By Paul Furiga
Deep inside the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, I sat before a row of blinking lights and a diagram that told me I had only one choice left: push the button in front of me. I did, and the 20-some people around me whooped, hollered and laughed. I had “scrammed” the reactor, preventing a nuclear meltdown.
Thankfully for the citizens of Maryland, my button-pushing was all a simulation (which explains the reaction of my colleagues), conducted deep in the bowels of a training simulator that exactly duplicated the actual Calvert Cliffs reactor control room.
My exercise was part of a laudable program by the now-defunct Knight Center for Specialized Journalism designed to educate journalists who covered critical industries. For four years, as a Washington correspondent, I covered the nuclear power industry during the 1980s.
What’s happening now at the Fukushima nuclear generating station is hardly a simulation, unfortunately. The disastrous core meltdowns and release of radioactive materials from multiple reactors will harm the entire nuclear industry, not just the plant and the community and nation that surrounds it.
There’s plenty of blame to go around but here’s one group of folks who need some self-examination and haven’t stood up to take their lumps: public relations practitioners.
It’s easy to blame the engineers, who easily fit the professional stereotype of not “getting” proactive communication, or Japanese business culture (see Toyota and other recent crises for emphasis) or even the nuclear industry itself, which has been so effectively proclaiming a “Renaissance” that most citizens of the world know little about it.
It’s time to take to task the one group of people who could most effectively have helped the communication-challenged in managing this disaster and preventing the perhaps fatal reputational damage it has caused: public relations pros.
It’s funny how far too many PR types are happy to bask in the transient glory of marketing the latest pink cell phone variant with some D-list celebrity gimmick and call themselves marketers. When a crisis happens, these same pros love to step forward, thump their chests, proclaim that only PR can handle a crisis, how PR in this sense is not marketing, how the affected industry should have listened to the PR pros, etc., etc. It’s all very self-serving and even disingenuous.
I’ve spent most of my career in journalism and PR avoiding the pink cell phones and D-listers to work on these sorts of communications issues, and when the hot lights of CNN aren’t on the scene, I rarely see many of my professional colleagues bothering to put their considerable skills to use in preparing industries such as these to deal with the unthinkable, and yes, all too often, inevitable emergencies that are part of life.
It’s as simple as this, as I’ve written earlier — most crises in business are entirely predictable. Isn’t a nuclear meltdown the first thing even nuclear neophytes think about when considering a potential industry crisis? Well, where’s the professional planning to communicate in a way that tells people what they need to know and when? It’s completely absent at Fukushima and now, across the nuclear industry, like some slow-motion game of billion-dollar dominoes, the reputational damage is spreading around the globe.
This is just the latest example of a Groundhog Day like attraction to disaster that the globe’s largest industries seem to have. Despite being flush with cash, they seem to skimp on vital investments in communication, preferring instead to lose billions poorly managing the aftermath of crises like the Gulf oil spill.
At our firm, we’ve worked on many crises but we’ve never in the nuclear industry. There are firms and practitioners who do. I have to ask: What happened? How is it that public relations, which claims to have standards and accreditations and commitments to truth and results, somehow didn’t prepare this industry to manage perhaps the most likely crisis scenario you could imagine?
Here is a life-and-death situation in which the best practice of our profession could have saved the health of thousands if not millions — and protected the reputation of a multi-billion-dollar global industry as well.
I have no answers. I hope some of my colleagues do. We should be held accountable as well.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
