Welcome Back And Guest Setup

Tom Mueller 0:08

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On our episode today, we're continuing our conversation with District Chief Craig Covey of the Orange County Fire Authority. Chief Covey is a 32-year veteran of Orange County Fire Authority, has a lot of experience working as an incident commander and working with public information officers on incidents of varying sizes. So we get lots of great feedback from the chief on his experiences and on working with PIOs and giving some advice for them to be better. Let's join that conversation again now.

Managing Elected Officials At Scale

Tom Mueller 0:57

Typically when a big IMT sets up, you've got a liaison officer function there who's engaging with other agencies, uh, maybe with the elected officials. But you know, when so often we see with these large-scale incidents, elected officials want to be involved, they want visibility. Uh, and you know, as long as they're happy, that can go well. Uh, how was it working this uh this recent GKN incident now where we had 50,000 people evacuated? You had elected officials at all levels who were engaging around this. Tell us a little bit about you know how you were able to engage with them, or did you delegate that out? How did that work for you?

Craig Covey 1:47

No, the uh the elected officials got me. Um, they deserved that by their position. Um, some of them I was doing individually, some of them were doing as groups. Um, it was to say it was massive would not be an understatement or an overstatement. It may be an understatement. Um, it was also election season, too, on top of everything else. So there was an incredible attention from them. You know, we impacted six communities and it did go all the way to, you know, Congress, you know, local, state, and national elected officials there. Um, it was an incredible challenge. The one of the big challenges with it, you know, they they wanted to be the ones to tell their communities what was going on. And sometimes those messaging they were putting out wasn't ready to be released by the incident or wasn't as accurate as it should have been or could have been, uh, which caused confusions and stuff, and trying to get them to understand that responsibility in communicating out. And, you know, anything the incident puts out is officially approved and releasable. When you're going out on your own, you know, you may not be saying it exactly right and you may be causing confusion. You know, the whole goal is a joint unified informational pipeline. But we did have numerous instances of stuff outside that pipeline that cause confusions and unnecessary frictions that um it is the nature of the beast, and we use those cooperator meetings to have those conversations, somewhat frank, and hey, you know, please help us help you kind of thing, and and um make sure you're not putting anything out, the incident's not ready to put out, or if you are, it's accurate to it, um, was a huge lift in

Keeping Messaging Inside One Pipeline

Craig Covey 3:36

this. Uh, but I did have some really incredible senior leadership that came in at the both local, state, and national level. And they were asking every one of them, what can we do? How can we help? And I I tasked them with, hey, would you be willing to emphasize getting an uh emergency declaration done to this area? It's super, this area is incredibly impacted, both at the city and at the residential level, and and they can't afford it. A lot of people are struggling. Um, they had that done at the state level within eight hours, and by the next morning or mid-afternoon, like within 20 hours, done uh at the federal level through President Trump. Um, so there is some things you can use that are incredibly useful with the power of those elected officials, the resources that they can bring to bear. And though, and my emphasis on that not only wasn't was was finding relief to the cities and the uh the residents, but it also opened checkbooks to me and access the resources. Should this thing fail and go catastrophic, I could pull from the state resources or national resources without having to run through that process at that time. Those doors were open, the checkbook was ready, the people were in position and monitoring. All I had to do was say send it. And so um there is positive to having those electeds around. And when you give them something like that that they were passionate about and they fixed immediately from an incident commander's perspective, that was awesome to have in my hip pocket and available to me.

Tom Mueller 5:13

That's an excellent point there, Chief. Uh, because so often uh, you know, we get a little cynical, a little jaded at uh how some of the politicians engage in these incidents. And it feels more like grandstanding for themselves rather than serving the community. Uh, but it's a terrific point about you know, navigating the federal, you know, emergency declaration process or just emergency resources and tacking those elected officials to help you do that. Terrific point uh you made up there to leverage, uh leverage those. But you know, every incident we see uh examples where uh politicians go off script or um you know they just they want to break the news. And so you'll give them. I've been on incidents before where we have you know done a briefing for elected officials at 10 in the morning, and then we're doing a press conference at noon. By the time we had the press conference go in, you know, some of those elected officials had already broken the news that we were going to deliver in the press conference. And as you said, sometimes accurately, sometimes not so accurately. So that's I guess that problem's not going away anytime soon, right?

Craig Covey 6:28

So um any other I think to your point, that 10 o'clock meeting is that moment to, you know, once I realized what was going on, to have that, you know, better, you know, politically correct but frank conversation of hey, help us, help us making sure, make sure that we're getting the right information out, it's accurate and timely, uh, and don't don't push us in a direction that it's not clear and ready yet. Um and for the most part, once we started having those conversations, things started getting much better. Uh, but unfortunately, a couple of days have gone by at that point, and some of that stuff had already occurred. And and there's nothing worse for a city manager to be hearing stuff from other cities or other electeds that they don't know about themselves. You you know, that concept of no surprises to your city managers, your highest, your highest official in your city government that I work for, those are my bosses outside of OCFA, direct bosses, but that that's what I work for in these cities. Um, I mean, I got to do my best to support them. And that is trying to control those electeds and making sure they're not saying things that affect what they're doing in cities as well.

Tom Mueller 7:40

One of the uh fascinating aspects of this uh was you had multiple communities affected. And so you had mayors, city managers, you know, kind of doing their own levels of communications for their communities. Um, and uh I'm just curious, you know, from your purchase as I see, did you have visibility into what the mayors were doing and you know, the websites and some of that things that were going on, and anything um you know that you would have hoped would have could have been done differently, perhaps?

Craig Covey 8:15

Unfortunately,

Using Political Power For Declarations

Craig Covey 8:16

we had nothing, um no involvement in what they were doing once they left incident command posts and at their city halls and elsewhere, or what some of them put on on social media. Um, it was more reactive posture, like, oh, did you see this? Okay, we you know, okay, that's okay, or oh boy, we gotta get ahead of this. And um, so we had a little bit of both on that. And uh I had nothing from a proactive space.

Tom Mueller 8:43

Okay. Well, it was it was fascinating. I mostly paid attention to Garden Grove and uh and what elected officials there were doing. And you know, they took they made a really, really strong effort at at making their website, you know, a fit-for-purpose, all information type site. Um, and they did, I thought, a pretty good job of that. And the mayor was out and visible and talking to her constituents there. Uh I'm not sure you know, Chief, that uh private citizen there in Garden Grove put up a crisis website. Uh young gentleman named Victor Trenn, um, who it just he's a programmer and he saw a need and he did that. Are you by chance familiar with with what he did there?

Craig Covey 9:30

I haven't looked it up, but I, you know, I did your podcast was sent to me early on uh when you kind of reviewed the incident and what we did well, and and a couple things that we we can improve on, and that website being one of them. Um our our incident management team has a website, and uh so we wouldn't need to develop it on the fly, but we I I I like that idea of using something like that. We have a template here, and that's a takeaway from us is to evaluate our ability to stand up something like that and and have that robust single point of contact information to get everything related to the incident. Um, because I think there was there were silos of that around the community, both uh in a private aspect as well as the the public aspect, um public service aspect, whether city or county, um, that we could have collectively put it into a single point, like he did. He did a great job from everything I've heard about it. I haven't personally seen it, but that's certainly a model idea. And you did make a comment also about the subtitles and things like that, uh, that we could have done sooner in the multiple languages. Uh, I don't know if you've seen, but apparently I am extremely fluent in Vietnamese. Um, someone used an AI portal to to it learned my voice, it learned my uh mannerisms and had me speaking fluent Vietnamese in my voice with my mouth moving to it and everything. Um, AI is out there, there's some incredible capabilities with it. Uh, we're evaluating, you know, having some contracts with that type of thing that we can send it out in multiple languages. Orange County is a very diverse community. Um, you know, both English and Spanish are our primary ones, but we have a large Middle Eastern contingent, we have a large Asian contingent, we even have Russians uh that a large contingent that live in here. So being able to quickly disseminate in multiple languages, using AI is a force multiplier that uh I think we're gonna embrace as well.

Tom Mueller 11:39

Well, I gave kudos to your PIO team for that and uh for getting it out multiple languages. Yeah, the challenge is doing that from the beginning, right? Getting everything up and running quickly so that you can do that. And um, you know, that's an opportunity for personal growth for most incident management teams. And the technology just keeps moving so fast to do that, right? Used to be Google Translate would do it. Now you've got AI tools that can help you. It's just it's fascinating and it's fast moving and rapidly changing. Hey, Chief, that uh AI video of you speaking fluent Vietnamese, was that uh just was it using the messages that you had delivered in one of your on-camera um updates?

Craig Covey 12:27

Exactly. It was one of my regular ones, and I get it all of a sudden I get this thing sent to me from one of my city managers, and they're playing it in their uh city EOC that they had opened up, and everybody's laughing because they know I don't speak Vietnamese, and they're like, What in the world is this? Uh so I usually shared that with my family, and we got a pretty good chuckle out of it. Uh, but I mean, people are commenting that literally, how does this guy speak Vietnamese so well? You know, I certainly don't look like someone that should speak Vietnamese that well.

Tom Mueller 12:57

Okay, well, that is fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Right. 100% because that could is just as easily have been misinformation coming out of your mouth in Vietnamese. And um yeah, that's the scary thing as you know, as PIOs trying to keep ahead of this stuff, and you know, those deep fake videos

City Communications And Crisis Websites

Tom Mueller 13:20

are coming. And if somebody's uh trolling a response, you know, in the middle of something like this, you could easily throw something like that out there just to, you know, sort of drop a hand grenade in the middle of things, just to mess with people. Uh I'm so happy that didn't happen to your team after everything you guys went through and all the time and energy, um, particularly for this recent GKN incident. Um Chief, on the but just back on the website issue, real quickly. Uh I worked, yeah, I worked for BP uh most of my career, the British uh oil and gas company. And the last several years I was in charge of uh crisis communications and crisis websites and having dark sites up and ready to go for an incident that might happen anywhere in the world, and uh, you know, being ready to launch those websites when something goes wrong. So there is some pretty cool technologies out there that um that will allow you to do that and uh take inquiries on those sites now. You know, for the for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010, uh, you know, we stood up five different crisis websites, the master site that that the response used, and then one for each of the impacted states, or at least four of the five states. Um we were looking after five different websites during that incident. And the thing was each one each one covered one state, so we dedicated some of our responders in that state to managing that site. And of course, each site could take inquiries from the general public, and so they were responsible for engaging with the communities and dealing with the inquiries that were coming in. But we were able to, you know, to sort of parse that out on a state-by-state level so that your central PIO team wasn't trying to manage all of that you know, from uh from New Orleans. So some fascinating technologies out there, and uh, but I was just tickled to see this young man create that website. And uh I'm like, he's really good. And he he did the community of service by everything he pulled together there. That's fantastic. Um, Chief, uh, as you think back over your career, uh you've worked you know many, many different incidents. You know, what kind of advice do you have for up-and-coming um incident commanders, you know, people who are training to fill your shoes? Uh, because there's so many aspects to being a good incident commander uh and being able to manage people, being able to manage elected officials, people with differing agendas, all come together to try and solve this thing. What's your sort of general advice for other up-and-coming team members?

Craig Covey 16:19

Remember what we're all here, what we all swore to do, right? And and that's to serve the public. Um, whatever your role you have now, if you if you get up to a senior chief officer, you know, battalion chief, division chief, or higher, um, don't forget our purpose. Yeah, it's it is obviously this to take care of our members, um, train them, keep them safe, all the things with that, but it's also to serve the public. And think about that. And if you were not a first responder, you know, they don't have the knowledge that we have, and don't assume that's the case, and and just share with them in a language they understand. Don't don't be all technical and and and fire service jargon jargon or whatever your profession is, jargon. Um, you know, share with them, keep it simple, be as open and transparent as possible. They have the right to know, never fall back on that. And good or bad, own it, share it, and and communicate to them because if you don't, they're gonna come up with their own narratives. Yeah, and that's not right to the incidents, not right to the impacted area. Um, so I guess that would be my my biggest thing with the the generation that's coming up right now, and you're preparing for stuff like this. Um go to the classes, get trained up on it, build reps, you know, on smaller incidents. Don't be afraid to jump in front of it, don't be afraid to make mistakes, um, but learn from it and move forward. And at some point in time, you may or may not ever get being under a microscope like we were put on on this one, but when you are, you're ready and and uh you're not making it up at that time as it's the first time ever.

Tom Mueller 18:15

Terrific. And how about for you know, up-and-coming public information officers? Uh, you've, I'm sure, worked with a variety of PIOs throughout your career. Um, you know, as we all know, people have different skill sets, different strengths, and different roles. And uh, so as you think about sort of your ideal public information officer or you know, advice to somebody coming up to be a good PIO, what's your counsel to them?

Craig Covey 18:47

Be that good filter. Right. Um you you're our subject matter expert. I'm not, I'm not a PIO, never, never really was, other than the roadside and incident, small incident or team-related stuff. You know, be that person I can lean on and understand where this messaging needs to go. Correct me when I'm wrong, encourage me when I'm right. Um, make sure that we're doing the right thing for the service we're supposed to be providing. Um, that filtering thing is a huge thing, you know, of what's right and what's wrong, and correct or encourage both, but also set the expectations with the media. You know, that's a that's a machine that takes a lot of feeding and a lot of care and feeding, and we can't necessarily always meet that demand. Uh be willing to filter that demand so that I mean our primary mission there is to mitigate the incident. You know, the the the care and feeding of the media machine is a secondary in nature. It's it's almost 50-50, but really we're there to go fix this thing. Um so help out with setting expectations with the media as well, and sharing that we hear you, we're going to provide for you, but let let our folks run the incident as well. So I think that would be my biggest ask of a uh a new PIO or a seasoned one is to support both sides, right? Support the incident as well as the demands of the media, uh, balance the two and and make sure what we are putting out is the right message.

AI Translation And Deepfake Risk

Tom Mueller 20:30

All right. Terrific advice there, Chief. Thanks so much. I think Chief, I think we'll we'll wrap it up here. Um unless there's any other stories that are just itching to share with us from your long experience in the fire service. Anything else?

Craig Covey 20:48

Yeah, I I without getting into the whole, you know, I've been there, done that, but I've had a very fortunate career with responding around the country. You know, Lahaina, Puerto Rico, um North Carolina. I've I've had a lot of opportunity to go around. Last year I was in Texas for the Guadalupe River floods, you know, and all those collective experiences you build on and grow from and share out. You know, um, I'm a big person, and I think we talked about early on before we started about paying it forward, paying it back. I had a lot of people teach me to become the experience that I have. And and now it's my responsibility to share my experiences with the upcoming generations and mentor them and give them that opportunity and preparedness for it. So um, you know, I am so thankful of this career and being able to go out and help and do the things that I've done, you know, whether it's putting out a house fire or or or finding someone that died in Texas in floods, you know, um, I'm so appreciative of OCFA and the opportunities it's provided me. And and, you know, it's been an incredible career. This is an incredible moment right now, being able to talk to you. I never would have thought I'd be on some podcast talking about PIOs. So thank you for the respect you showed me to call me and ask me to do this. And and uh hopefully any of some of the little nuggets I've been able to share and lesson learned from this incident um will help somebody else down the road.

Tom Mueller 22:20

I'm sure they will, Chief. And you know, one of the things I'm struck by here as we close out uh talking to you and then talking to your uh your PIO, um Greg Barta, is just the humility uh that I sense from from your team there, that uh, you know, people are focused on delivering results for the communities. And you don't get a sense of egos in the room and needing to manage egos to get this stuff accomplished. So I think that's just a fabulous testament to you and to your teams uh that you you come to it with that level of empathy, care, and concern um for the communities that you serve. So thanks for that, Chief.

Craig Covey 23:05

That's super nice of you to say that. Thank you. Uh I do believe that's a huge culture that we bring in the OCFA. I don't think we're unique to the fire service, um, but it's certainly something we strive for in this agency is drop the patch, drop the ego, and remember what you're here for. So I appreciate that acknowledgement.

Tom Mueller 23:25

And that's gonna do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Hey, if you want to drop me a line, you can email me at Tom at Leadinginacrisis dot com. And we will see you again soon for another episode. Take care.