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April 27, 2009

The Communications Failures Lessons of Three Mile Island

Dr. Peter M. Sandman

Err on the Alarming Side

In the early hours and days of the TMI accident, nobody knew for sure what was happening. That encouraged MetEd to put the best face on things and to make the most reassuring statements it could given what was known at the time. So as the news got worse, MetEd had to keep going back to the public and the authorities to say, in effect, “It’s worse than we thought.”

This violated a cardinal rule of crisis communication: Always err on the alarming side. Make your first communication sufficiently cautious that later communications are likely to take the form of, “it’s not as bad as we feared,” rather than “it’s worse than we thought.” In the 25 years since TMI, I have seen countless corporations and government agencies make the same mistake. Its cost: the source loses all credibility. Because the source is obviously underreacting, everybody else tends to get on the other side of the seesaw and overreact.

That’s why Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and preschool children. MetEd was saying that the amount of radiation escaping the site didn’t justify any evacuation—and MetEd, it turns out, was right. But MetEd had been understating the seriousness of the accident from the outset. When the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) misinterpreted a radiation reading from a helicopter flying through the plume, thinking it was probably an offsite reading of exposures reaching populated areas, Thornburgh didn’t even check with the no-longer-credible utility (which could have told him PEMA had misunderstood the situation). He decided that it was better to be safe than sorry and ordered the evacuation.

In contrast to MetEd, the Pennsylvania Department of Health adopted an appropriately cautious approach. The Department of Health was worried that radioactive iodine-131 (I-131) might escape from the nuclear plant, be deposited on the grass, get eaten by dairy cattle, and end up in local milk. Over a two-week period, health officials issued several warnings urging people not to drink the milk. Meanwhile, they kept doing assays of the milk without finding any I-131. The Department of Health’s announcements moved slowly from “there will probably be I-131 in the milk” to “there may be I-131 in the milk” to “there doesn’t seem to be I-131 in the milk, but let us do one more round of testing just to be sure.”

By the time the Department of Health declared the milk safe to drink, virtually everyone believed it. While the caution hurt the dairy industry briefly, the rebound was quick. Health officials were seen as looking out for people’s health more than for the dairy industry’s short-term profits. This should serve as a model for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad cow disease) and the beef industry, for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the travel industry, and for avian flu and the poultry industry.