This blog will provide new information related to environmental challenges as well as follow-up on problems already brought to the public’s attention.. The information will be presented as it becomes available to the author either through the news media, personal interviews, or FOIA. At present she is following the developing story of lead found in the soil of an East Chicago housing development and subsequent discoveries of lead in additional residential areas near locations where other lead factories have operated within what she is calling the “Lead Belt,” the area surrounding the southern tip of Lake Michigan.
The blog is based on the situation the author discusses in two recent articles, published in the STC Technical Communication Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. In those articles she examined the communications between governmental agencies, local communities, and citizens in an East Chicago housing development and in the water of the Newark School system. Her findings supported previous findings that written communication has been one of the root causes of some of the major crisis situations in the past 50 years, especially those involving the environment, space and transportation. These include such crisis situations as the Three Mile Island near nuclear meltdown, the Challenger and Columbia Shuttle accidents, and the BP/Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf, as well as the 1992 man-made Chicago Flood and the 2011 natural Mississippi Flood. In her recent book, Risk Communication and Miscommunication, the author concluded that the communication errors underlying all of these situations are similar and are caused by engineers and managers who fail to consider how the people who will be reading their emails, texts, letters, memoranda and other documents will interpret their messages.
Boiarsky believes that almost invariably behind each crisis situation is a text, email or memo warning that a potential problem exists. This blog will continue to examine the East Chicago situation she discusses in the latter articles as well as provide information on new situations.
As climate change continues to evolve and as the EPA’s funding and charge change, Boiarsky believes such disasters will continue, and it will become increasingly important for engineers and scientists to provide the public with information they will need to know and possibly act on.
This blog will post sporadically as new findings become available. Please add your comments. Also, please add situations of miscommunication and/or environmental situations affecting local residents of which you are aware or instances in which such situations have been averted because of effective communication.
Let’s start a dialog to improve communication between engineers, scientists, government agencies and community organizations.