Incident Commander Craig Covey 0:05

I do

First-Hand Take On The Response

Incident Commander Craig Covey 0:06

this all over the country. I've been in Puerto Rico, I've been a Lahaina. I went down in Texas last year in Guadalupe River floods. This was one of the better responses I've ever seen.

Tom Mueller 0:15

Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Hi

Why A Tank Threat Shook Orange County

Tom Mueller 0:20

everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and crisis communications, and we deliver that content through interviews and stories as shared by experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. Thanks for joining us again this week. On our show today, we are going to take a deep dive into a recent uh major incident that occurred in uh Orange County, California over the Memorial Day weekend. This was a major incident that involved a storage tank that was suffering a thermal reaction and had the potential to be a runaway action in that tank with the potential for a massive explosion or bleve. So it was a huge incident, and of course, it happened over a holiday weekend. How often does that happen? That opening clip you just heard was uh one of the incident commanders from the Orange County Fire Authority, uh Craig Covey, giving his assessment of how the response went, how it was handled, uh, as part of a town hall briefing that happened during the incident. So I have to say I share the chief's assessment of this response and the communications around it. There are some very interesting aspects to this response, which we'll dive into here. To

Evacuation Orders And Fast-Changing Risk

Tom Mueller 1:54

give you some background on the incident now, this happened uh on a Thursday afternoon about 3.22 p.m. The fire department is called out for a thermoreaction happening in a tank that appears to be venting, and pressure is building inside this tank. And it's all hands on deck then trying to uh get this situation under control. Uh the fire department very quickly realized that there was a very dangerous situation for the community, and they issued evacuation orders that Thursday evening. And uh, but something changed. They got a little bit of different information a few hours later. They rescinded that evacuation order only to have the situation change again overnight. And early the next morning on Friday, the fire department issued or reissued the evacuation order and expanded that to include uh the entire city, uh, well, 50,000 people in the cities of Garden Grove and Anaheim. Huge, massive evacuation effort. And the success of that is a major part of this story. Um, but there are many other interesting things. When I look at the communications aspects of this overall, I have to say it was very well handled. It was a little unorthodox from other responses that I've seen and been a part of. And I was a public information officer for BP during the Deep Water Horizon incident back in 2010. So I'm very familiar with complex operational responses and expanding scenarios and situations. So I watched with a critical eye as the team on the ground there in Orange County and Garden Grove worked the incident. Again, overall communications were well handled, and we'll get into some of the details of that as we go through here.

Company Silence During A Public Emergency

Tom Mueller 4:07

One of the interesting aspects of this is we did not see any company representative visible during the entirety of this response. So the actual incident played out over the course of about six days, and we never even heard from the company, which is GKN Aerospace, which is a company that manufactures um canopies for fighter aircraft and uh windows for spacecraft. So it's a very high-tech aerospace-focused company based out of the UK now. GKN was very active in the unified command helping to troubleshoot the tank and figure out solutions there. But when it came to communications, it was a different story. Interestingly, we didn't hear anything from that company until day five of the incident response. And that's when we saw a first press release issued, which basically said, hey, listen to your local emergency responders and elected officials, and we're sorry for the inconvenience that the incident has caused. Now that was the communications response from the company. Now, we did see a couple of other press releases issued by the company over the next several days. They never did participate in a press conference or offer any kind of a video statement, which was uh was very interesting to see and a bit unusual. So we'll talk a little bit more about that as we roll. One

Video Updates That Built Credibility

Tom Mueller 5:36

of the really unique things about this response is that it was primarily video-driven communications. So we saw multiple updates a day of casually shot videos of incident commanders, health department officials, the mayor of Garden Grove all standing out in front of an emergency response vehicle and giving a verbal update on the situation. Now, there's several things I really liked about this approach. First of all, it gave the incident commander or the speakers an opportunity to be very empathetic to the people they were talking to in these videos. But it also gave the people watching these videos an opportunity to assess the credibility of the people who were running this response. And the videos, while very casually prepared, were just masterful in terms of providing that empathy and letting people know that they are top of mind as the incident management team's working through the incident. The videos carried those messages very well throughout. And we saw that, you know, starting on day two on the Friday and carried on over the weekend uh and uh regular video updates. Now we also saw uh three different press conferences that were held over the course of this. One of those, the first one was on day two. Uh it was a smaller press conference, mostly operationally focused with the fire department officials, the mayor, health department person there talking about the potential health effects of this chemical that was uh having the thermo reaction, the runaway reaction in the tank. The press conferences work well. So that was the first one, it was a smaller one, five speakers. On day five, there was another press conference. And as often happens, as these incidents drag out over time, more and more people want to be part of those press conferences and have their two minutes of fame. So what we saw was more and more elected officials uh from you know various state and federal levels coming in to be visible in the community during this crisis situation and you know, having a couple of minutes of comments to offer uh as part of the press conference. Now, kudos to the public information team at the fire uh department who managed all this and uh kept all those ducks in a row for these press conferences. I watched these remotely and I was just very impressed with how the team organizes. This is obviously a very experienced emergency management team, very experienced public information team working with the Orange County Fire Authority. And it showed. So those press conferences, you know, more or less effective. I'm not a big fan of you know, press conferences with nine speakers, but it's a fact of life, and uh you just have to roll with it. Now, one of the interesting things is after that press conference, what do you do with the video of that, right? You've recorded video of the press conference. Where does it go? And

No Single Website Until A Volunteer

Tom Mueller 9:16

that was one of the interesting aspects of this response is that you did not have a unified command website stood up to provide one single source of information for the community. There were multiple websites in different places. The city of Garden Grove had emergency pages on their city website that provided a lot of good information. Um, the Sheriff's Department had a page up to talk about evacuation shelters. But the most impactful website of this response wasn't prepared by any official agency or company. It was prepared by one young man who volunteered on his own and created this emergency website. And I'm hoping to uh interview him and talk to him a little bit more very soon about you know what he was thinking and what drove him to do that. But he's obviously very astute web designer. He built a website that pulled in lots of different news feeds. So it became, in my view, uh the go-to website to find out what was happening in this response. He captured videos of those press conferences. He had all of the update videos that were issued by the fire department and the incident commanders. All of those were captured on this website, as well as other resources that were available. People were providing shelter, but also food. Uber was offering free rides to the evacuation shelters. Uh, there were some restaurants that were offering uh food for evacuees, and he captured all of that information on this site. So it just did a really fantastic job of capturing all that information in one place, and it was a completely volunteer effort. So kudos uh to that young man. His name is Victor Tron. We'll hopefully get him on to get his insights into this as well. But again, when you look at the web-based response here, you had multiple places where you could go to get information. I always like to see one critical go-to source of information. And we didn't see that from the city or the um county fire agency. Um, there was good efforts on all of those, but uh, you know, kudos to the young man who put together the ultimate information website. So that was well done. Uh I've talked about the video response.

Clip: The Plainspoken Safety Briefing

Tom Mueller 12:01

I want to play for you one of those video updates that we saw from the incident commander. And uh, here you can assess for yourself the empathy, the credibility uh of this incident commander as he's delivering this message. Let's listen.

Incident Commander Craig Covey 12:20

Good afternoon. My name is Craig Covey. I'm a division chief with Orange County Fire and the incident commander as part of the unified incident command of the Western Incident in Garden Grove. Just want to take a moment to keep you updated of exactly what's going on. I know there's a lot of interest with so many people evacuated. And trust me, our our intentions are 100% about keeping you safe. We want to get you back home as soon as possible, uh, but the situation is such that we have to keep you away. But here's the update so far this afternoon. Uh, the positive news is we have been able to keep the tank temperature maintained. The primary one that's in crisis uh and uh has been damaged. We've been continuing our water curtain on it, and our active monitoring has shown that the temperature of it is stabilized and buying us time to continue to sort out how do we fix this. I know I keep talking about we were handed this situation where there's only two things that can happen. It could it could crack and leak or it could blow up. That's not acceptable to us. I have an entire team actively working locally, regionally, across the state, and across the country to try to figure out how to fix this. What can be done, create something that's never been done before, get all these brilliant minds together to put a plan together so that we don't let this blow up. That was what we were told. Our goal is not to let it happen, and we'll do everything we can to do it. Uh appreciate everybody that's evacuated. We supported those that couldn't evacuate uh with uh between PD and fire resources to get them out of the danger zone. Uh and please stay out until we can get a final outcome of this incident. Dr. CK?

Dr. CK 14:09

Um my name is Dr. Regina Chinseo Kwang. I go by Dr. CK. I am your county health officer from the Orange County Health Care Agency. And I, along with Chief Covey here, have been behind the scenes working with the team to understand the situation and make sure we safeguard your health. So in this situation, our biggest concern is when this chemical reacts and the temperatures rise, it can cause a vapor. And my biggest concern is that if that vapor goes into the air and people inhale that, it causes significant damage. And what do we call that? What do you think about damage? Well, it can cause a lot of irritation to your eyes, your nose, your respiratory tract, or your lungs. Um, so you can get a sore throat, you can get a runny nose, you can get itchy burning eyes. Um, in some cases, you can have nausea with prolonged exposure of the vapor, you can feel a little dizzy, maybe a little drunk and headache, but it can cause severe respiratory issues. We want to prevent that. And that is why we have expanded the zone where people should be evacuated from. So no matter what happens with the situation, whether the polymer just leaks out and then just hardens, or if it does explode and there is a vapor, you are all safe as long as you are out of the zone that was determined to be an evacuation zone.

Tom Mueller 15:28

So I hope you found that as interesting as I did. Uh, just very plain spoken, member of the community, uh offering uh an informed, credible operational update and um you know giving instructions, uh, but also showing the people of the community that they are top of mind as this response carries forward. So they did a really nice job um with all of that.

Day-By-Day Communications Breakdown

Tom Mueller 16:03

I want to uh walk through now just kind of day to day what we saw here with uh some of these, well, just what we saw day to day uh here, like on so on Friday, which would have been day two of the actual incident, we had three video updates, uh one press conference. Uh that would have been the the uh the first sort of five-person press conference that was done there. I like the the Orange County Fire Authority, their feed on X. Whenever they had one of these video updates coming, they would put all caps headline on that X post that would say critical incident update, all caps. So as you're searching through the feed from the Orange County Fire Authority on X, it becomes really obvious where these critical updates are. So kudos to the team for putting the headlines on those to make them really easy to find, and then recording those videos, getting them up quickly and uh and succinctly and delivered out there. Now, I really would like to know what the approval process was like for this communications, but you know what? If you've got the incident commander doing the video, I think your approval process is going to be pretty quick to get that up and posted. And they seem to get things out pretty quickly. On day three was Saturday. This would have been a very long day for the responders and certainly for the people who were hanging out in the evacuation centers. Um, on that Saturday, we saw five video updates, including one from the mayor, and this private volunteer website was launched on the Saturday. So the event incident started Thursday night, really got rolling on Friday, and by Saturday, uh, this website was posted up. And I became aware of that crisis website because Victor, the young man who created it, was posting comments uh underneath the critical incident update videos saying, hey, I've got this website out here, so come check it out. And I don't have any stats for the website, uh, what kind of traffic he saw, but I'm hoping I can track that down soon. Um, but all that happened on Saturday. Again, the critical incident update was very obvious uh when those videos were coming out.

Translations, Misinformation, And Lawsuits

Tom Mueller 18:50

When we got to day four Sunday, that's when we started to see translations really become a thing here. And uh we didn't see any of the sort of the posts on X translated or the videos translated on Friday or Saturday. But when we got to Sunday, then you were seeing now multiple copies of the videos posted out there, and the subtitles would be uh in different languages. So they had one in Spanish, uh one in Vietnamese. So obviously a lot of Spanish speakers in the community, but a lot of Vietnamese speakers as well. So they did a very nice job of getting those translations up and used AI as a tool to provide the subtitles in translated form for those videos. It was very obvious as you're looking uh under the critical incident headline, you'd see a video there. It'd actually be three videos together, and um you could choose the one with the subtitles that worked for you. So a really nice job getting the translations worked. And on that Sunday, day four, uh, the first announcements of lawsuits being filed, or class action lawsuit was issued by an attorney uh there in Southern California. Uh last I heard there was about a hundred residents who'd signed on to this class action lawsuit, but that happened in the midst of everything else going on here, right? Not unusual at all. You had a couple of incidents where PIOs had had wrong information that they were giving out, and that that created confusion at times. Um, you know, as I mentioned, I worked as a PIO during Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And um in these in complex responses where things are happening quickly, developments are occurring, uh, keeping the information correct and current can be a challenge. Uh, and we had no shortage of challenges with that when I was working as a PIO. If I ever write a book about my experiences, one of the chapters is going to be entitled Quotes I'd Like to Have Back. And that's an ode to every public information officer who's given out uh incorrect information, even though we try really hard not to. But there's a few examples of those, and I think most PIOs, if you do it long enough, you run into that situation. So as we continue on day five, Monday, things were a little bit quieter on Monday. You had a critical incident update with the incident commander early in the morning, uh, and then a Press conference at about 6 p.m. that evening. That was the big one with the nine speakers. So that was on Monday on the holiday weekend still. And that Monday is when we saw the first statement from the company, GKN Aerospace. So, you know, things continuing to develop there. On Tuesday, then we had a critical incident update with just the public information officer. So it looked like the incident commander was getting a little bit of a break. Public information officer stepped up and delivered a critical incident update in front of the camera. We saw a second statement from GKN Aerospace at that point issued from the UK. Then

Town Halls, Security Concerns, Next Steps

Tom Mueller 22:51

on Tuesday, things got interesting because you started to see town hall meetings being called. So the local congressman Derek Tran called a town hall meeting for four o'clock the afternoon, and he very publicly invited GKN Aerospace to participate in that meeting. In fact, sent them a letter and then uh sent issued copies of that letter on the X platform so everyone could see his name on the paper talking about the incident, inviting GKN Aerospace to come answer questions from the community. Um maybe it's not needless to say, but in my mind, needless to say, the company did not participate in that town hall meeting. There was a second town hall meeting it later that evening, starting at 6 p.m. That was at city uh municipal buildings, hosted by the uh Garden Grove City Council. And that was an opportunity to update the community on what was happening around the incident, and they had released many of the evacuees to return home at that point. So there was a bit of a sigh of relief going on as the potential for explosion and significant vapor releases was declining now, and so people were allowed to go back home. So the pressure was coming off the community as it was coming off of that runaway thermal reaction storage tank. As often happens in these incidents, the community meetings can get rowdy, and that was no exception for the one hosted by the um city council there. Uh, you saw a lot of vitriol um in the audience. You know, it seemed to partly be hijacked by people with other political agendas, which is a side effect of that some of these town hall meetings have. You know, this is one of those conversations that we have regularly when you're thinking about, hey, should I send my company representatives to be part of this town hall meeting? And the safety and security of your people is, of course, top of mind as you're sending them out into a community. I mentioned I worked a Deepwater Horizon response, and our teams on the ground along the Gulf Coast attended many community meetings. Many of them uh got ugly. You had a lot of people who were impacted, whose livelihoods were being impacted. They were very emotional. And we had a number of instances where people were spat on, people were jostled physically by people in the rooms. And so that caused us to really stop and rethink our participation in many of those meetings. What we ended up doing in that Deepwater Horizon example is taking more control over the community meetings so that we could find venues that offered enough space that we could safely uh host the meetings, but that offered you know multiple uh areas of egress if things got out of control and we needed to pull people out. So we took a little more control of those meetings than and we felt uh more comfortable than putting our people out in those. But as I mentioned, in this case, the GKAN Aerospace did not participate uh in these town hall meetings.

Investigation Questions And Closing Thoughts

Tom Mueller 26:34

As I record this, uh the evacuation orders have all been lifted, and the community now is working to get back to normal. It's a it's been a tough week for them, and I just want to reiterate again my assessment of the overall communications response is that it was done really well and with great credibility, with great empathy, and obvious care and concern for the community. So the other shoe is going to drop soon as the investigation gets underway and we find out what actually happened and how was this type of incident allowed to happen, you know, in a community so densely populated. And there's lots of questions out there, those answers will be forthcoming. Uh, but GKN Aerospace is going to be front and center as that investigation goes forward. So that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Stay tuned. We're going to have more episodes to focus on this incident out in Orange County, California to provide a little more insight and information. Thanks. Take care.