Re: Hurricane Maria: Summary of communication status - and lack of

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

Career federal employees are taught to write situation reports in very 
boring language with just the facts known. Nevertheless, after 
reading lots of situation reports, you start to notice when the 
bubureaucratic language changes. Perhaps the most famous was the 
commander of Apollo 13's report "Houston, We have a problem."

Puerto Rico has announced a new web site with current status:

http://status.pr/


However, in the last 24 hours I've noticed some agency situation reports 
used different statistics to report "happy, happy, joy, joy" stuff. In the 
bureaucratic world, this is very concerning, such as when the Veterans 
Administration was misreporting appointment waiting times to look better.

You can't fix problems, if the real situation isn't being reported 
accurately to senior leadership even if its bad news.