Not All Information Is Created Equal

Accurate information is difficult to obtain in the early stages of a disaster.  There are many reasons for this, including:

 

... the difficulty of gathering information, especially during impact, and the inaccessibility of parts of the impact area.

... reports based on partial observation or knowledge of the disaster's impact.

... the natural tendency to translate our horror or distress at the impacts of the incident into reports that are symbolic, rather than factual.

... the equally natural tendency of some of those reporting to fill in missing details with what they believe may have happened.

... and the desire of some to be helpful or even important by making reports that do not reflect any reality but there own.

 

So how do we evaluate which reports are valuable and which are worthless?  And how can we make decisions based on them?

 

The first rule may seem counterintuitive if we are trying to sort good from worthless - do not automatically discard any report received.  In a search for a missing aircraft in the Florida Panhandle in the early 1980s, a ground team interviewing along the route of flight was having no luck.  And then, on a front porch littered with alcoholic beverage containers, an obviously intoxicated "witness" reported seeing a pink aircraft circle a radio antenna tower and then head back in the direction from which it had come.  The pink aircraft in this case seemed intuitively to be a first cousin to pink elephants.  However, radar track data the next day showed that the missing aircraft had in fact been in that location, had circled twice, and had turned back on its original track.  Oh, and the pink thing - a red sunset and a white aircraft ...

 

So we have to look at two key components in any report: (1) the reliability of the reporter and (2) the level of confirmation of the report.  You can use any scale you want to make this evaluation, but we use a simple color coded scale.  If you plot reports the color codes help visually depict what the words represent.  And the colors are a quick way of capturing the assessment in any culture which uses red, yellow, and green traffic lights.

 

The reliability of the reporter is based on history and reflects the probability that reliable sources tend to make reliable reports.  Our scale is:

 

GREEN - highly reliable source - a source likely to supply as accurate information as possible about this subject.

YELLOW - source of medium reliability - a generally reliable source, but which may have only partial understanding of or limited access to the full range of information.

RED - low reliability source - a source whose characteristics or record indicates that the information has a probability of being incorrect or even deliberately misleading.

 

The level of confirmation reflects the probability that a number of reports with the same or similar content is more likely to approach reality, and be more actionable, than a single report.  Our scale is:

 

GREEN - confirmed - information confirmed by a number of other sources or by reliable technological methods.

YELLOW - partly confirmed -  information confirmed by a single additional source or unconfirmed, but consistent with conditions or limited information from other sources.

RED - unconfirmed - information that is not confirmed by or contradicts other information received.

As more reports are received the level of confirmation of any single report will change.  In the case of the drunk on the front porch, the initial evaluation was RED/RED.  However, when technological evidence that the report was true emerged the report became a RED/GREEN. 

 

RED/RED information should be approached with skepticism. However, it should be logged and not ignored. RED/RED is true enough times to justify recording it in case other confirming reports are received or if no other information emerges. At the same time GREEN/GREEN is not guaranteed to be true.  Even multiple reports by the best sources miss the mark from time to time under the conditions of the event.