… our next speaker, Elizabeth Vanacore.
Elizabeth received her bachelor’s of science in geological sciences from
Virginia Tech before pursuing her Ph.D. at Rice University.
Before landing in Puerto Rico a little over six years ago, she had postdocs
at Australia National University Research School of Earth Sciences
and the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
She is now an associate research professor at the University of Puerto
Rico-Mayagūez and a coordinator of research and seismologist at the
Puerto Rico Seismic Network. She’s also the current team member
of the UNESCO IGBC Caribbean Wave Task Force team, the UNESCO
Caribbean EWS Working Group 3 vice chair, and vice chair of protocols
for end-to-end communication and dissemination of warnings.
Without further ado, Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here today.
- Great. Thank you. It’s good to be here.
I’m going to be talking a little bit on a different angle.
Much more of what we see as the scientific network side as far as
our kind of communications during the 2020 southwest
Puerto Rico seismic sequence.
And I’m going to start out by showing you kind of the web of communications.
As far as Puerto Rico goes, we have the – we have the USGS,
Puerto Rico Seismic Network and Strong Motion Program, and the
National Weather Service as the official sources of information for –
this is just for earthquakes and tsunamis. And, from that, the official sources will
feed into our emergency management. It’s important to note that
it’s not just Puerto Rico emergency management –
also Virgin Islands emergency management.
And that also means to the government officials
and to the press and to the public.
But then we also have our local geology department, which we are –
the Puerto Rico Seismic Network is part of the geology department.
But they also have their great local expertise.
We had such a – for this particular sequence, Jim Joyce, who also was
able to communicate with the press and the public, as well as Stephen Hughes,
who is our landslide expert in the department. And he also helped us
out during the sequence as far as communicating those dangers.
And, when you have these official sources they go – the official scientific
sources to the government sources. And the official – emergency
management will talk to the government officials.
They’ll talk to the press and the public. And the government officials will
talk to the press and the public. So, even though there’s one source
of scientific information, that information essentially
could go through whisper- down-the-lane sequence.
And that can and does happen. And it’s important to note for –
it’s official – it’s important that all the official sources talk to
each other because one thing that’s important during this type
of sequence is to have consistent information.
You can talk about how, with the day of the 6.4, the tsunami information
to the public was not consistent because there was a disagreement between what
the PTWC put out as well as – then compared to the Seismic Network
and the agencies based on different protocols and local preferences.
So that’s something that is going to be discussed and something that
needs to be addressed in the future so that doesn’t happen.
So you have to have a consistent message from all three.
And one thing that also can happen during this type of communication,
when you have multiple official sources, there can be some confusion.
Because all the official sources will talk to all of the sources
on the right-hand portion of this screen.
And, with the public, the public might go to the USGS ComCat catalog,
and they might go to the PRSN catalog.
And, if PRSN has not finalized and sent our final earthquake location
to the USGS, they might get two different locations.
Or they might get two different magnitudes for the same event.
And that will cause – that can and did cause confusion.
And I think part of that is, there is not a lot of education of how the
three agencies over here on that far left work together.
Or, what is the Advanced National Seismic System?
That is not in the public idea, so they don’t understand, when they
see a final location of PRSN in USGS, that that is a PRSN location.
Or, if they see – don’t see a PRSN location in USGS, they don’t realize
that that earthquake hasn’t been finalized by PRSN yet.
So that is maybe pointing out an issue that we have to address in the future as far as
our communication is, how do we get people to understand how the official
sources work and communicate together.
Now I’m going to address three major issues that came up –
or, challenges that came up during this sequence.
The first one is unrealistic expectations. And this is for – especially for PRSN.
They have an idea – the public, the press, and the government,
even, have an idea that PRSN has an army of scientists.
They think that we have – if you talk to the public, sometimes the public thinks,
oh, you don’t have – what do you mean you don’t have 100 employees?
We have maybe 20. And that includes everything from our data analysts,
the three scientists on staff, which we could say three, but really is we have
one and a half because of administrative and other university duties.
We have – and that includes our secretarial, administration staff.
That includes our education staff. That includes our IT staff.
And people don’t realize that we are a very small operation
that’s punching much larger than our body weight.
So they think that they make a phone call to PRSN immediately after
an earthquake – especially when that 6.4 happened in the morning hours –
early morning hours, they expect that someone is going to physically
answer the phone. When the reality is that PRSN,
the analysts on duty are busy dealing with sending out the earthquake alerts
and sending out the tsunami information that goes with those earthquake alerts,
and then dealing with the aftershocks – the immediate aftershocks that are
coming in that are also causing alarms.
So that is the first challenge that we have to – that we have is that
there’s this unrealistic expectation of instant gratification, and they think
that we have more resources than we actually have.
So one way we started to address this is, because to set up a press conference
in Puerto Rico is not an easy feat, is one thing that we did is we started
using Facebook Live more. And that was an advantage to us.
Now, when we did the Facebook Live, we had to have it done
both in English and Spanish. So you usually have to have two people.
One person would just – one person would do the Spanish,
and then I would do the English immediately afterwards.
And then we also brought in – brought in volunteers to do sign language.
And that is something that we’re working on because you can’t do
real-time closed-captioning with these Facebook Lives yet, that we
have to make it accessible as much as possible for the population.
The other thing is, we started using – we got – we started writing kind of blog
or newspaper articles for Temblor. I know this is a online blog.
It’s not an official resource. But it has advantages.
One, it does have a DOI. And secondly, it let us put out the –
all the papers we wrote in Spanish and English.
So, again, that bilingual need was attended to.
And we were able to go directly to the internet – directly to the audience.
We didn’t have to go through the press or the press office
to get that information out there.
And so, while they were somewhat scientific, they weren’t
completely scientific articles. So they were accessible to the public.
And I think using something like Temblor is actually very advantageous
as a scientist, as a network, to get information out
without necessarily having to go through the press.
Because the press do have – they call up, and they say,
we need this information right away. One thing that we can handle better,
and I think that’s something that we’ve learned from, is that we need to stop
and say, we’re going to do a Facebook Live update at 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Or 7:00 a.m. and – or, 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. and be done.
Because otherwise, most of our first few days as a scientist were spent
on the phone answering press questions when maybe it would have been better
just to do one YouTube or Facebook Live conference.
The second one – challenge was the misinformation.
And I’m saying misinterpretation. I know Lorna already just talked
about this. One was that we had a rumor of drilling offshore
causing the earthquakes. Which we all knew was not true.
But that misinformation, rumor, got going on social media.
And part of it was, people will take a report, or a figure like the one
I’m showing you on the right, and they would say, oh, look,
southwest Puerto Rico. They must be drilling there.
But, if you read the report, it basically says it’s not viable.
And thankfully, we did have support for dealing with that type of issue.
Second thing is, with the aftershock forecast, what we found, especially
with many of the meteorologists on the island, they were initially
misinterpreting what these numbers meant.
So this is – I would say that’s not misinformation.
It was much more misinterpretation. It’s a new product.
And so how you communicate to the public is something that
needs to be taught. And then we have the last one,
which I call it Monday morning quarterbacks.
Because people forget what the sequence – it started on a single fault.
It started on – likely, it’s going to be the Punta Montalva Fault.
So, as a seismologist, we say, okay, we have the Punta Montalva Fault.
It looks like we’re having a nice, simple aftershock sequence on that single fault.
The 6.4 occurred on a different fault. And then – so that means we went
from a single-fault sequence to a multiple-fault sequence.
And so it’s kind of like apples and oranges as a seismologist.
So we went from a nice, simple apple to a complex fruit salad.
And people were saying, why didn’t we know.
Why didn’t we know that those were foreshocks?
And the reality is, there was – at the time, there was no way to know.
So how do we address that? One, call backup.
I know some people on this panel today were part of that backup.
So thank you very much. It’s appreciated.
We have good relationships with EcoExploratorio and Ada Monzon.
And that actually helped aid us. And so that pre-existing relationship
did help us address some of those needs very quickly.
I’ve got to say – again, Lorna already mentioned this – we already had
a paper that was signed by 28 geologists that came out
to help us deal with the fracking issue.
Also the geology department was invaluable.
Our [inaudible] colleagues in the geology department would come in and
would help us. Either they were dealing with social media –
Jim Joyce took out a couple of the press to the Punta Montalva,
explained what was going on, which was great.
And also cutting out the middleman with Facebook and social media –
going directly to the public was actually quite useful
because it let us control the message.
And the other issue is geography. And this is – hopefully, with COVID,
things will be changing – is the reality is, Puerto Rico is – Puerto Rico
Seismic Network is in Mayagūez. The source region of the earthquakes
is the red – is the red square in southwestern Puerto Rico.
The government, the news media, everyone else is based in San Juan.
And the time between Mayagūez and San Juan, going the northern route,
is about three hours – 3-1/2 hours, maybe 2-1/2 if you get really lucky.
Because you have to think about, during this earthquake sequence,
the southern route was not very available because of damage to PR 2.
So we’re talking – if they wanted us to come and talk to the government
or go down to Caguas emergency management, it’s talking 3-1/2 hours
for just us to get a physical person there.
And so that geography became an issue. Because when [inaudible] says,
oh, we want you in San Juan at 6:00 a.m. to give a talk or tell us
about this, and at the same time, we need to be out in southwest
Puerto Rico installing stations to help monitor the sequence,
we end up with an issue of, we can’t be in two places at once,
and we’ve run out of manpower. It goes back to that unrealistic
expectation. We are only human and can only do so much.
So how can we address that? One is to encourage more telemeetings.
And, thanks to our friend on the right-hand picture here, COVID,
hopefully that will actually be occurring more in the future.
So it’d be easy for us to be based in Mayagūez, [inaudible], talk to the press
or talk to the government officials for 15 minutes, get what’s needed to be –
get them the information they need, and then go back to work at the network.
One thing that is being floated is having someone – a designated and trained
representative that’s based at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.
Possibly, like, I could beg Lorna to come – go do this.
To have someone designated as our official representative
in that area that we know and trust.
The other thing is, right now, when we did this – originally did the Facebook
and YouTube broadcasts, they were very sporadic in our response.
And what we really need to do is set up, like, a schedule of 9:00 a.m., 9:00 p.m.,
so we know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done,
and the press and the public also know this.
The other thing that was done is we met press in the field.
I know that there were a couple days when we were actually out installing
stations that we did have CBS and Ada Monzon come and meet us in the field.
And another thing that’s important is – and really acknowledge the support
that you have as a network. And I think the USGS is a huge support.
And the ANSS relationship was critical during this time, not only of getting
the instruments out and helping us deal with the response, but also
helping us deal with the press and the public and how the message –
things like the aftershock forecast. So the takeaways.
We have to be clear, concise, and consistent from official sources.
And we do need the education products for things like aftershock
forecasts and what is the ANSS. Because those are two gaps that I saw.
And I think there’s a need to humanize responders.
Because people think we’re superhumans
that don’t need to sleep or eat.
And I think, with modern media, social media and – modern media are the key.
Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat. And there needs to be some more
flexibility from the government officials for briefings to make it
more doable for us as human beings.
And the other thing – ask for help. It’s there.
And going to leave it at that.
[silence]
- Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was a fantastic talk.
And I really love what you said about responders being human beings.
You know, we often forget that, you know, when you’re working
in the disaster space, there’s just so much pressure to get work out there
and work done so quickly, and yet responders do absolutely need rest.
And there’s not that many of us.
So that was an incredibly insightful talk. Thank you so, so much.