PETERS: City needs to rethink its communication strategy around incidents like this week’s water main break

Cracks and leaks are bound to happen, but there should be processes and mechanisms in place to locate those leaks quickly and employ the necessary short-term and long-term fixes.

Beyond the repairs themselves, though, this fiasco has raised a number of critical questions that must be answered – especially around communication protocols.

Water service levels and restrictions put in place this week were moving targets for the city to try to hit, certainly.

Even so, many of the folks we spoke to expressed dissatisfaction at how information was relayed.

Traditional media outlets like ours did their best to communicate what residents needed to know most urgently.

Increasingly, though, people are looking elsewhere for their information.

We in the legacy media can lament that fragmentation all we want – and this week is a good example why the trusted sources are the ones to rely on – but that’s not going to stem the overwhelming tide toward other sources.

The pitfall of any sort of reliance on social media is its subjectivity to the whims of everyone’s individual algorithms.

As soon as the information hits those platforms, a game of telephone takes off, diluting and polluting every pure fact with the contamination of misinterpretation and conjecture.

Even reliance on Voyent Alert is not going to be sufficient for many who have not adopted the app.

The City of Kamloops cannot deem the shotgun approach to distributing information it employed this week a success. Too many people said they had no idea what was going on.

When it comes to something as critical as water service, that’s just not good enough.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

by James Peters

PETERS: City needs to rethink its communication strategy around incidents like this week’s water main break

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