Hybrid public alert system lauded
Nova Scotia’s emergency public alert system, its capabilities and failures came under scrutiny again Thursday during a public inquiry roundtable.
A day earlier, lawyer Sandra Mcculloch said the emergency alert system, Alert Ready, that existed in 2020 but was not used to warn Nova Scotians during the 13hour mass murder rampage, could have saved lives.
“We have this superior tool and it should have been used,” said Mcculloch, a lawyer with the Patterson Law firm that represents the majority of the families of the 22 victims fatally shot by Dartmouth denturist Gabriel Wortman on April 18 and 19, 2020.
“There can be no question about it that we have the ability to reach a wide audience in a powerful way and nobody even turned their mind to using it and that has to change.”
Changes to the system and what works and what doesn’t within the system were among the topics of the fiveperson roundtable discussion Thursday.
Paul Mason, executive director of the province’s Emergency Management Office (EMO), described the Alert Ready system as a centralized system when it was first used in Nova Scotia in 2011.
“That way of doing business remained in place with EMO being able to issue alerts in response to events,” until the time of the mass murders in April 2020, Mason said.
The EMO’S role was issuing the alert and “providing guidance in the midst of an event,” he said.
“After the mass casualty, we moved to more of what has been described as a hybrid system, where EMO still retains the ability to issue alerts for the types of emergencies that we typically would deal with in the province.”
With regard to law enforcement agencies, Mason said, “some of our partners in that area have wanted to take direct access, particularly the RCMP and HRP (Halifax Regional Police).
“They can now issue alerts for events which fall into their area of jurisdiction.”
Mason testified earlier in the week that the RCMP and HRP did not accept that access until after the April 2020 killings, even though the EMO had urged them to do so over a four-year period that preceded the mass murders.
ALERTS HARD TO PRACTISE
Tim Trytten, a public emergency warning consultant in Canada and former leader of the Alberta Emergency Alert program, said a decentralized alert model is faster.
“You have people on scene who can actually issue the alert,” Trytten said. “The quality of the information is based on the individual’s perception at the moment but it is and can be quicker. On the other side of the coin, there is a greater chance of errors.”
Trytten said alerts are used only in “low-frequency, high-severity events,” and the user does not get much opportunity to practise any procedure.
“All of a sudden you are in a high-stress situation, you have to issue an alert on something serious, and now there are things like do you remember your password, do you remember the key sequence. … There is a lot of terror that goes with that when you have to say something to the entire population.”
Trytten said the hybrid model “walks the line” in that designated users in communities and organizations provide the opportunity to issue alerts quickly, but if they need help they can call on professional assistance before issuing the alert.
“There are tradeoffs,” he said.
Cheryl Mcneil, a 35-year civilian member of the Toronto Police Service Service and a communications operator with the 911 system, warned against “paralysis of analysis.”
Mcneil was referring to waiting for perfect conditions, a perfect amount of information before acting on a public alert.
“One can become so consumed with seeking 100 per cent accuracy that the opportunity passes them by,” Mcneil said. “There is also a concept within policing, which is called what did you know, when did you know it and what did you do about it.”
Mcneil said police agencies or emergency management organizations should act in accordance with “communicating what you know, this is what we know now, and you have an obligation to communicate with the community, particularly people who are being affected.
“We don’t know everything but this is what we know now.”
MISTAKES CAN BE FIXED
Trytten said the alert issuer will never have all the information needed but inaccuracies can be fixed and updated along with an apology.
“I can’t apologize for not saying anything.”
He said extensive preparation can include alert templates for different emergencies that can be updated quickly and the alert issuers should be trained to craft an alert, update an alert and to cancel an alert when the danger has passed.
The paralysis of analysis was not in play during the 2020 killings in Nova Scotia.
On Tuesday, Paul Mason, EMO executive director, told the inquiry that he was surprised that the RCMP hadn’t requested an Alert Ready be sent out during the rampage.
Mason testified that EMO eventually suggested to the RCMP that an alert was warranted and would be useful but the police force was still in the process of drafting that alert message when the gunman was killed by police at the Enfield Big Stop in the late morning of April 19.
In an earlier statement to the commission, Mason had said issuing a public alert about a gunman dressed as an RCMP officer and driving a replica RCMP vehicle during a 13-hour killing rampage “didn’t cross their (RCMP) minds.”
PIECEMEAL APPROACH CRITICIZED
The commission will hear from the RCMP about public communications and the alert process in the coming weeks but Mcculloch said Wednesday the RCMP side of the communications story should be told this week along with the other testimony.
“A big part of the discussion that we will see coming forward is really about the content of the communications that happened and the timeliness of those public communications,” Mcculloch said. “We are telling the story in a very piecemeal way and going back and forth on the storytelling. I feel it’s difficult for the public, and our clients to a degree as well, to follow along with the commission’s work and to put together a comprehensive understanding of what happened in the way that it is being presented.”
The roundtable also addressed the theories that public alerts generate mass panic and alerting fatigue.
Mason said EMO issued a dozen public alerts since the mass casualty event and “we haven’t seen what I would describe as mass panic.”
Mcneil described mass panic as a myth.
“The time when people panic is when they have no options left,” she said, adding that alerts that are clear and concise in providing people valuable information about what they ought to do in the face of the emergency do not create a mass panic.
Jennifer Jesty, who developed the Unama'ki Emergency Alert System that provides a public alert system for the five First Nations communities in Cape Breton, said the people served by the system now go to social media asking why an alert concerning an emergency event hasn’t been issued.
“They are expecting that information now,” Jesty said. “A lot of our native communities are to some degree isolated so getting that information out in a timely manner is usually very important.”
Jesty said the Unama’ki alert system has issued 102 alerts and they have not heard from anyone requesting the messages be stopped.