Round-the-clock media coverage of events such as Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon bombings has morphed into an obsession with violent behavior and human suffering some have labeled “tragedy” or “disaster” porn. 
Now we have “weather porn,” which seemed to have its most widespread debut with Hurricane Sandy coverage. It was as if all the other hurricanes didn’t matter unless they impacted those within the largest media markets in the country.
(As an aside, don’t get me started on the fact that we now have to name winter storms. What’s next? The weatherman telling us, “Thunderstorm Zeus is moving across the Ohio Valley.”)
But this space won’t address the chicken-and-egg question of whether society is infatuated with this type of news coverage or whether the networks choose to focus on it simply because they are afraid of losing a ratings point to a competitor. That’s a separate debate. Analyzing the media doesn’t take into account the real human impact for people being hit by these increasingly common extreme weather events.
Just 15 days after Atlanta ground to a halt thanks to fewer than three inches of snow, the same exact scene—literally if you watched television—played out in neighboring North Carolina.
Let’s look at Atlanta first. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s investigative team had a scathing indictment of the events, taking the governor and numerous school districts to task for a series of spectacularly bad decisions.
The Georgia governor blamed the weather forecast, in spite of the fact that meteorologists nailed the accuracy and timing of the storm with plenty of advanced warning for him to tell people to stay home that day. The mayor of Atlanta blamed employers for letting all their workers leave at the same time during the storm. Perhaps they could have found someone to talk to at CNN or the Weather Channel, both of which are located in Atlanta.
As for the school districts, they were lucky their negligence didn’t result in loss of life. The same Journal-Constitution report points out that 10,000 students were unable to reach their parents by the evening of the storm, and more than 200 had to spend the night on buses in below freezing temperatures.
“In the absence of any kind of authority telling people what to do, they will tend to go about their regular business because their children are in school and workplaces are open,” Joanne Nigg, former director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, told the Journal-Constitution. “Had the governor come out when the storm had started in earnest and said, ‘Stay off the roads,’ people would be more likely to listen.”
That leads us to North Carolina. Only 15 days after reading the horror stories of stranded students and seeing jaw-dropping images of abandoned cars lining interstates across Georgia, North Carolina was equally asleep at the wheel. NPR reported that everyone knew the snow was coming and the governor urged people to not travel, but people didn’t take the threat seriously, and that led to a near repeat of the scene we saw in Georgia. Officials again blamed businesses for letting people hit snowy, crowded roadways at the same time, but North Carolina needed to mandate a no-travel policy. Workers shouldn’t have been in the offices at all.
If this is what snow can do to the Southeast (or a chemical leak in one river can do to 300,000 people in West Virginia), what about something even worse? We like to beat up the federal government for its inefficiency, but the local and state governments are doing a bang-up job demonstrating their lack of effective crisis management all on their own.
An effective, updated crisis communication plan could have spared thousands of travelers a perilous trip into the hazardous conditions during these two storms.
MWW‘s Jarrod Bernstein is a crisis communications expert who recently spoke to Mediabistro’s PRNewser about what unfolded in Atlanta. He points out that decisions made in the middle of the storm should have been made the night before, and coordination between school districts, local and state government was inadequate, at best.
“I’m not saying it was a lack of preparation; in each separate discipline they were prepared,” Bernstein said. “More than anything else, this was a collaboration issue between the operational folks and the communicators, and the comms issues were secondary to the siloing. There are a lot of people who work very hard every single day at that sort of cross-silo integration, but it’s an art, not a science . . . In emergency management we always say ‘you never want to exchange business cards over a pile of rubble,’ be it literal or figurative.”
It’s a shame what happened in Atlanta and North Carolina, and there’s really no excuse for it. There is so much less interference and red tape at the local and city levels, that leaders must accept responsibility and their constituents should demand accountability.
A plan won’t prevent a crisis, but it will—excuse the pun—help everyone more effectively weather the storm. Let’s leave the futuristic, zombie-apocalypse images of barren streets and abandoned cars where they belong . . . in the movies. We have enough bad reality television already.
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Jeremy Church is an account supervisor for WordWrite Communications. He can be reached at jeremy.church@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter @churchjeremy. 
