Emergency Managers and Comms Pros Must Train Together

Picture this: A building collapses during the annual Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. More than 1.2 million visitors attend the 23-day event each year, most of them from out of town. There are five local trauma centers, but they’re largely unknown to visitors. 

Within minutes, social media lights up with unverified photos and eyewitness accounts. Media calls begin flooding in. And inside the emergency operations center, the communications team and the incident commanders are speaking (perhaps for the first time) two completely different professional languages.

That scenario was the centerpiece of a large-scale crisis communication exercise I co-led with Kaysey Pollan, MBA, director of System Preparedness and Continuity at Cook Children’s Health Care System in Fort Worth. We called it “Chaos in Cowtown,” and spent eight months planning it. In February, we presented our lessons learned at the Association of Healthcare Emergency Preparedness Professionals Conference in Frisco, Texas.

The single most important lesson: Emergency managers and communications professionals must stop operating in siloes and start training together before a crisis happens.