Emergency Management Editing and Proofreading Services

Hawaii's emergency management agency had a written script for the drill it ran on the morning of January 13, 2018. The Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau later reported that the recording played that morning "does not follow the script contained in HI-EMA's standard operating procedure for this drill."¹ What had been recorded instead was the text of a live ballistic missile alert message, including the words "this is not a drill," which the standard operating procedure for the drill did not use.²

Two versions of one text existed that morning. One was written into a standard operating procedure and could be read by anyone who opened the file. The other was a recording, and the recording was what played that morning. The Commission's finding concerns the relationship between the two, and it is that the second did not follow the first.¹

A script held in a document and a script read aloud are two pieces of writing. Holding them identical is clerical work rather than operational work. It can also be done at any point before the drill, by reading one against the other.

The live template and the test template shared a menu

The software offered the live template and the test template together. In the Commission's words, "the drop-down menu listed the options for an internal 'Test missile alert' together with the 'Missile alert' message on the same screen."² The report describes the officer selecting the live template from that menu, then clicking yes in response to a prompt reading "Are you sure that you want to send this Alert?"¹ The prompt does not name which alert it means.

The message that reached the public read: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."² The Commission attributed a "38-minute delay in correcting the alert" largely to the agency's lack of preparation for how to respond to a false one.¹

The record made afterward has its own required contents

An exercise run under FEMA's Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program produces a written record. The program has the After-Action Report and Improvement Plan document "strengths, areas for improvement, capability performance, and corrective actions."³ The doctrine holds that an objective "should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART)," and it applies the same guidelines to corrective actions.³ Whether an entry is measurable and time-bound is settled by how the entry is worded.

The government's own auditors have looked at whether those documents get written. The Government Accountability Office reported in May 2020 that FEMA had "completed after-action reviews for only 29 percent of disasters from 2017 through 2019."⁴ It also found that the agency "lacks a formal mechanism to track corrective actions and does not have guidance on sharing after-action reports with key external stakeholders, as appropriate."⁴

The auditor asks whether the record exists

The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General audits grants made after declared disasters. In an early warning audit of one Florida county, one finding heading read "The County Did Not Maintain Documentation to Support Claimed Security Costs."⁵ The auditors counted "29 instances in which the County was unable to provide timesheets or other records to support the hours claimed."⁵ That heading names a documentation failure rather than an operational one.

Some of the sentences are supplied

Planners are not always writing from nothing. FEMA's guide to the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment supplies capability targets as sentences with blanks left for local numbers. One example reads: "Within (#) (time) of an incident, clear (#) miles of road affected, to enable access for emergency responders, including private and non-profit."⁶ A planner filling those blanks is writing to a form somebody else fixed.

Elsewhere the requirement is for an account of how a document was made. A local mitigation plan must include "Documentation of the planning process used to develop the plan, including how it was prepared, who was involved in the process, and how the public was involved."⁷ FEMA's planning guide adds that plans "should clearly communicate to operational personnel and support providers what their roles and responsibilities are."⁸

The limits of an editor's part

Which agency holds which responsibility, what a hazard analysis concludes, and what a jurisdiction will do when an incident begins are decided by emergency managers, their legal advisors, and the officials who sign the plan. Those decisions are made elsewhere, and we do not revisit them. We read the writing that carries them.

That reading covers place names, facility names, and agency titles spelled the same way in the base plan and in every annex. It covers an acronym expanded in each annex that may be read on its own. It covers one consistent use of shall, should, and may through a document, a numbered list that matches the total stated above it, and a script that matches the procedure referring to that script. Every submission is treated in strict confidence.

A local jurisdiction must review and revise its mitigation plan and "resubmit it for approval within 5 years in order to continue to be eligible for mitigation project grant funding."⁷ Five years is long enough that the people revising a plan may not be the people who wrote it. What those revisers have is the documentation the rule requires the plan to carry, which is a written account of how the last version came to say what it says.