Public relations veteran Brian Sibley is no stranger to a crisis. He’s spent the last decade of his career focused on crisis response management for many global corporations, including big oil companies. Even with his pedigree, serving as a spokesperson for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill Incident Command post in Mobile, Ala., would prove to be Sibley’s greatest challenge yet. It was also an invaluable experience that further proved true the following things: the news media cycle is not dead, there’s still no substitute for face-to-face relationships with people, and that social media is not the end-all, be-all in a crisis.
Hired by O’Brien’s Response Management, which manages disaster and emergency response for many organizations involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Sibley spent about a month at the Mobile command post, which is one of two main incident command posts. This main post in Louisiana covered response operations at the wellhead and the state of Louisiana; the Mobile post covered Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and Mississippi.
The Incident Command System is a Federally mandated temporary organization that is triggered whenever there is a disaster of national significance. The organization’s main role is to manage response efforts for that incident, and the members are any organization or government agency that has jurisdiction or responsibility related to the incident. In this case, the main Federal agency involved is the U.S. Coast Guard, and BP is also involved as the responsible party. As a spokesperson for the Incident Command, Sibley was to communicate to the press any information about the response itself, yet not on behalf of any one organization or agency.
“Most of the time the press were interested in operational facts and figures, such as ‘how many boats do we have doing skimming?’ or ‘ how many people do we have on the beaches?’” he said. “An operation like this changes constantly and one of the major challenges is making sure that the press have the most current data, because data becomes obsolete very quickly.”
Gallery: Scenes from the Incident Command
As a field media liasion, Sibley went anywhere along the coast in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to follow the media so that they could have a direct contact and build a trusted relationship. He spent many of his days on the beaches knocking on the doors of satellite trucks — “sat row” as it came to be known — and introducing himself as a resource. Most of the trucks were present from the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox, as well as local media from the gulf coast cities.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, those folks were really glad to see me,” he said.
Sibley said that the satellite truck residents were almost without exception grateful to see him because they hadn’t yet gotten a face, a person they could identify with one-on-one to get information. They wanted someone with whom they could build a relationship and could count on to get what they needed.
“It’s hard for me to describe how great the hunger for information is in a situation like this,” Sibley said, “The appetite for information is totally insatiable.”
