Canterbury Quake - Crisis Comms In Action

It struck at 4:30am, which didn’t leave much time for the local and national media to organise the morning report for Sunday September 5th.

Despite this, the coverage gained was flawless, which can be put down to the fast thinking crisis communication strategy behind New Zealand’s Civil Defence.

Minister of Civil Defence, John Carter commented earlier thisyear that New Zealander’s were unprepared to deal with a disaster. People only began to seek information about how to deal with a potential Tsunami in March after several warnings were issued. The clear message Civil Defence were sending: it's too late to seek information well after a disaster has occurred. The Canterbury 'quake was too severe to ignore, and we listened.

Carter definitely presented an exemplar performance, and fronted on television extremely well in a matter of hours following the first 7.1 sized tremor, as did Mayor Bob Parker.

The output that Civil Defence were generating was enormous - there were curfews ordered, school’s staying closed, a CBD lock down, a state of emergency, buildings getting torn down before they fell down, burst water mains, and power outages. Widespread panic was avoided completely, as the dissemination of this information was clear, concise, regular, and at no point did it seem the disaster was bigger than us.

The somewhat confusing response to the Tsunami in the Pacific last year left many unsure about the confidence held in our Civil Defence, however they managed every level from declaring a state of emergency to discussion around recovery with caution and attention, and was applauded by the Minister.

More than 3,000 followers of the @NZcivildefence Twitter account watched closely as updates were fired through with only minutes in between. The hashtag #eqnz was quickly adopted into most tweets, despite the official tag for the Civil Defence being a long winded #christchurchquake (click here if you want to know why).

Prominent researchers Neilson looked into the drive of social media following the biggest earthquake seen in 80 years. Over 27,000 comments and posts on various different social media engines in the 6 days that followed with aftershocks.

The strength of our social media, and the successful crisis communication response entailed that the heads at Fox News, Good Morning America, The Bangkok Post, and UK’s BBC News broke the story around the world, and were trawling Twitpic well before any professional photos had been taken.

Written by Jess Miller.