Lapsley talks emergency communication in Geelong

THE person in charge of co-ordinating the state’s response before, during and after a major emergency stressed the importance of good communication at an event in Geelong on Tuesday.

Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley was the featured speaker at the lunch seminar organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), held at City Hall.

Mr Lapsley said his first action upon being appointed Emergency Management Commissioner in 2010 was issuing six principles about how to manage incidents, with primacy of life and issuing information to communities the two most important.

As an emergency such as a bushfire is a highly dynamic environment, Mr Lapsley said controllers now had the licence to release information in a “timely, relevant and tailored” way.

“Go and tell people that you haven’t got the whole story, but tell them what you’ve got, and keep building it up… to allow people to make decisions about their safety, that was a game changer.”

The 2014 Hazelwood mine fire was also a major influence on changes to communication policy, Mr Lapsley said, including breaking the assumption that websites were the best way to share information with people.

“We had a couple of community meetings and not many people came, and a community meeting where those that came were extremely angry – it told us the information we believed we were putting out there, they weren’t getting.

“We had a further look, and 47 per cent of people in Morwell are not connected to the internet at home.”

He said the emergency management industry was experiencing change through a number of factors, with population growth being one of the most significant.

“That’s 100,000 new people to Victoria every year for the next 40 years, and it’s on track – the Geelong district is part of that, we’re on a trajectory that’s very important.”

Sitting in the audience, City of Greater Geelong chief executive officer Kelvin Spiller noted that this represented 120 new people a week to his municipality.