Worth upping this from a comment — an email I sent to the New School admin and faculty senate after the school spammed out hysterical messages following the 2011 VA earthquake. It’s a quick, nontechnical primer in how to think about emergency message broadcasts. (For the uninitiated, the UFS is the University Faculty Senate. TNS’s experiments in requiring invasive and incompetent surveillance software were pretty recent [summer 2010], and I had learned that going directly to the executive level didn’t work, whereas faculty pressure and an emphasis on process did. Sort of.)
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:18:47 -0500
At the risk of jumping the gun on some UFS indoctrination ceremony that’s shrouded in masonic mystery, I’d like to suggest that the UFS should consider looking into the events following the earthquake we’ve just had. I received a series of SMSes and emails about it (six total), as you probably did. The first one said:
S: EVACUATE BUILDINGS Please evacuate all buildings until we can assess the damage. We will make a notification when you are able to return. This was an small earthquake. To confirm: reply with ‘YES’ and send.
Now, there are a number of problems with this message:
`(1) it’s unattributed (it came from “893-61”);`
`(2) closely related, it doesn’t mention any scope (e.g., “TNS buildings”);`
`(3) it doesn’t provide any guidance about duration (e.g., “within 1 hour”);`
`(4) its wording suggests that there *is* (“the”) damage, which foments rumor; and`
`(5) it smacks of hysteria.`
While I think it was unwise to send the message at all, I will note that better wording could have avoided most of those problems, for example:
S: EVACUATE BUILDINGS Small earthquake in NYC. No reason to believe damage resulted, but please exit all TNS buildings until inspected. We will send a status update in 1 hour. To confirm: reply ‘YES’ and send.
The follow-ups came between 75-100 minutes later — quite a long time, if you think about it. If school were in session, this would have disrupted an extraordinary number of classes in prime-time slots. However, because it’s summer the TNS community is scattered across the country and, indeed, around the world. Whoever wrote the initial message was thinking about the interiors of a handful of TNS buildings, but the thousands of people who read it were thinking about wherever they *are* when they received it. The importance of attribution, scoping, and clarity in a case like this can’t be overemphasized.
Moreover, the message was 210 characters long, whereas the traditional limit for an SMS is 140. For smartphones, this isn’t a problem, but anyone using an older cellphone may have received a truncated message:
S: EVACUATE BUILDINGS Please evacuate all buildings until we can assess the damage. We will make a notification when you are able to return.
— which is even worse, because it provides *no* context whatsoever. My revised version would have been truncated to read:
S: EVACUATE BUILDINGS Small earthquake in NYC. No reason to believe damage resulted, but please exit all TNS buildings until inspected. We
— which, though not great, focuses on fact and provides a clear scope.
Now, I come from earthquake country, and later from tornado country. That hardly makes me an expert in natural disasters, but it’s been my experience that as a rule of thumb people should *not* run out into the street without a plan. The strong corollary is that ‘authorities’ shouldn’t tell you to do so. I can think of several instances when doing just that — usually at the direction of an uninformed and overzealous employee — has *caused* injury and death due to falling or flying debris, whereas everyone would’ve been fine if they’d stayed put. In NYC, in particular, where most nearby buildings are made of masonry and metalwork, inspection practices are less than trustworthy, it could be especially unsafe outdoors.
Put simply, I’d much rather be hit by some plaster falling 5 feet than some stonework falling five stories; and I expect that TNS’s insurers would agree. Moreover, an event like an earthquake is generally held to be an ‘act of god,’ legally speaking, meaning that TNS would probably be indemnified. However, if TNS goes on record as requiring everyone to evacuate its buildings and some debris fell on someone, or someone was injured while evacuating, any resulting legal proceedings would probably consider questions like:
`(1) What or who was the source of authority for this message?`
`(2) What protocols were followed for drafting and sending it?`
`(3) What measures did TNS’s institutional peers take?`
Reports indicate that this tremor was felt all the way from South Carolina to Montreal to Milwaukee, which encompasses a *lot* of institutional peers. How many of them do you think ordered everyone to evacuate? The NYT is reporting that “Several buildings in New York City were evacuated, with employees standing in the streets in midtown Manhattan.” Several — out of many thousands. While I wouldn’t assume that the maintainers of all the buildings people stayed in were better prepared, I do think there probably is some wisdom in those crowds.
I’ll be blunt: I’m concerned that the existence of TNS’s emergency-broadcast system is encouraging ill-informed, poorly thought-out, and dangerous overreactions. Therefore, I’d like to suggest that the UFS requests a detailed account of how this decision was made and according to what protocols and terms of reference. I think it’s also worth asking the same kinds of questions about how the buildings were deemed to be safe, because if those evaluations were mistaken it could expose TNS to additional liabilities.
If you feel that the UFS isn’t an appropriate forum for asking these questions, it would help me to understand who you think might be.