When the lights went out across the Northeast and into the Midwest United States on Aug. 14, David A. Fuscus put his people into high gear. As president-CEO of crisis
communications firm Xenophon Strategies in Washington, D.C., he wanted to know how the utilities would respond to the crisis.
For the next two days he watched TV, listened to radio, and rummaged through the Web. He was unimpressed, to say the least.
"I have very seldom seen organizations perform as poorly as they performed," he says. "The first four to six hours after a crisis begins are crucial, yet they said almost
nothing. Probably the most blaring example of that was what they did with their Web sites, which was - nothing. For the first full day they made no changes, and even when they
started using their Web sites, it was just to offer a brief recognition that something had happened."
Fuscus is hardly alone. Throughout the PR world, people shook their heads in disbelief as some of the nation's biggest power suppliers offered what appeared to be a
disastrously inadequate response to the blackout. (The jury is still out on the utilities' response to Hurricane Isabel. See upcoming issues of PR NEWS for coverage of this
crisis.)
Passing the buck
Many were put off by the apparent blame game that was played in the first few hours of the crisis, as Ohio blamed Canada and Canada blamed Buffalo and New York blamed Ohio.
Peter Burg, chairman of Ohio utility FirstEnergy, was still singing this tune two weeks later, when he spoke at Capitol Hill hearings looking into the disaster. "FirstEnergy
believes the outage can only be the result of a combination of events that occurred across the Eastern interconnection," Burg said. "We don't believe that events on any one system
could account for the widespread nature of the outage."
At the time of the blackout, that kind of language outraged Catherine Bolton, executive director-COO of the Council of Public Relations Firms, who was at the PRSA when the
lights went out.
"I was shocked and surprised that people were immediately making accusations and pointing fingers. They couldn't even tell us when we could have power back, so how could they
already know whom to blame?" she says. "The biggest problem you have in a crisis is that people want immediate answers, but the reality of most crises is that you don't know the
answers for a while. The worst possible thing you can do is to jump to conclusions."
If the utilities were speculating, it may have been due to a lack of coordination. "We tried to coordinate with the transmission owners [but] in the early part of it, everybody
was just trying to deal with getting the power back on and dealing with local questions," says Carol Murphy, vice president of government affairs and communications at N.Y.
Independent System Operator, which manages the New York state electric grid. Murphy did hold a coordinating phone call with all the utilities' communications departments - but
that was not until Sunday, after the lights had already gone back on.
In the meantime, some communications pros may have succumbed to the temptation to give reporters what they wanted. "In every conversation we had, the media wanted us to finger-
point," Murphy says.
Others anticipated that pressure and set the ground rules in advance. Take Jamie Floer, PR manager at R.W. Beck, a consulting/engineering firm that during the blackout
supplied transmission grid experts for CNN and other media outlets. "As a former member of the media, I knew they would be looking for immediate answers. Who wouldn't be? And in
the first interview our folks did, an hour after the blackout, the reporter in fact asked our expert point-blank: 'Do you think it started in Ottawa?'" Floer says.
"Our experts made sure to not finger-point," he adds. "Obviously, this is going to end up in litigation, so from a legal perspective our attorneys were concerned. Moreover,
this is a national story with national significance and I did not want us to be the ones to say, 'Hey this was somebody's fault,' when in fact it will probably take months to
figure out what happened."
Missed messages
If finger-pointing was not needed, what then should have been the key messages? One consensus that emerged from the blackout chaos was that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
nailed it.
"In New York, Bloomberg said: 'We know what we are doing, we have a plan, we have drilled this plan.' He made it clear that things were under control," Fuscus says. In its
blackout postmortem, cable news station MSNBC said on its Web site that New Yorkers "finally warmed up" to the mayor because of his competent handling of the crisis. "Bloomberg's
efforts to reassure the public and to restore order played well to a jittery public."
While New York's mayor succeeded in convincing the public that the situation was under control, the utilities failed to answer the question that many people were asking: Was
this terrorism? It took an official pronouncement from President Bush to make clear that this was, in fact, not a deliberate act of sabotage.
Still, some wondered that if it was possible for the whole region to lose power all at once, didn't that mean that the grid was vulnerable to terror attacks? "That is the scary
part to me," says Jennifer Quasdorf, director of marketing and communications, which counsels engineering companies on infrastructure security and other matters. With the grid so
demonstrably vulnerable, "the utilities needed to follow up immediately after the blackout with confidence-building communications on that," she adds. "Yet there were no
reassurances given about that."
Maybe that's just because the utilities have been too busy. A month after the blackout, the PR shop at FirstEnergy declined to talk to us, saying they were still very much in
the midst of their follow-up work.
All heat and no light:
The PR community gives low marks to the handling of last month's massive blackout. Here's what they would have wanted to see in response to the crisis:
- Action plan: Here is what is being done to fix the problem
- Timeline: Here's when the lights will come back on
- Contact info: Here's how to reach us with questions
- Safeguarding: The system may look vulnerable now, but here's why this will not happen again
- No finger-pointing: Get the lights on before you start blaming each other
Contacts: Catherine Bolton, 212.460.1400, [email protected]; David A. Fuscus, 202.258.8802, [email protected]; Carol Murphy, 518.356.6070, [email protected]; Jennifer
Quasdorf, 202.342.8415, [email protected]