This has been an argument since the beginning of time. The outcome of this argument is always the same. Nothing against the PIO ever, they are doing an amazing job, but they are heavily constrained by age of intel, agency regulations/policies, and most of the time simply not where The People are, so the message doesn’t get to The People.
The PIO position and office has evolved immensely over the last 10+ years thanks to some who push the agency forward, or belong to agencies who are progressive or see the benefit of it. People like LAFD’s Brian Humphrey, who was one of the FIRST to engage The People on yahoogroup email forums, facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. But just as the fires in the last 3-5 years have now become monsters, the amount of timely intel available has exploded, as well as The People are scattered amongst a million disparate social media and physical locations. Right when PIO’s seemed to have caught up with the problem, agencies loosening up a bit, every R5 forest active on facebook, calfire units on twitter and facebook with timely posts shortly after dispatches and stuff, the incident outruns them and just as their current statement of a fire being 1200 acres comes out, there’s an air attack estimate of 3500 acres, and a FIRIS mapping of 5000+ acres.
Just locally here in NorCal, a late chief of mine had a passion for the public engagement and education and I appreciated and encouraged his work. He could switch from IC during a major incident to a PIO with empathy and phrases that both educated and put the public at ease, then go right back to his incident, tweeting updates and photos along the way. I’m similarly engaged in my dept, dropping unofficial official summaries of working incidents in places where I know The People are, such as the deep pits of Facebook community groups etc, as insane as the signal noise ratio is in those places it’s where the bulk are today.
I’ve also been contacted by some DIVS, STL’s, single resources, COMT and COML’s while they are on incident, sometimes on the line, looking for more timely intel than they were getting on the incident. Fires have been so large and can’t scale overhead fast enough that the folks on line aren’t getting what they need at times. What’s the wind look like it’ll do here at this lat/lon for the next 2hours? What’s the lightning map say? Are there satellite hits 3 miles east of me? My ops map doesn’t go that far and if there is, I need to fallback and reengage. WTF is the tone for the tac on my div because the 205 I have is wrong. Does it look like we’ll get rotor support here or did another IA fire suck them all up? None of those people are making major tactical decisions based solely on my feedback but it probably had a lot of weight behind it thanks to established trust and relationships. That’s what all this is, established trusts, relationships, experience, credibility and history. Whether it’s agency to The People, agency to agency, incident to outside, outside to incident, etc. Each of us have a weight interpreted by every other reader. There are names here I’ve seen for 20 years in the online world of fire. When they speak, I listen. What I say might have 2oz weight to some who don’t know me, and a 100lb sack of wet cement to others who do.
If we’re all worried about someone misinterpreting someone or what they represent, then there would be no innovation in this industry. We’d all be back to ground zero, where the PIO is deathly afraid of lawsuit or retribution because they inserted half an ounce of opinion and it just happened to be wrong in hindsight (coughTamarackcough). Maybe we should make IMET the PIO, so we won’t get mad when the forecast for rain just maybe, perhaps, comes up dry. After all, we always forgive the weatherman.
