In the hours after the attack on Utøya island on 22 July 2011, families across Norway were doing something that would become horribly familiar: calling and texting, again and again, into silence. On the island, young people were sending messages to their parents from wherever they had found shelter or hidden in the water. Later in the evening, the names of survivors were being recorded by hand, on paper. The families waiting on the mainland had no reliable way of knowing whether their child was among them.
Preserved on a wall at the Utøya museum today are text messages exchanged during the attack. One reads: “Mamma, I’m so afraid to die.” Another was even more dramatic: “Mamma, this is not going well. We are being attacked.”
What those messages show is not a communication failure in the conventional sense. There was no press release, no spokesperson, no messaging strategy. What they show is something more fundamental: that in a disaster, communication is not only a function to be managed. It is the space between a parent and a child – the space between organizations and their customers, employees and other stakeholders.
Go quiet
In some organisations, crisis communication is still treated as a reputational concern – a question of what to say to the media, how to protect the brand, or when to involve the lawyers. That perspective can lead organisations away from the people who need them most. When the audience is seen primarily through the lens of reputation, the immediate needs of those directly affected can be pushed into the background. It also means that organisations which remain silent in the early hours of a crisis may lose the chance to establish themselves as a trusted, reliable voice – at the time of the crisis, but also in the days, months and years following.
In the first hours of a disaster, the most urgent communication needs often belong to those directly affected. They may be families sitting in hotel banquet rooms that function as makeshift Incident Assistance Centers, or parents constantly refreshing their phone screens at midnight waiting for updates about their loved ones. When organisations go quiet – to consult lawyers, to align messaging, to wait until they are certain – those families do not wait. They fill the silence themselves, with assumption and fear and whatever social media offers them. The vacuum is never empty for long. It is always filled, and rarely with something better than the truth. Add to this the proliferation of images and videos produced by artificial intelligence, and the case for early, honest communication has never been stronger.
What good looks like
There is much to learn from the aviation industry, which unfortunately has had a large number of accidents to handle. Airline communication teams understand that something can happen at any time, but they cannot predict what or where – or how to stay ahead of passengers and witnesses sharing stories and images from the scene.
On 29 January 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. All 67 people on board both aircraft were killed, making it the deadliest aviation disaster in the United States in more than two decades. American Airlines’ response has since become a case study. Within hours, more than 220 members of the airline’s CARE Team had been deployed from 30 locations across North America. CEO Robert Isom stood at the podium himself, taking responsibility openly rather than distancing the airline from a flight operated by a regional partner. He was present, accountable and human. Months later, the team remained in frequent contact with families, helping them navigate the practical and emotional machinery of the aftermath.
What American Airlines demonstrated is what the US National Transportation Safety Board – which has organised more disaster assistance operations than almost any body on earth – describes as the four fundamental concerns of families: notification of involvement, victim accounting, information and resources, and personal belongings. All of these concerns require professional and compassionate communication about facts and news that, for some, will be life-changing. These four concerns are not merely a checklist. They are a statement of what a person needs to function when their world has stopped.
What silence costs
The Camp Mystic disaster in Texas in July of 2025 illustrates what happens when preparation and communication both fail. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 am, with language urging people to seek higher ground. The camp’s emergency action plan – reportedly a single page – contained no specific flash flood evacuation procedures. Staff and counsellors had received little to no training or drills for this kind of event. When the water began rising, internal communications relied on walkie-talkies and radios that proved wholly inadequate in the conditions. Subsequent investigations identified more than twenty-two safety deficiencies, many of them directly related to communication and preparedness.
This pattern is common. It becomes the default condition whenever an organisation is underprepared and therefore hesitates when an incident occurs. The lesson is that organisations should communicate when they have enough to say responsibly, while being clear about the limits of what they know. Research consistently shows that families can tolerate “we are still establishing the facts” far better than silence. What they need is a visible presence, clear leadership and responsibility, and recognition of their immediate needs.
The words inside the system
Crisis communication fails at the level of systems as often as it fails at the level of individuals. After the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando in 2016 and the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019, a quiet but significant change was made to the standard terminology used in US disaster response. What had been called a “Family Assistance Center” became an “Incident Assistance Center.” The reason was simple: the word “family” had caused many of those affected – partners, friends, and chosen family – to feel unwelcome or unsure whether they would be admitted. It can also be named a Family and Friends Reception Center or an Evacuation Center, but the goal is the same: A one-stop-shop for information and supervision from staff who knows how to deal with people in grief and who can give the right type of care and information at the right time.
The tone inside the message
In 2017, four years after the Boston Marathon bombing, Adidas sent an email to runners who had completed that year’s race. The subject line read: “Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon.” There was no malice in it. It was a marketing email. Someone had written it, someone had approved it, someone had sent it to hundreds of thousands of people – and at no point had anyone stopped to ask the question that should precede every word in a crisis context: could this hurt someone? The answer, in this case, was obvious. Nobody asked. Adidas suffered reputational damage because it had failed at something more basic than brand management: the elementary obligation to consider the person on the other end of the sentence.
Even carefully chosen words can be undermined by the setting in which they are delivered. Gary Southern, president of Freedom Industries in Charleston, learned that the hard way during a press conference in 2014. He apologized for a chemical spill that had contaminated water for 300,000 residents in West Virginia, but held the press conference outdoors, with no visible support from staff. Then, while cameras were broadcasting live, Southern drank from a bottle of cold water during an exchange about people who had none. The clip spread on YouTube, where one commentator asked: “Is this a press conference or a commercial for Aquafina?”
The obligation
After a deadly plane crash in the United States, Deputy Director of Public Safety and Operations at Blue Grass Airport, Scott Lanter was asked what he had learned about talking to families. His answer was six words: “Think of every word you say.” Good advice, but I would add: Think equally carefully about what you should not say. Phrases such as “I know how you feel” or “At least she is not suffering any more” are well-intentioned but deeply harmful. They close down conversation at the very moment it needs to open.
Lanter’s sentence contains the whole discipline. Speed, messaging frameworks and media training all have their place, but they are secondary to something simpler and harder: the person receiving your words is carrying something you cannot fully imagine, and every word you choose will either help them carry it or make it heavier. Robert Jensen, the former owner and CEO of Kenyon International Emergency Services, put it this way: “We can’t make things better for the loved ones. We must make sure that nothing we do or say makes it worse.”
Every minute an organisation goes without communicating, the people it serves fill that silence with the worst version of what might be true. The obligation of crisis communication is to serve the human beings on the other side before it serves the institution – to give them what they need to function, to grieve, and eventually, when the time comes, to begin to recover.
We know how to do this. The evidence is there, through decades of case studies and After Action Reports and in the testimony of survivors and bereaved families across every kind of disaster. The question is whether organisations choose to treat communication as what it actually is: not a reputational function, but a humanitarian one.
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Kjell Brataas is the author of Managing the Human Dimension of Disasters (Routledge, 2021) and Disaster Memorials and Monuments (Routledge, 2024). He is a Security Specialist at DNB and an international keynote speaker on crisis communication, crisis management and victim support.
