 County level, emergency management, state level, state of Florida dealt with a couple of hurricanes in 2004 and in FEMA. When Hugh originally approached me for this, my interest in this discussion was Hurricane Ian. More people drowned or were killed from blunt trauma in evacuation zones than any hurricane in Florida since the 1935 labor day hurricane. This was after all the programs, all the development of hurricane evacuations on the hurricane program, all these things and we still saw people dying at an unacceptable rate. So as we talk about all this, I'd like you to keep in mind that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is how many people lost their lives that we could have prevented. So I don't really focus on damaged stuff. I have people like that. I focus on lives. And so this panel is made up of practitioners or people who work with practitioners in that decision-making space. Our goal is to understand the various risk communication needs and sources across scales of communities from county, municipal, faith-based, orgs, local emergency management, et cetera, spanning the household, local and state levels and the challenges that arise across population segments with different experiences. So that is our panel and I wanna start very quickly and just go into the discussion. So I'm gonna turn it over to Drew Pearson to present. And again, we're gonna do this very short and then we're gonna have questions at the end. Well, thanks, Craig. And thanks for that introduction and allowing me to get started. And it is truly important when we say life is lost. At the local level, we know those people. We know those lives that have been lost. We know them personally. But first, thanks to everybody for the opportunity to be here and to share some insights from a local emergency managers perspective. Before I start, I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize the thousands of other local emergency managers across our nation that have their own perspectives. One of the amazing elements of our profession is our ability to network and share not just with our neighbors but across our state and across our nation. I have to give a shout out to the National Association of Emergency Managers, 6,000 plus strong professional organization for their efforts to drive our profession to collaborate across disciplines on important issues like risk communications. Next slide. To set the stage for my perspective, I've needed to share a little bit of information about my community. Our location in Northeast North Carolina just south of the Tide Ward of Virginia area is home to 38,000 residents. Over the summer months, we welcome millions of our best friends as long as they come with their checkbooks and dollars as they come to visit our towns, undercorporated villages and the K-Patteress National Seashore to rest, explore and just enjoy our 110 miles of pristine coastline. I'm hoping many of you have already enjoyed some of the time on the North Carolina Outer Banks. If you have, you may already have personal insights on our risk communication efforts. Next slide, please. We get asked what often what triggers the need to communicate threats and hazards across our community. The answer is pretty simple. It depends. I'd say that it depends, but I have to always go with the followup question because I get it on why. And that's a little bit harder. For me, the what are the impacts we should expect to see from a particular threat or hazard? In my county, as you look at the slide of historical tropical storm tracks, you can see how we've developed a pretty good foundation of the what for weather events in particular, any storm, no matter what time of year, that brings water and wind impacts to our community. We have a good sense of how much water we can take and how high the winds can get before impacts make it unsafe. As we see those impacts on the horizon in a forecast or just occurring or just starting to occur, we do start our messaging efforts. We also work to determine if protective actions or measures like mandatory evacuations will be needed to protect public health and safety. And I've been really interested in the conversation about evacuation zones and evacuations in general and when they start, when they end. And I don't have a lot in my slides about that, but I think it's really important topic to talk about and help bring some clarity to it from a local level where it starts and ends. Because we're the ones that pull the trigger and we're the ones that end the trigger. But I'll get back to my notes. When I say how much water we can take, that's fetal water above ground. The wind that sustained strength over an extended period of time. Next slide, please. For us, the only trusted source of weather impacts is the National Weather Service. While we truly enjoy our friends at the hurricane center and know Robbie was on early and I think Mike Brennan's around, at the local level, our eye-to-eye engagement is with our local weather forecast office in Newport-Moorhead City. Our warning coordination meteorologist Eric Hayden is on the favorite on my iPhone. We're always chatting with our R&D forecaster and NWS chat 2.0 powered by Slack and what a great improvement that has been and given us the ability. I've been sitting here chatting about the high wind warnings and coastal flood advisers have been issued to my county while I'm here in DC and on Slack with them just keeping up the date on it. Our decision makers know who our meteorologist is in charges and quickly ask, what does Newport think? When decisions need to be made, the National Weather Service is with us either virtually or in person in our EOC. And the image you see before you, the guy up front like this is Scott Kennedy. He's our incident meteorologist that was with our EOC during Dorian helping us make the decisions we need to make. Next slide, please. As those decisions are made, we have a public information officer sitting with us. That's, you can see in the back corner there up against the wall, black hair, blue shirt. That's Dorothy Hester, our county public information officer. In our county, it's not a collateral duty position. Dorothy runs our county public relations department all the time. Why do I make that distinction? In our county, our public relations staff has a constant finger on the pulse of our community. Their breadth of well-established personal relationships with the media, the public businesses and influences second to none. When we activate our EOC, they bring all that with them as part of our joint information center. Having a fully engaged public relations staff helps not just during an activation but before and after as well. It helps because they are doing everything that needs to be done to keep our community informed. They aren't just pushing information, they're listening. Their efforts often bring community issues to the county staff well before they become hot button topics with our elected officials. Their efforts not only ensure accurate information is being shared but also allows messaging to be adjusted to answer questions or concerns that they are hearing and to correct misinformation whether it's shared, deliberately or unintentionally. Next slide please. Our robust public relations effort have also helped us raise awareness and increased understanding of risk. At times our residents and visitors have struggled to see the tie between life-threatening storm surge and mandatory evacuation orders. You'll never hear me say voluntary evacuation orders. Mandatory evacuation orders. Anybody can evacuate at any time. They can volunteer to leave on their own at any time. We used the word mandatory evacuation. The challenge that we've seen by our JIC staff is recurring chatter that said no one told us it would get that deep. If they had we would have left. As we drilled on that we found the impacts we saw were forecast and communicate often by the National Weather Service and watches and warnings. As we hosted community preparedness forums it became clear that many struggled to grasp that information that what inundation above ground level actually means. And I say it all the time go figure that they can't figure it out but it's hard. So we took an action. Next slide please. So we decided to develop a storm surge awareness campaign that led to the installation of 27 storm surge interpretive displays around our county. They allow anyone to see how deep the water will get while providing insight on inundation forecast products. Since they've been installed we've seen community influences use displays to try and educate before the water comes up. And at times I'm gonna use the word ridicule it's by a bad word but ridicule those. We say no one told us about the flood impacts until after they've come up. That's a 12 foot pole for three foot segments colors aligned with the forecast products put out by the National Hurricane Center. Next slide please. Well I think we'll over struggle to get everyone to understand their risk will never stop trying. Part of that trying drives into how we message what to expect this forecast start to develop. In our lead up messaging we include educational information using a toolbox of graphics public safety announcements and quick videos that our staff will push using any in all paths to those that we serve. We also use our mass notification tool OBX alerts to reach those that have signed up as we encourage others to join by creating a profile or simply texting their emergency alerts to 77295. We also encourage everyone to turn on government alert notifications on their mobile devices and that's really important when you have thousands of visitors to reach as protective actions are needed to protect life and property. When we approach that point we continue to push every path we have to include the integrated public alert and warning system and we even get down to that door and door engagement. The cops go to the doors that bring the doorbell firefighters drive through neighborhoods and let people know what the impacts they could expect. We delicately balance using iPods too early or too often but when we turn to it our messaging focus changes from informative to clear concise details on the hazard including what it is where it will occur, when to expect it and what to do to stay safe. Next slide please. As I wrap up I don't think the perspective I've shared will vary much across my peers at the local level. Local emergency managers across our nation know their communities. They have partnerships and relationships that reach across all sectors before, during and after storms or any incident. Even when things don't go well and criticism mounts we never stop looking for ways to improve the special crisis communication skill sets. Slide you're looking at now is something I share whenever I can. Robbie mentioned loss of life due to rip currents during storms. We lose them all the time on the outer banks and we're trying to stop it. But did you know the rip currents are the third leading cause of weather related fatalities behind heat and flood? They are. Our loved beach respect the ocean campaign works to help ensure all of our friends that come to visit are well informed as they enjoy our beaches while always respecting the ocean. And Craig, thanks for the opportunity to share and we'll start it when a little bit long. Yeah, okay, thanks Drew. Let's go is Russell Strickland online. I am Greg, I'm here. All right, Russ is the director of Maryland. So you're gonna hear it now from the state perspective of emergency management. Take it away. Well, great, thank you very much. And I need to start out first off with agreeing 100% with you. We're here to prevent deaths. And in Maryland we use the term that we're really focused also on our survivors, the people more than anything. And really following with what Drew has mentioned here, all events are local. So that's where everything truly happens. And in a tiered response kind of system as well as planning for and in the recovery stages, we work with the locals and focus on the locals such that the help comes first with them. Secondly, through a regional process, third through the state and the resources the state may have and then into the federal government. So it's a real, it's a true crossable or team effort of all levels of government. I think there are really three key messages in this and that one is that public information and warning for all hazards is a core capability in all phases of emergency management in the United States. And in Maryland, this capability exists at the local government and state government level whereby local governments are responsible for responding to threats and hazards facing their communities. And then when multiple jurisdictions are involved or one jurisdiction is overwhelmed that lacks the resources to respond to the needs of its impacted communities, the state coordinated by our department provides that kind of assistance and coordination in the state of Maryland. And finally, there are key messages that our public information and warning goal is to deliver coordinated, prompt, reliable and actionable information to the whole community through the use of clear, consistent, accessible and culturally and linguistically appropriate methods to effectively relay information regarding any threat or hazard, as well as the actions being taken and the assistance being made as appropriate to provide the right information at the right time to the right people so they can make the best decisions. So really the state's role in all of this is to support our local jurisdictions with all the resources and assets we can muster and then obviously reach out to other sources to again, support the local jurisdictions. So I would offer that to you Craig for our opening. Thank you very much, Russell. I think you work a lot with the emergency management at the local level. So again, this panel is focused on the emergency managers either them or the researchers that are working with them. And so your findings and what you're observing. Yeah, thank you for inviting me to speak on some of my tornado related research and sharing a few things I've learned about city and county emergency managers, other local officials and tornado survivors. The following are highlights from several qualitative research studies that I've conducted over the last nine years shown in the red boxes are studies of emergency managers, some of which broadened out to include other local officials like fire captains, school officials and public works supervisors. I've also collaborated with structural and wind engineers to speak with survivors of tornadoes at over 90 home sites. All of these studies were funded by NOAA. Being an empathetic person and a qualitative researcher I've worked really hard to get out of my meteorology head and into their heads. The state of the science is such that our sensor technologies put us here and our sensor technologies even with large long track tornado only about 3% of the area in that warning is actually directly experiencing the tornado. Thus it should not be a surprise that we have taught people what a warning means. They probably won't get hit. It should also not come as a surprise that 85% of people in this Joplin study did not take any protective actions until they saw, heard or felt the tornado coming. I see the same and heard the surprise and anguish that a tornado actually happened. An individual's concern is a tiny spot on a map but the situation is not a whole lot different for a city or county EM. The hard truth is that their jurisdiction probably won't get hit. Here we see a fire captain discuss the costs. It was 10 to $12,000 of overtime to be prepared and over the course of the year they at times spend $200,000 on that but not have a tornado in their city. In the hours leading up to a possible severe weather event I sat with EMs and observed a cadence to their alertness. I saw them use tools and past experiences to help them narrow down when storms might impact them beyond the forecasted two to eight hour windows provided by the National Weather Service. Timing helps with determining when decisions have to be made for things to be in place. EMs and other local officials are learning whether we have supported that or not. The University of Oklahoma's Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis has undertaken a severe weather and emergency management survey effort where they collaborate with other researchers to populate questions on three to four surveys per year. They cleverly built upon what I and others have found and asked EMs to rank what type of information was most important at key points in time. On the left you can see the top factors summarized at those different times. This survey effort is ongoing and they welcome collaboration. Shifting back to my qualitative work Vortex Southeast was funded in part because storms in the Southeast U.S. are difficult to forecast. Through critical incident interviews we saw why and how EMs developed an amiable distrust of forecast information. Null events to no notice events these are all difficult to deal with. One EM declared that's dead on but they also didn't like the framing that I put on that. EMs trust the forecasters intent even if they don't trust the forecast completely. So EMs related many critical incidents to get us to that conclusion. Through their experiences they learned to adapt to the shortcomings in the state of the science. The tornado watch expires the EOC closes but the EM lingered. In other cases there was no watch but warnings started being issued. On the other end of the spectrum a watch might be issued hours prior to severe weather and the EM learned to wait to call the dispatchers from law enforcement fire EMS etc. When should they make that call? It's hard to know the timing. EMs and other local officials develop a calibration to the forecast. In another study we saw that when SPC issued a slight risk EMS and other officials viewed that as anywhere from a low to medium risk to if it was an enhanced risk of severe storms anywhere from low to high to a high risk being anywhere from medium to high. Where does that calibration come from? It is learned through experiences and built through individual reflection and what else? I'm not sure we entirely know that learning could be better supported. We saw two instances where a post-event review helped local officials respond to unhappy constituents and reflect on their decisions. In closing a few things I see that are working well. EMs are a conduit providing high quality weather information to other local officials. EMs strongly value their relationship with the National Weather Service and while there's always room for improvement they generally feel well supported in their weather related decision making. And finally NOAA's funding strategy has resulted in much deeper knowledge by enabling a series of projects. Any one project is likely to be a baby step. You need lots of steps to get to a meaningful place. So in close I'd like to highlight a few things that are needed. First I am not aware of any demographic profiles of our nation's EMs which is a moving target. Second we need to grapple with the hard truth that current forecast skill does not serve the very small area of concern of an individual or a city county EM. We need to do a better job in helping them learn and supporting their autonomy and decision making as Kim Cloco McLean pointed out at AMS on Monday of last week. And finally given that so many decisions are not made until the final moments before a tornado strikes we really must work towards a greater resilience to severe weather in this country. Thank you. Our next presenter is Tom Kovat University of Utah. Can you see my screen? We see a screen we don't see your slides. That's weird. It's video it's always weird. There how about that? It's working now. Okay okay well thanks to the organizers for putting this together and my topic is timing wildfire warnings. So different hazard all together. Here are the phases that everybody's familiar with that comprise evacuation time from ignition through decisions by the incident commanders warning the public the household preference so on with network clearing time. This red line symbolizes a good case basically that's the fire entering the community after it's been cleared and preferably with as much buffer there as you can get. And this is what we're calling a dire scenario. This is one where there's still people in transit or even in the community that have not we're not able to leave. Obviously there's been a lot of energy on the part of a lot of people in this room among many others operations and research associated with shortening all of these phases to make sure that you can take something that may have been dire and make it not dire. But in some cases the same phases can take something that wasn't dire and make it dire. So yeah problems can occur in multiple time phases and they often do. This is looking at one very famous dire scenario that I think everybody's familiar with paradise. And even though they had an hour and a half from the time the fire started their citywide evacuation plan called for two to two and a half hours to evacuate everybody. So this is one of those scenarios that was dire from the get go. Even if they had alerted everybody instantly they were still underwater if you will because the time the lead time was not greater than the evacuation time. So you have basically duration your lead time decisions by the officials and by the public. Obviously households can make their scenario more dire if they wait longer. And then the design is the community itself. You know what sorts of egress does it offer and all of that makes up direness. So oh yeah this is in a paper called towards simulating dire wildfire scenarios. And our point here was just that we don't simulate enough dire ones that they're all too rosy. So here's the case where you have a community in a wildfire. You try to set a trigger point that offers two hours and then hopefully that wildfire behaves well and you actually do offer the community two hours. There's a lot of uncertainty. It's a super challenging problem being made much more challenging by climate change because of extreme winds at the same time that you have moderates and maybe even greater drought and fire behavior, both in terms of spread rate and flame lengths that people have never seen. The unprecedented theme that's running through the day. And then of course the community itself, ex-urban development, more people sprawling into the mountains and hillsides so that your evacuation times are going up too. So here's the best case time available is greater than evacuation time. Unfortunately the uncertainty bands on these are so great and almost unknown that you could actually be in this scenario. You could be in a dire scenario and not even know it. And also I can't emphasize how dynamic the situation is because events occur throughout the scenario. Fire can triple in terms of its spread rate. Roads get closed or blocked. And all of these things contribute to making either the evacuation time greater or the lead time shorter. Here's just a few. I've probably put too many, but chimney tops to many Gatlinburg residents visitors to the tourist town have complained they received no mobile alert. Sonoma County officials could have sent out emergency alert to every cell phone that chose not to. The WEA system could have been used to alert all compatible mobile devices. It wasn't. Many residents in Paradise said they received no warning on their cell phones or landlines. And then of course recently Lahaina Maui has a siren system meant to alert people, but it never sounded. So it's a human problem. It's a technical problem. But we have a lot of cases where there were little to no alert or warning in some of the most dire scenarios that we've seen. So this would be the case of not setting a trigger point. And it can lead to a lot of confusion, chaos, and ultimately ironically traffic jams that maybe some of the people thought they could avoid because people are so delayed. Wireless warnings. This is a paper that was with Erica Kuligowski, Nicholas Wall, and Jeanette about looking at analyzing how wildfire alerts are being used, wireless alerts. And while there's a lot to a lot of room for improvement, it's great to see how many counties are actually doing this and many more should get set up to be able to do this and also trained in how to do it so that we can get more and more earlier alerts out there. In what I'm, as I said, becoming more and more dire scenarios. So recent extreme wildfires combined with extrovert development led to leading to more dire scenarios we can expect more. The timing and sending of alerts has been a challenge in some of the most dire scenarios that we've seen. And then there's a need to assess and improve protective action risk communications and options. Things like shelter in place and other methods for warning people. Thanks. Thanks, Tom. There's some very fascinating if you looked at Tom's examples, local decision makers chose or did not use their warning systems. As much as we talk about the process of issuing, I think that's a thought is what you keep in mind. They didn't activate their systems, which is not what we've been talking about with hurricanes. This is very interesting. Our next is Jim Elliott, Rice University. Thanks, everyone. Can you hear me and see me? Yes. Great. So no slides for me. And I'd like to start by thanking the organizers and especially Drew and Russ for their ongoing hard work on the ground. I'm a sociologist. I'm at Rice University. That's the virtual background there. I started getting into storms and social inequities, largely in long-term recovery after riding out Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. My wife worked at a hospital and I stayed behind to help and volunteer there. So not everybody leaves. In my case, I was able to leave under eventually good circumstances. But since that time, the last 20 years or so, I've been researching different elements of social life and disasters and hurricanes. And so what I thought I'd do is just share a few lessons from that ongoing effort. So these are things that we might consider, even if we perfected the storm tracking and all the communications and we got all that perfectly right. But as a sociologist, some of the things we might continue to consider. So I'll have three points. First point is generally that social factors matter in more ways than we might typically think. This complicates things, of course. We know from existing research that those who can't drive because they're too young or too old perhaps or don't have a car find it challenging to evacuate when the warning's given. And so we need to focus on the transportation gap and local planners are probably best positioned to do that. We've got data to map where carless folks tend to live or are concentrated and we can help target specific interventions there. We can also work creatively, maybe with shelter in place efforts that maybe utilize public infrastructure such as local libraries for worst case scenarios where people can't get out. But with that said, what our research has found over the last number of years is the lack of a vehicle isn't the only reason why people don't leave when they get an evacuation order. And there are lots of reasons for that, but there are three big sociological reasons that we've sort of encountered. And I'd say they sort of revolve around religion, race, and roles. So on the religion aspect, when we've talked to folks on why they didn't evacuate, it's a story that you might have heard before, but many folks will say, Hey, you know, the storm's coming. It's an act of God. My fate is in God's hands. I'm going to stay, right? So what's the lesson here? First, it's a perspective that's oftentimes reinforced by the congregants or the parishioners in their church. So that's something to consider. But the lesson there is the communication is only part of the story. We need to consider the source of that communication as well. So if it's coming from government, but not coming from maybe trusted sources in the community, maybe we could do more work there. So one action item might be to consider working more closely with local religious leaders, especially in those areas of more prominent exposure to communicate with them with their parishioners about how to move forward and interpret these warnings and acts when they come. So that's on the religion. Obviously there's a lot more that can be said there, but on the race aspect, obviously there are lots of ways that racial inequities can increase exposure and vulnerability to major hurricanes and other disasters. One that gets less attention, I think is that lots of homeowners of color often have lower wealth or less wealth and less insurance to rebuild after the storm. So how they imagine the unequal recovery process influences oftentimes how they think about what they're going to do as the storm warning comes, especially in hurricanes. So what happens is oftentimes folks are incentivized there to think about what will happen if I don't stay and patch that roof or deal with the initial damage from the storm and I'm gone and get stuck out for days or weeks. Could that small problem become a big problem? And so one of the lessons there is that people sometimes stay precisely because the risk that's communicated creates a lot of worry about what's going to happen to their home and their economic future, especially in historically marginalized communities where you have tenuous resources, maybe not a lot of insurance and maybe less trust in government assistance once the return happens. So action item, maybe I consider communicating with and engaging more economically vulnerable communities, but especially those with high homeowner rates where there's a really high incentive to stay and oversee the property and make sure damage doesn't get out of control. On that, another aspect, so religion, racial dynamics with respect to fewer resources overall, but then roles. What we've also found is that when households hear an evacuation order, they begin to think about not only if and where they should evacuate, but who should evacuate. And oftentimes, there are traditional gender roles that play out where the women and children will leave and the man will stay behind to look after the property in ways that I mentioned before. So thinking about that as well as the economic precarity, oftentimes it's working class folks who are worried about losing their jobs will often have a family member stay behind. And so thinking about what that means and maybe engage you with employers, especially of hourly workers, maybe in traditionally male sectors would be useful there. So that's big point. Number one, big point. Number two, this might have been brought up in earlier panels. I wasn't able to attend those, but big point is that in many communities, it's not just the natural environment and the hazards there that need communicating, but also the cascading or compounding implications. Right. So I'll just highlight two that are probably well known, but I think important to keep in mind. One of those is street flooding and closures. Right. And some of the research we've done specifically here in Houston, we've been able to model under different scenarios where the road networks are likely to get cut off to first responders and to hospitals. So being aware of that, you might not be in a flood zone, but if something happens to you and you're cut off by a nearby inundation of the flood network or the road network and you can't get to a hospital or you can't get care, that presents a major challenge. So thinking about what is going on there and using local data that are available to identify where it is that road networks are likely to cut off access for assistance and maybe getting that message out a little bit more working with local communities on modeling those issues. Second component, that's the road network. That's part of the built environment. Right. The other part of the built environment, especially in the Gulf coast where these storms are quite prominent is exposure potentially to hazard industrial releases. Right. You've got industry along the coast. You've got storms. And so what does it mean to stay behind and not only ride out a storm in floodwaters but have those floodwaters in your neighborhood be potentially toxic or polluting in some sense. And so what does that mean for first responders who have to come in and assist them? What are they being exposed to? What does it mean to be in your household? And so there the action item is maybe to work with local groups and research or other institutions to map out where hazardous sites that could potentially cascade into sort of these for lack of a better word toxic tides will be and where they might be compromised. And maybe even thinking about prioritizing those evacuation zones. Here in Houston area we've got four at least we did four evacuation zones where we try to go one, two, three, four and priority maybe thinking about prioritizing these areas that have both the chemical and the natural hazard risk would be worth considering. Point three academics talk too much and I'm one so it's true even on panels so I'm going to stop here and kick it back to Craig for the Q and A. Thanks, Jim. That was that again a lot of you said I've seen myself and it's sort of like we you know the popular term these days is influencers. Jim kind of pointed out the influencers in decision making may not be your typical TikTok influencer maybe the pulpit has more value in communicating risk. But I want to go back to something that we kind of dance around we never get to and I think Russell and Drew are the two experts on this and it was how do state and local jurisdictions decide when and where to I want to say this a little bit different warnings they don't issue warnings issue evacuation orders. There's a legal distinction. There's a reason why the Weather Service doesn't issue evacuation orders. And so I'd like to turn it back over to Drew and then Russell really talk about who makes that decision how they make that decision and the sources of information to make that decision. Well, thanks Craig and in North Carolina the authority to make a decision is given to the governor has it from an evacuation perspective and then he delegates it down to elected officials in at the county level and it can go down to an elected official in a municipality level and those folks have the ability to declare a state of emergency and oppose prohibition and restrictions that includes evacuation orders. So one of the challenges that most local emergency managers have in North Carolina is getting the right people in front of those elected officials that have that authority to make the call and making sure they're as smart as they can be on what's going to happen when it's going to happen and what's going to cause. So in the pictures you saw one of the pictures I had up was our senior leaders coming together in our EOC with the National Weather Service briefing us on the impacts we were going to expect from Dorian very early on as Dorian was starting to be forecast and looking to come our way we bring those decision makers in we sit them in front of the National Weather Service Guys the Weather Service Guys and Gals give us the best forecast they have and then we bring other pieces in to help them that elected official make that decision because it's his or her name that's going to go on the evacuation order and it's the impacts that are going to come from that. So in North Carolina it's down to the local levels and elected official. And then Russell at the state level each states a little bit different but I imagine it's similar but what are the things when you're briefing the governor and your local officials that are making that decision what is the information they're looking for to make those kind of decisions? Well I think first off is the confidence in landfall or where the area is that's going to be impacted. We'll start generally seven days out before landfall or the impact area and meet with our local jurisdictions our federal partners the governor and then the relevant state agencies that would be involved with it and what we try and do is basically set up an evacuation coordination with the local jurisdictions that would be impacted and then really for the governor it's his role as necessary to really kind of talk to the local jurisdictions particularly the county manager the mayor of a town to assure them that we're going to do this in a coordinated fashion an effort across the region versus each individual jurisdiction doing what it is they want to do or feel they have the need to do. Thank you. I got one more question and I'm going to open it up to everybody else because I think this is again for everybody on the panel they want to offer in on this and this is something that the emergency management community is becoming more concerned about is how do we address deliberate and unintentional misinformation or rumor control? Very good. Biggest way for us to do that is we've got to be listening to what's going on around this. We've got to realize that there's that misinformation and rumors are being circulated and we have to be able to adjust and counter it as best we can. In my county we have a call center we stand up that we can hear people calling in and saying hey this is what's going on I'm hearing this I'm hearing that and we say that's just not right and then we have to go out and attack it and go back with the factual information from a trusted source to counter that misinformation as best we can. So we have to be listening. Anybody else? Yeah, Greg it's Russ the exact same thing basically in Maryland is that each of our jurisdictions as well as the state set up a rumor control hotline and that basically flows into the JIC we make sure that the information that is going out to all the jurisdictions is the same and is vetted through that kind of a methodology. In my role as acronym translator a JIC is a joint information center in case you aren't familiar with emergency management speak the code words we use to keep the outsiders from knowing what we're doing. And Craig if I can just hop in real quick I wanted to come to you Jim because I think you would have an insight on that too. Well you know in Harris County we've been talking a little bit about this not only with respect to the storms but also we have industrial facility accidents and whatnot and one of the big challenges is just the sheer number of agencies that are involved from local firefighters to flood control districts and so one of the big efforts here is to make sure that the rumor control happens by having consistent messaging from all the agencies involved and so making sure there is real time coordination there's probably some technological aspects there but then also trying to work with local news outlets and so that they know that it's coming from a central messaging point so you're not playing ketchup or contradicting what's happening on the news but making them a partner in these conversations again people get their news from a lot of different ways so it may be hard to get people to the local news but I think in times of evacuation people might be more likely to seek those local news sources and so collaborating there is useful. Any questions from inside the room for our distinguished panel? This is the quietest you've been we didn't run out of coffee so So Craig we have a question online that I think would be really good to wrap up this discussion from Castle Williamsburg so for all the panelists in your opinion what is the single most important operational challenge or gap that practitioners face in effectively communicating weather related risks? I'm going to say we got to keep it as simple as possible I don't know any other way to say when I say how deep is it going to get tell me how many feet above ground it's going to be in my community I can communicate that I can explain that and people will understand that that's it's just got to be clear on point and unambiguous and leave the science out of it leave the scientific terms out of it just give it to me in straight straight-shoot what's it going to be that's how I would do it Anybody else? Hey Craig it's Ross I would agree 100% with Drew and I think the biggest point there is particularly with a hurricane where you may be doing this planning seven days out but yet it could shift tremendously before it actually hits it's obviously the confidence that it's got to be built into it with the with the public so you know putting it out there as straightforward and honest as possible not honest as possible but as accurately as possible and allow people to know what's going on and then give them information that is meaningful what should they do at this point in time? Thank you anybody else so I saw somebody going for the mic? Yeah I was just thinking that maybe understanding what people are responding to could be important I have expanded beyond just tornadoes and done a little bit with deraille shows and in South Dakota there were people who responded to the hail threat of the deraille show when they got a wea alert for 80 miles an hour and greater winds so that was interesting and they were focused on the wind or the hail aspect of protecting vehicles for a business that they owned and then just understanding how some of these systems work so if it's coming from your local sheriff it seems to have a higher risk or higher comprehension that this is for me as opposed to in Louisiana with the air be tornado there were people who said well it just said in my area and the context there is there's so many parishes that were being read off as part of the warning they weren't convinced that it was them all right well I want to hey thank my panel we got to move on because we got another group coming up and then we'll be around for some follow-up on this but again I want to thank the panel I want all the researchers to recognize you have drew here so if you ever want to talk to a real live local emergency manager who's having to make these decisions he represents a large group of them with that we'll bring up the next panel