Wildfires teach crisis pointers to communicators

These three corporate editors and crisis-team members learned lots in a short time about how to communicate, literally, under fire

The disastrous southern California wildfires that started more than two weeks ago taught companies whose workers were in harm’s way useful lessons for future emergencies, said three editors who played pivotal roles in their corporations’ crisis management teams when Ragan.com spoke with them last week.

The big lessons of the California wildfires

Those lessons include:

(For a complete list of “lessons learned,” please see the box accompanying this story, Communicators learn from California wildfires.)

Ragan.com spoke to Nicole Helprin, director of IPG internal communications for Hewlett Packard; John Dodd, senior communications advisor for Epcor, a Canadian energy company headquartered in Edmonton; and Greg Bardsley, senior communications manager for Sun Microsystems.

Epcor: “A zillion things to do”