If it feels to you like the politicians are making it up as they go, odds are you’re right.
Dry wood feeds a fire.
Bad comms fuels ire.
Some local local media re-wrote their stories about Monday night’s fire briefing from the government.
Some first versions contained the world “flee,” as in government tells residents get ready to flee. One headline read: “Be ready to flee fire, thousands in Avalon told.” Others had the word “flee” in the sub-head but the tone was already out there. By Tuesday morning, every newsroom - save one - had reworked their copy to replace the word flee with “evacuation.”
Keep up with what’s going on.
The thousands in Conception Bay South and Paradise who got the warning from Premier John Hogan at 7:30 Monday night to get ready to run had no idea who should get ready. Hogan’s script was terrible at explaining things. Hogan himself couldn’t ad lib any better. No one on the panel had a clue either and to make matters worse no one had any pictures. In an age of touch-screens and whiteboards, no one involved in government'semergency communication from the Premier on down thought maybe having a picture might help people understand.
No one.
Paradise and CBS used crude maps on their social media and got *instant* pushback from residents who had no idea the fire was potentially headed in their direction. All day, news had been about smoke downwind of the fire. People whose homes smelled like Norwegian herring factories worried they were in the path of this rapidly moving fire on the outskirts of Sin Jawns. That’s why reporters wondered, disbelievingly, at the Monday night briefing why Southlands and Galway - downwind of the fire - had not be alerted.
The image at the top of this column is a screen grab of the Paddy’s Pond fire on FIRMS. There’s a neat feature on FIRMS that lets you see the progress of a fire in three hour increments. Sandy stuff is more than 24 hours old. Orange is more recent, within the past three to six hours. The yellow colour is in between six and 24.
The provincial government folks fighting this fire had *this* type of information yesterday. They clearly used it to project the fire’s direction and that projection is what informed the decision to alert people in the likely path. You can tell from the colour-coding the fire did not move in the wind direction because of the line of ponds on the right.
When the government added Galway and Southlands to the evacuation alert stage on Tuesday, they could have shown a picture of the changed conditions on the ground that led to the changed decision about evacuation. they didn’t. They also didn’t explain to people what had happened both on the north and on the east or that firefighting efforts concentrated on holding the fire back on the north and towards the east. As it turned out, that was very effective. While officials evacuated Three Island Pond, the northern boundary of the fire was still 2 to 3 km away from the highway while in the east the fire was still much further away at dusk on Tuesday from Galway and Southlandsthen it was Monday night from the communities to the north. Pictures would’ve told a much easier story to understand both on Tuesday morning during the daily brief and in place of the official text circulated widely by political social media.
The evac alert from Monday night seems to be based on the idea the fire will likely progress to the northwest in between the ponds, left and right of it as you face northwest, with the likelihood it will break further to the left of the general line of advance unless the ground crews can contain it. That was clear Tuesday morning when I first wrote this, and as it turned out, that’s exactly what the forestry crews were doing all day Tuesday to contain the fire.
The wind direction on the picture at the top is marked in yellow. The green circle is where I erroneously thoughtGalway and Costco are, as well as Southlands just beyond, to the right a bit.In fact, you can make out Costco just to the left of that circle, which means that they are still as far from the fire today as they were on Monday.
The direction the fire headed was 90 degrees left of the wind direction. That’s where the firefighting effort focused, and it seems to have worked to hold the fire back.
Imagine if people had had *that* information on Monday, when it was available. That is, what if at a briefing earlier in the day some official who actually knew what was going on - not a talking-head politician - had raised the issue or raised the possibility of how the fire might head and how crews might be responding. Certainly, if people had that information Monday night they would not have been as panicked and angry as they were with the crude maps and nothing but the bombshell of a stand-by-to-flee notice driving them.
Same thing goes for folks dealing with the much larger Kingston fire, where days of uncertainty have taken a huge toll on people’s mental health. One of the reasons for that emotional strain is the lack of information from the provincial government about what is going on. Monday night’s shock was a text-book example of how *not* to do emergency communications and it comes from an organization - the provincial government and its agencies and associates (municipalities) - that has shown itself chronically unable to handle emergency comms over the past 25 years.
But it’s not just the comms folks. The problem is, as always, with management overall, especially at the topmost political and bureaucratic levels. Jamie Chippett - the guy sitting mute on the right hand side of every - likely has a better grip on what’s happening and what needs to happen but we hear more from ministers who literally only have briefing notes written by people in Chippett’s department, not a level of knowledge Chippett and his officials would bring. Competence equals confidence and people cannot have confidence in folks who seem like they are always running things by the seat of their pants.
Show me a screwed up comms situation and every time it’s about overall management problems. Breast cancer, Snowmaggedon, Hurricane Igor, COVID, the 2021 election, and now wildfires and you see the same fundamental problems. As the Cameron Inquiry showed, the health care authority managements never dealt with public communications at all. And the comms folks seemed more concerned with giving themselves attaboys after the fact over when they disclosed the crisis (they never did). Once the politicians got involved, the comms took on another unhelpful flavor.
In IGOR, the provincial emergency management crowd used to have their twice daily co-ordination meetings of every agency involved in the ops centre where people were trying to deliver front-line service. Add in the political overlay, which delayed calling for much-needed federal assistance solely because of concerns about giving then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper any chance to grab good headlines locally.
In Snowmaggedon, the province ignored its responsibility to co-ordinate across municipal jurisdictions and completely failed to realize that - because of the City’s role in feeding the province - leaving Oceanex container terminal snowbound in downtown St. John’s meant grocery store shelves across the island would start to empty out very quickly. What’s worse, the City of St. John’s blundered its way through the whole crisis without an emergency operations centre, resulting in needless delays in restoring service and poor co-ordination with municipalities.
That’s one thing the province is doing exceptionally well this time. It’s declared regional states of emergency, which ensures that where four or five towns might be involved, there was one single unified command, and control.
COVID’s actually a really good parallel with the wildfires in one sense: useless stats that did not help public understand what was going on. In COVID, they’d talk about total number of infections. It was a number that never went down and in the first few days of the crisis, that ever-climbing tally exaggerated the mental strain of the crisis.
Eventually, they started to talk about the number of recovered cases but curiously they never publicly talked about the logical conclusion which was a point we hit in late April and early May when there were no cases of COVID at all in Newfoundland and Labrador. We still had maximum restrictions, though, completely out of line with the evidence and what was globally already known to be good pandemic management. After that we blundered through Janice Fitzgerald’s nonsensical alert system, which she eventually admitted publicly was something she’d made up.
But here’s the thing: The same day your humble e-scribbler published a projection that we’d be at zero cases by late April or early May, John Haggie was telling the province we could expect more severe restrictions on our personal liberties than at any time since the Second World War. He kept at it as case numbers dropped. A subsequent access to information request turned up a chart almost exactly the same as the Bond Papers one that government’s own officials delivered to the minister the day that Bond Papers chart appeared. There was a total disconnect between decisions at the political level and the actual evidence and that continued to plague Covid response through the entirety of the pandemic finishing with Andrew Furey idiotic and grotesquely irresponsible 2021 election.
Total cases was never a meaningful statistic and in the wildfires of 2025, total acreage consumed is equally meaningless. What would have been much more useful for everyone and still can be for the Kingston fire is the time-line FIRMS imaging or something like it. Most importantly, you can see where the fire seems to be heading and expanding. The widest front is into open ground with no houses. There is some expansion to the north but firefighting efforts are looking to contain that. There might be a huge acreage already burned, but the active fire is a lot smaller area. The thing people would need to know – and what the officials are very reluctant to say– is what the current state of the fire is on any given day. That plus the officials best insights into how they’re fighting. The fire would be immensely helpful to calm people’s frazzled nerves.
People are highly stressed and most likely to cause themselves and others problems if they feel they are helpless victims in events. Giving them insight and making them feel included changes that, especially for those most directly affected by a public emergency. They may not have much real control, but knowing is always better than not knowing.The suggestions Dr. Janice Fitzgerald made during Tuesday’s briefing to help people deal with the stress,are all good as far as they go, but they are really just telling people to suck it up and cope. We can do better. We must do better. We must expect better from public officials. Other places in North America understand the importance of solid public communications and so their public communications for emergencies are often radically different – that is more informative –than what happens in Newfoundland and Labrador.
This is not a permanent situation. The provincial government can change. The problem is that both politically and bureaucratically, ordinary people are the subjects of government decisions. They are chattel and cattle to be herded. Knowledge is power and ordinary Newfs are outside the circle of power. That culture is so deeply woven into how government works, only a radical change driven from the top could stand any chance of even slight success. And since the very top of the bureaucratic and political pyramid is where the problems chronically live, that’s where the biggest challenge to change comes from.
Giving the politicians unquestioned support and endless attaboys on social media – as some would do –didn’t change the outcomes in any of the horror shows before now and it would be foolish to think it will do any good now.
