Joplin's Crisis Notes

For those of you who weren't able to attend the April meeting, here are some great notes about the discussion:

City of Joplin & MoDot Preparing for Snow Storm

 

• News outlets calling asking for preparation plans, ride alongs with salt trucks and snow plows. 
• Customer Service calls 
• MoDot took 3,500 calls regarding the storm 
• MoDot phone bank has 2 full time people answering and an additional 17 to pull from during snow fall season. 
• City did internal communications to ensure all city workers had the correct information for if they got a call from someone. 
• Joplin Mayor declared the city a disaster area and told citizens to stay off the roads so they could prepare and clear them 
• Prepared talking points a week in advance.  
• 400 linear miles of roads.  
• City does not plow residential roads. Mall shut down for two days. Missouri Southern closed for a week.  
• By that Wednesday citizens wanted out. 
• Grated snow on the roads so cars could get around.  
• The snow fell so hard and so fast that doing much prep work for the roads was tough. Smaller crews were pulled to work on I-44.  
• Calls starting to take too long per call.  
• Governor told MoDot to clear county roads. Their normal roads weren’t in good condition yet.  
• Some issues can’t be touched on in a news release. 
• Citizens needing food once their government checks were deposited, needed oxygen, doctors couldn’t get to the hospitals. 
• Medical community was told the National Guard would be plowing their roads. But they ended up saying they couldn’t do it. 
• City’s audience was stuck at home MoDot’s audience was out on the road. 
• News releases started including roads that were cleared and citizens were to assume the rest were covered.  
• MoDots social media was huge. 800 to 28,000 followers on facebook. Had conversations with facebook users. 
• Users became advocates of MoDot for their response to the snow.  
• MoDot’s community became Facebook and Twitter 
• Oklahoma shut down I-44. They have concrete guard rails but had 8 ft snow drifts.  
• Trucks were a big issue on the roads. Large trucking traffic. MoDot had to communicate with Springfield and other communities to help stop the truck traffic to Joplin.  
• Media requests became large because of the truck traffic back ups.  
• City published all the names of the maintenance and people answering the phones in the Joplin paper to thank them for their work.  
• Mistake: Double commenting on facebook 
• Mistake: Not keeping their cool on the phones.  
• Mistake: Should have looked sooner for volunteers to shovel walks of people who really needed. 
• PR is one on one relationships. PR is listening too.  
• Quit being concerned about the media and cared more about the customers and public directly.