from a from a public information standpoint to not have not have the media take us seriously, you know, and in and take that in contrast to Palisades, right, if we're going to sort of look at a compare and contrast. It was the same situation. It was an extreme fire behavior with very long runs of fire impacting communities, but they weren't overly populated communities and so the news didn't pick it up.

Tom Mueller: 21:00

It was a one of the challenges that we face, you know, out there, especially in the current climate, where health and safety are at risk or can be at risk very quickly based on the turn of the weather, turn of the fire, whatever it is. So those are very challenging times, okay, well, guys, I think we're going to wrap up here. Katie, I want to thank you for joining us and for sharing some of your stories with that. We really appreciate you coming out and best of luck with Control Line Communications. We look for big things from you. And thanks again for your military service as well. Thanks, kenny.

Katy O'Hara: 21:56

Thanks Mark, thanks Tom.

Tom Mueller: 21:58

And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you soon for another episode.