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“Communication is at its most powerful when all extraneous noise is stripped away. Think on this.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday – The Way of Communication

I keep saying that the older I get, the more often I run into events and situations that get me thinking along the metaphorical lines of, “I’ve seen this movie before.”

Well here we go again.

In case you don’t already know this, my so far 40 year career as a consultant and practitioner in security and emergency management makes me an expert (in the ACTUAL and not the mainstream media definition of that word) in the field of emergency communications on the theoretical, operational, and most importantly, historical levels.

I say “most importantly’ because in all endeavours, nothing succeeds like success, so if it’s been done before and done well, nothing new should be added unless it enhances performance, and never simply because the addition is “new”. Any sales pitch to the contrary, what you’ll get has never been articulated better than this:

Whenever I am made aware of a situation wherein a breakdown of communication played a role in making outcomes worse than they should have been, and evidence or at least inference by way of a trained eye may permit to be discerned, as often as not I find the same symptoms presenting, singly or in some abominable combination:

1. Technology has been substituted for understanding;
2. Historical precedent has been ignored, discounted, or worse, never learned in the first place;
3. Equipment used in the event was selected by people other than those who will need to use it, likely with too much emphasis on whizz bang features, AKA the MAGIC;
4. The selection process discounted Real World conditions, and that any technology used in the face of them MUST fit the definition of a Real Tool.

I will elaborate on these as we go along, so with the aforesaid in mind, let us move on to two recent examples as the launching point for your education, Goode Reader. Please know that as we go, I will make every effort to eschew mind numbing technicalities in favour of the always favoured crystalline POINT of the issue.

Thank you for staying awake so far. Now follow me.

The Portapique murders:

In 13 hours spanning 18-19 April 2020, a lone assailant dressed and equipped as a credible copy of a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) killed 22 people in and around the rural Nova Scotia community of Portapique. Anyone who has followed the inquiry of the Mass Casualty Commission into the events will be aware of complications afflicting communications from, to, and within the RCMP, and of particular interest to today’s topic are those factors that impinged upon the ability of RCMP members in the field to communicate with one another and with the central command post.

“The radio communications system used by the RCMP during Nova Scotia’s mass shooting worked as it was designed to — even if officers struggled to get messages through because of network congestion, officials told an inquiry Thursday.

“The system, known as Trunked Mobile Radio 2, is designed to allow authorized users and organizations to communicate with one another on multiple channels through so-called talk groups. During emergencies … the system can get overwhelmed.

“‘It’s important to understand that radio frequency is not infinite and systems such as ours and all public safety systems cannot be designed and engineered based on what might happen to traffic in an emergency event,’ Matthew Boyle, director of public safety and field communications for the province of Nova Scotia, told the public inquiry investigating the mass shooting.” ~ Officials say congested radio system worked as designed during N.S. mass shooting

The Rogers collapse:

The morning of 8 July 2022 came with collapse of the Rogers communications network —

“On the morning of July 8, the entire Rogers network — cable television, internet and wireless telephone services — went down and stayed down for much of the day while the company scrambled to figure out what happened.

“The outage triggered a series of seemingly unrelated systems failures beyond the company itself, leaving debit payments, 911 services and government services unavailable to Rogers customers for much of the day.” ~ Rogers executives try to quell anger over outage during committee appearance

By way of explanation, Rogers offered this:

“The company said at the time that the outage was caused by a software update gone wrong, which then cascaded into a massive chain reaction that took down the entire system.

“Rogers’ newly minted chief technology officer Ron McKenzie went into more details with MPs, saying the update caused an unexpected reaction from certain equipment that began to push high amounts of traffic toward the ‘core network’.

“‘The core of the network you can think of as the brain of the network that controls all access of flow of information and flow of connectivity for all services,’ McKenzie said. When the core became ‘flooded’ it shut down, he said.

(Rogers President and CEO Tony) Staffieri repeated to MPs what the company said on Sunday when it released more details of what it plans to do in response to the outage.

“Rogers says it wants to ensure that 911 calls switch automatically to other carriers during an outage, separate its wireless and cable systems so that an outage affecting one system doesn’t affect the other, and spend $10 billion to strengthen its networks …

“Conservative MP Tracy Gray pressed Staffieri to describe the protocols in place to ensure 911 and other emergency services can still operate during an outage.

“Staffieri said 911 calls are supposed to be directed to other networks during an outage. He attributed the failure to redirect those calls during the recent outage to ‘very specific technical reasons,’ which he did not explain.

Staffieri said Rogers considered options to restore 911 service during the outage. Gray took that to mean the company did not have a plan to maintain emergency services.

“‘It sounds like while you were considering different options that there weren’t strict protocols actually in place considering what happened, so that’s not overly reassuring to the public,’ she said.” ~ Rogers executives try to quell anger over outage during committee appearance

So the table is set. When next we convene, we’ll look at the tiny community of Dayspring, Nova Scotia, the lethal events therein upon the night of 3 June 1985, and why that should matter to the decisions that led to the aforesaid failures.