The first notice in five minutes

The first notice is the one that matters most. Residents are searching, rumors are spreading on social media and the phones are ringing. A short, accurate notice posted in five minutes does more good than a complete one posted in an hour.

You can only post in five minutes if you wrote most of it months ago.

Remember: A short, accurate notice in five minutes does more good than a complete one in an hour.

Write templates for your likely emergencies

Your county's hazard mitigation plan, or your emergency manager, can tell you which emergencies your community expects. For most places the list includes some of these:

• severe storm, flooding or snow emergency,
• boil water notice or water outage,
• extended power outage,
• road closure or evacuation,
• shelter in place (hazardous materials, police activity),
• facility closure (Town Hall, schools, library),
• extreme heat or cold, with cooling or warming centers.

For each one, write a template with blanks in square brackets. Have your emergency manager and, where wording has legal or health effect, your water operator or health department review it.

An example template

Boil water notice for [area]

Updated [time] [day], [date].

If you live or work in [area], boil your tap water before drinking it, cooking with it, making ice or brushing your teeth. Bring water to a rolling boil for one minute, then let it cool.

This applies until we tell you it is over. We will update this page by [time].

Why: [one sentence].

Free bottled water: [place, hours].

Questions: [office], [phone]. In an emergency, call 911.

Use your health department's or water operator's exact instructions. Boil times and other protective steps come from them, not from you.

The five-minute sequence

Practice these steps until they take five minutes:

1. Minute 1: Get the approved facts from your information lead: what, where, what to do.
2. Minute 2: Open the template, fill the blanks and add the timestamp.
3. Minute 3: Publish the emergency page.
4. Minute 4: Turn on the alert bar with one line and a link to the page.
5. Minute 5: Open the page on your phone in a private window, then send the link to your information lead and whoever posts to social media.

Say what you do not know

The first notice will be incomplete. That is fine, as long as it says so and promises an update:

Crews are working to find the cause. We will update this page by 4 p.m.

Do not guess at causes, timelines or numbers. A wrong fact corrected later costs more trust than a missing one.

Agree on who approves, in advance

Write down, before you need it:

• who can approve an emergency notice (at least two people),
• who can post it (at least two people, each with their own login),
• how you will reach each other if phones and email are down,
• what you may post without approval. Some institutions let the web team post a pre-approved template word for word, then get approval for changes.

Store templates where you can reach them

Keep templates in two places: in the website as unpublished drafts, if your editor allows it, and in a shared document you can open from a phone. If the website's editor is down, you need the text somewhere else.