The Communications Failures Lessons of Three Mile Island

Dr. Peter M. Sandman

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Get the Word Out

Most government agencies and corporations respond to crisis situations by constricting the flow of information. Terrified that the wrong people may say the wrong things, they identify one or two spokespeople and decree that nobody else is to do any communicating. In an effort to implement this centralized communication strategy, they do little or nothing to keep the rest of the organization informed.

There is certainly a downside to authorizing lots of spokespeople; the mantra of most risk communication experts is to “speak with one voice.” But I think the disadvantages of the one-voice approach outweigh the advantages. This approach almost always fails, as it failed at TMI. Reporters took down the license plate numbers of MetEd employees, got their addresses, and called them at home after shift.

Inevitably, many talked—though what they knew was patchy and often mistaken. The designated information people for the NRC and the utility, meanwhile, had trouble getting their own information updates; those in the know were too busy coping with the accident to brief them. (The lesson here is that there should be technical experts at the scene whose designated job is to shuttle between the people who are managing the crisis and the people who are explaining it.) The state government felt its own information was so incomplete that Press Secretary Paul Critchlow asked one of his staff to play de facto reporter in an attempt to find out what was going on so Critchlow could tell the media and the governor.

While the utility and the federal government tried to speak with one voice, the local anti-nuclear movement stopped speaking altogether. During the accident, hundreds of reporters called the Harrisburg office of TMI Alert, the area’s major anti-nuke group. They got a recorded message explaining that the staff had left town for their own safety.

In today’s world of 24/7 news coverage and the Internet, the information genie is out of the bottle. If official sources withhold information, we get it from unofficial sources; if official sources speak with one voice, we smell a rat and seek out other voices . . . and find them. But crisis information wasn’t controllable 25 years ago in central Pennsylvania either. As my wife and colleague Jody Lanard likes to point out, even in the pre-Gutenberg era, everyone in medieval villages knew when troubles were brewing. The information genie never was in the bottle. Keeping people informed and letting them talk is a wiser strategy than keeping them ignorant and hoping they won’t.

—Peter M. Sandman (peter@psandman.com) is professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and professor of environmental and community medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. For more on Dr. Sandman’s approach to risk communication, see www.psandman.com. This article is based on one published in Safety at Work (April 2004), www.safetyatwork.biz. Published with permission.