Read on Twitter
Here’s an interesting example in civil emergency messaging 
The pipeline that supplies Townsville’s water has a big nasty leak. Water reserves are already critically low. Friday 10pm: the council puts out a press release (
) asking people to only use water for emergencies.
The pipeline that supplies Townsville’s water has a big nasty leak. Water reserves are already critically low. Friday 10pm: the council puts out a press release () asking people to only use water for emergencies.
(That means drinking and flushing only. No showers, no washing, no watering etc.) But this is late on a Friday night. The commercial stations won’t clock on again until Monday morning. The local ABC and Townsville Bulletin are reporting it...
...but the message has yet to reach a significant proportion of the population. The info was finally messaged direct to mobile very late at night. Too late. No one likes the media until they *need* the media, especially local councils with negligible social media presence...
But regional media is so depleted these days it’s not enough of a vector anyway. Soon, locals will start noticing a water shortage and have no clue why. And while engineers worked all night to fix the problem, the population wasn’t informed and thus enabled to avert the shortage.
Anyway, it’s been a big year for public crisis messaging, but this little example exposes so many shortfalls.
