Crisis Communications Review – Santa Barbara Oil Spill

By Tom Mueller

I’ve been watching the communications effort around the Refugio Oil Spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California over the past week and how the effort has evolved over time. Here’s my take on the first week’s response and communications effort.

Plains All American Pipeline clearly had some crisis management plans in place in case of emergency.  That was evident in their initial response – issuing a press statement late on Day 1 (May 19), activating their emergency response plans, and mobilizing resources to begin response operations. They had a website domain name and a hotline telephone number in place and included in their first statement issued that first day.

Operationally, they clearly had plans in place to bring equipment and resources to bear in addressing the physical spill, and we saw boots on the ground fairly quickly, with a steady ramp up in the following days. The one question that seems to be hanging out there still, in terms of emergency response, is how long it took the system operator to shut down the line once a pressure drop was indicated. We’ll learn more about that in the subsequent investigations.

In terms of crisis communications, the company’s early effort at communications seemed to lag as the unified command structure was being put in place and the main command post set up. As part of this process, the company’s crisis website, plainsupdate.com, was replaced by a unified command site titled refugioresponse.com.

The unified command, operating from the Santa Barbara County emergency operations center, issued its first statement at 2:36 p.m. Pacific Time on Day 2. The release did not mention a crisis website, making it more difficult for stakeholders to find the unified command site.

Plains All American Pipeline did have knowledgeable spokespersons immediately available for press briefings from the early hours of the incident.

Both websites for the incident – the initial one set up by Plains All American Pipeline and the second set up by the unified command – were built on the PIER system, a response tool that allows quick deployment of a crisis website, high volume inquiry management, and push notifications to stakeholders.

Staff in the joint information center were obviously managing many incoming inquiries by telephone and providing information verbally. One of the key challenges in this situation is making sure staff in the JIC are then entering the name and email address of each caller into the PIER system’s database, which forms distribution lists that can be used to send out updated statements to those stakeholders.

In the Refugio response, it appears that the JIC wasn’t using the full capability of the PIER system to engage stakeholders. Instead, early communications efforts appear to have been focused on news media only. For example, news releases from the unified command were not widely distributed to stakeholders who had asked to be included – they went to media and were posted on the website.  In today’s media/social media world, that is a very narrow communications effort, especially given the ease with which one can reach hundreds or thousands of stakeholders with a few mouse clicks from the crisis website.

It wasn’t until Sunday – after the phone system in the JIC went down for a time – that they began using PIER to distribute updates to the many people who had visited the website and added themselves to the list to receive updates. (I don’t know yet if that outage was a catalyst for using PIER to communicate directly with stakeholders, but circumstantially it would seem so.) Since then, new updates and press releases have been pushed out to these audiences when the new information is posted to the website.

The company and the unified command ceded the social media space to the crowd early on, though not because they weren’t trying. The Santa Barbara County twitter handle (@countyofsb) eventually emerged as the credible source of information within the response, but that wasn’t immediately obvious to people looking for information.

As in many responses, choosing which hash tag (#) to use for a response can make a world of difference. The county used both #gaviotaoilspill and #oilspill in its initial tweets. It later switched to #refugiooilresponse, though few knew to search that hash tag name. Many, including major media outlets and some international NGOs, were using #plainsallamerican #santabarbaraoilspill, and some continue to do so.

These are parallel lines of communication that could be addressed by the social media team by using multiple hash tags, but limited characters on Twitter does make this a challenge. In the end, tying the Twitter feed to the response home page – as the comms team did in this incident – helps everyone find the right handle for the response, if they are looking for it.

Outside of the first press release and a subsequent fact sheet, there is very little company voice in the response communications, which is relatively normal for a unified command approach. There are at least eight state and federal agencies directly engaged in the response, and as many as 85 agencies in total (according to a Tweet from @countysb). Still, the company should be managing some communications directly with its key stakeholders, and I hope they are doing so.

The company should be prepared to stand up separate channels of communication – including a separate website and social media accounts – if they aren’t able to engage their stakeholders effectively through the existing unified command response channels.

(Tom Mueller is a crisis management professional, former press officer and writer who has worked and provided crisis training in more than 25 countries.)