QUOTE OF THE MONTH: “There are three kinds of people:
The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation.
The rest of them have to (touch) the electric fence and find out
for themselves.

— Will Rogers

WHY CAN’T WE LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES OF OTHERS?

St. Petersburg, Florida holds very positive memories for me. My
mom and dad both grew up there. Even though our family moved to
Pennsylvania and, later, New Jersey, we spent our summer vacations
in St. Petersburg visiting family.

Therefore, my attention was caught when a friend pointed me to a
story on the Web about a crisis brewing in St. Pete. It seems that
people who live near a Raytheon facility in a residential community
known as the Azalea neighborhood have recently learned that there
is a huge plume of contaminated groundwater under their homes and
the near-by park. Irrigation wells have shown significantly
elevated levels of vinyl chloride, 1,4-dioxane, and
trichloroethylene (or, as humor columnist Dave Barry calls it,
“methyl/ethyl/lucy badstuff). All of these named chemicals have
been labeled as carcinogens, which means they have been found to
cause cancer, at least in laboratory animals fed large quantities.

To say this has promoted fear, anger, concern, or outrage among the
citizens would be putting it mildly. And when one of the citizens
of St. Petersburg happens to be the governor of the state, you can
imagine that there will be significant coverage of the story! Class
action lawsuits have already been filed on behalf of the residents
of 900 homes in the area.

What can we all learn from this developing story?

HOW DID CITIZENS LEARN OF THE CONTAMINATION?

They read about it in the newspaper! Ohmygoodness… Why, oh why
have companies not yet learned that they would be much better off
if they were the ones to communicate this type of information?
Sure it’s going to make people concerned when they hear that the
water they have been spraying on their lawns contains chemicals
that have been determined by environmental protection agencies to
be above safe levels. But the company could have coupled the
announcement with a lot of information to help residents put this
into perspective. They could have emphasized that it did not have
an effect on the community’s drinking water (which comes from the
City). They could have expressed their empathy for the residents
- recognizing that this would naturally upset them - and laid out
their plans for dealing with the situation. When the problem is,
instead, revealed by the media, the company immediately becomes
suspect, with people assuming they have been trying to cover it up.
The “black hat” of the villain gets placed firmly on their head
and will undoubtedly prove very difficult to dislodge.

HOW LONG HAS THIS PROBLEM EXISTED?

If it were just discovered, people might be willing to cut the
company some slack. But the newspaper pointed out that the Florida
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been aware of the
pollution on this site for the past 17 years! (A whole other
e-zine could be written about the problems that the folks with the
governmental agencies are going to have as a result of this
situation.) The site was owned by another company prior to
Raytheon’s purchase of it in 1996. However, it appears that this
predecessor company was also related to the Raytheon corporation.
Besides, a good “due diligence” study carried out before the
purchase would surely have pointed out such an environmental issue.

The current owner has been using a third-party company to test the
wells on the company site since 1996. But the final report on what
they found hasn’t yet been published! And the company didn’t offer
to test the wells of neighboring residents until March and
September of 2007. If you could have obtained access to the DEP
records on that testing, you would have seen that tests at three
residential wells showed the totals exceeded safe levels. There is
no escaping the fact that neither the company nor the DEP saw fit
to notify the neighbors until the newspaper got hold of the
information a year later. Wouldn’t YOU be mad if you lived in that
area?

WHAT SHOULD THE COMPANY HAVE DONE?

I can just imagine some of the conversations that took place within
the management board rooms. Hopefully the main concern wasn’t “This
is going to cost us a lot of money to fix!” While that was probably
a factor, I think it likely these were the sentiments actually
expressed: “Let’s not start a panic.” “We should wait until we
have ALL the facts.” “We need to do a second round of tests just
in case the results of the first one aren’t right.”

Where were the public/community relations professionals and the
corporate communications staffs? Why wasn’t someone standing up in
those board room meetings and yelling, “Put yourselves in the shoes
of our neighbors! Would you want your own family treated like
this? These people have a right to know about the problem. And we
need to tell them what we are going to do about it. If we don’t
grab this bull by the horns, we are going to be gored by our
neighbors, the elected officials, and the public in general. Let’s
DO the right thing!”

I don’t pretend to know what the “right thing” is, technically, to
deal with this situation. (One neighbor surmised that the company
could install filters on the well pumps. Sounds reasonable, but
I’m sure I don’t know if that’s feasible.) I do know that - when
groundwater contamination was discovered on my own company’s site
in New York back in the early 90’s - our president moved swiftly.
He convinced the DEC that we should be allowed to voluntarily
implement a “pump and treat” operation that contained the plume to
our site until we could work through an extensive clean-up
operation under their regulatory oversight. He and I and other
managers attended several meetings with local officials and area
residents to inform them of the problem, tell them what we were
doing about it, and honestly answer their questions. There was
obviously concern. But there was no panic — and there were no
lawsuits.

UNFORTUNATELY, SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO LEARN THE HARD WAY

See Will Rogers’ quote at the beginning of the e-zine. Time and
again we have witnessed instances where people find out things
that upset them from a source other than the one central to the
situation. Critics and extremists have ample opportunities to
frame the story, painting a bull’s eye on the company’s back. The
company already is presumed to be guilty of something terrible
because they tried to hide it.

Of COURSE it’s going to be uncomfortable to sponsor a meeting where
a lot of concerned citizens have tough questions for you or to go
personally knocking on your neighbors’ doors to inform them of a
situation that affects them. But you need to balance these
probabilities against the almost certainty of having the company’s
name dragged publicly through the mud by local newspapers whose
stories are often picked up by the national news wires. Add to
that how such sensational stories spread like wildfire through the
Internet, complete with blogs and chat room chatter that
characterize your organization in the worst possible terms. I hope
you will see that your choice is clear.

Note: For more details, got to www.tampabay.com and search for
“Plume Spread, Word Didn’t” published May 23, 2008 and related
stories.

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU IN THE
AREAS OF MEDIA AND COMMUNITY RELATIONS. Call me at 1-800-848-3907
PIN 2145 or e-mail me at jchent@earthlink.net.

Until next month…KEEP COOL!

Judy Hoffman

JCH Enterprises, 116 Nelson Lane, Clayton, NC 27527, USA