This quote comes from a lady who works for a local radio station – Heart Radio Gloucestershire, which used to be Severn Sound in 2007. She explains why during exceptional events, people don’t tend to contact the Local Authority, the police, fire brigade, school board or other formal body. Rather they usually turn to their local radio station.
It is sometimes really frustrating when you take a call and people go ‘Do you know if the number 23’s running?’ Why don’t you ring the bus company! Seriously. You know, that can be a little bit frustrating sometimes. But it’s how it is.
During the summer 2007 flood, this particular role for the people in Gloucestershire made the radio station decide to run a flood help-line.
I mean basically, because we are a local radio station, you obviously got contacts […]. We have the news team here, so obviously through news all the information was coming in. And they were basically appealing for anyone that could come and help. And obviously because, you know, we do have a bit of clout sometimes. And we kind of know all the people that are in those positions [of leadership in Local authorities and businesses].
[…] we got extra staff into the radio station, there were so much coming […], so much information. And we were getting so many calls. […] You will find this quite interesting with radio stations: people think we know everything, okay? They will ring us rather than… So we’ll get things like the fairs in the park, something. And people will ring us, “oh, do you know what time the fair opens?” They won’t ring the fair, for some reason the radio station. So, you know, straight away, when anything happens, people ring the radio station. It’s like, you know… It was all sorts of things. It was things like just people telling us their stories.
Rather than giving out lots of information, which was moreover susceptible to changing as the emergency unfolded, the staff at the radio station decided to give out only one phone number on air, and deal with people’s various questions on this quickly improvised helpline. They had the infrastructure in place due to annual Christmas Auction that the station organises.
People were giving us so many different phone numbers for all, you know, if you need this or if you wanna get hold of that information. And we came to the conclusion very quickly that we have to think about ‘clean air’ on the radio, so that it is very much a very clear message. […] the analogy is, you know, if you’ve got one ball and you keep throwing it in the air, you can catch it quite easily. As soon as you start doing two, three, you are like ‘phrrt, I don’t know what I’m doing’. So very quickly we came to the conclusion that there is so much information that needed to […] set up a help line. And the only number we gave out on air was our number.
Alongside pointing people with questions into the right direction, the station also worked with a group of volunteers to follow up some people’s requests, and help out where necessary.
We had a huge number of people wanted to help but trying to get them in contact with the right people, because they said ‘shall I just go along my road and knock on doors?’ and we can’t tell them to do that because obviously if there is some little old lady, you know, Mrs Jones at 27 so-and-so is having problems getting to her bowser, we can’t send some random person along because they could rob the old dear. So it was quite difficult, we did quite quickly set up a really good liaison with Cheltenham Volunteering Centre who then took responsibility for organising volunteers and we basically then put them in contact with them and they would allocate them to a water distribution point. Or to some of the churches set up teams who were knocking on doors and Cheltenham Volunteering would get people then to report to a group but then they would then go with the people, so it would be run by the local church so people could turn up and volunteer, not quite randomly, just knocking. […]
Things that were quite difficult were the fact you had so much information and I think the water shortage, I think that was slightly unusual, but even with the transport problems initially, and from a radio station’s point of view you almost need something that filters before then, because we had the trains, the buses, highways patrol, police, everyone contacting you with information, if you see what I mean. […]
Because we really made that our big thing, and every problem, if we were given a phone number, we ran it with radio station staff but also quite a lot of offices closed because of no toilets and water, so because we’ve got contacts through the radio station we got volunteers in from those, so people like the Chelsea Building Society, and one of the travel companies call centre, they were sending staff in to help man our phones so we literally had volunteers here working that were coming in to help. And every phone number we had, we checked it, so before we would put a phone number on our website or give it out we would check, ring them up and say ‘look, what kind of queries are you dealing with’. But it changed all the time because obviously with lack of water or even with flooding we had people with animals in problem. We had nursing homes, the worst case scenario where they had no water supply and all the residents went down with food poisoning.
It was an explicit policy of the radio station to supply locally relevant information and stories, self-conscious of being a ‘local radio station’. In the flurry of information and misinformation, Severn Sound developed into a central hub for directing general advice and connecting particular needs and offers of help.
Some old bloke phoned us and I loved the remark he made, ‘I don’t listen to Severn Sound normally; I’m a BBC man, but all the BBC are telling me is when bloody Gordon Brown’s coming here.’ He said ‘I want to know when my lecky is back on!’ And I think that was our choice, was yes in news we dealt with the fact that Prince Charles had popped in to see what was going on, the fact that we had the Cobra, which is the services, were dealing with, obviously the news dealt with that side of it but we decided we would deal with: how is this directly affecting our listeners? What are their problems today? And we actually made it a point to address those problems.
[…]
We rang people and aimed to find the answer. […] we would have people here doing internet searches, talking to people and then actually through the […] say ‘these are the big questions we’re being asked today, we need to know: where do people go for this information?’ and they would take that list of questions that we were getting over the phone. And sometimes we would say on air, ‘the big question everyone is asking us today is ‘where can I get a shower’?’ people want to get showers, and then the phones would start ringing and it would be Leisure Centres just outside the area would say ‘okay we’re going to open later tonight if anyone wants to come over they can come and have a shower.’
[…]
And just simple things like, we had quite a lot of people who had lost their wedding reception venue, because […] there were a few who had been flooded that were like the second Saturday, so about Wednesday or Thursday we found out that one venue in particular had been flooded that had several weddings that weekend, we put an appeal out to say has anyone got a wedding venue available for this weekend because we’ve got 3 couples who are getting married who have lost their wedding venue. So we would put people in touch with each other. What we were very, very keen on was to not tell people information. We never ever said we’re experts on anything, so it would be with things like baby bottles we would never say yes it’s fine to do, we would say ‘this is who you need to contact for that information’.
[…]
Yes, Friday night was obviously first of all the weather. You know, the heavens have opened. Then you start, everyone’s trying to get home from work so everyone was ‘are the buses running, are the trains running?’ So that was a bit like ‘oh my god it’s a bit difficult to get information, offices were beginning to shut early because obviously it was starting to get quite bad. Then you’ve got the flood warnings coming in so people want to know what the latest flood warnings are, because people just do not know where to go for this information. […]
Most people wouldn’t know to call the Environment Agency, they wouldn’t know that they dealt with flooding. So you’ve got the flood warnings and then obviously we had the problem of displaced persons if you like, that was that evening and that went into the following morning. Then, over that weekend, it was the actual people who had been flooded, and obviously the ongoing weather forecast, ‘is it going to rain again?, is there going to be more flooding?’, […] and then we were keeping up to date, and the flood warnings continued because water was draining into the river and it’s obviously is tidal, so depending when the tides were, so one of the things on the website we kept up to date with was what were the current flood warnings, we published that on our website and put them out on air what all the latest flood warnings were. Then obviously the people who had been flooded, we were talking to them. […] like people that had cleared their house, what do they do with all their stuff. We had people who had been offered empty houses but got no furniture, so it was putting them in contact with furniture recycling, centres, also people wanted to donate furniture to people who had been flooded. Loads of people ringing up ‘I’ve got a second spare room with a 3-piece suite sat in it, can we donate it to someone? How do you do the logistics of that?’ […] So it was putting the right people in touch with each other. So this was basically what people were asking us, who should they talk to, and the same with all the people who were ringing up saying ‘I’ve got a dining room table, I’ve got some beds, I’ve got loads of bedding’.
It is not only during floods, however, that local radio stations act as information hubs in exceptional periods. Rather, this role is regularly rehearsed when it snows in England.
For here, for us, snow is our biggie. People will ring us as opposed to ring their school because we start at 6am. They know that people from their school, no one is probably going to be in until 8am so every time it snows every radio station in our group, we have a snow team going. We have special bits of our website set up and ready to go. We have teams of staff that can get to the radio station even if it snows because we take all the school closures and we publicise online for all our websites all the school closures.
[…]
Every school phones up. […] They call us, so we basically have a team that will be in at 5.30am – we’re on snow alert! – and that happens in every radio station in our group. Especially Heart stations because our listener base is very family orientated. […] We are basically, our listener base is 25 to early 40s. Family based, and we pride ourselves that our audience is a very family-based audience. That’s why schools to us are the biggie. Our websites go through the roof when we have school closures. People don’t go to their school to find out their closed they come to our website. Because we are seen as the most authoritative information on what schools are closed. Snow is huge. We have snow plans. Plans of how we’re going to work during snow. What staff are on call.
She remembers the snow alert during the winter of 2010/11:
I had staff stay with me because I’m walking distance, so presenters stay in my flat so we knew we would be able to be on air at 5.30am with presenters. So I had two girls stay with me and then another guy who lives in Gloucester two of the presenters stayed with him, so that was six of us who would all be able to get in in the morning because we’re all walking distance. I think they put a couple of people up in a hotel because we had a lot. It went on for a long time. So we ended up putting people up in hotels within walking distance because everybody calls us. All the schools call us, all the parents call us to find out. For that kind of information the radio station is seen to be the people to talk to.
Today, the radio station also contributes its share to not forgetting the floods of 2007, and the fact that the lower River Severn occasionally floods.
We talk about it loads. Yes we do. We’ve always done like the first few years we’ve done a look back at the floods and that sort of thing on air. So the first couple of years, even up to this year, 20th July, we all talk about it on air. It was such a major thing in so many people’s lives that people do still talk about it.
If a similar emergency to the 2007 floods would happen again, she reckons that local radio stations will take on a similar role again, because they continue to be the first contact point. Only, they would be doing it better next time, due to their confidence and experience gained in 2007.
I do think now you would feel much better, if it happened again we would feel much more confident to do it again. But I still think we would have to do it again. I don’t think there is that facility still anywhere else, not that I know of. I don’t know that the council or anyone else has anything set up that coordinates across all the different things that people need to know about. And I still think, even if they did have it how would they get that information to people?
[…], we literally walk through that door and can talk to a hundred thousand people. Our listener base went up hugely through the flood. Huge. […] You go down to places like the council offices and they would have signs outside saying ‘for information please listen to your local radio station’ and it would be BBC Gloucestershire and Severn Sound. They were actually saying don’t ask us, listen to them. That was very much the message that was going out. Saying that the best way to get the most up to date information is to listen to your local radio station. So I do think local radio has such a huge part to play in this.
Severn Sound thus played a major role for the emergency response in Gloucestershire during the 2007 floods. The events triggered by this period, however, also had very direct consequences on the interviewee’s biography:
It ended up changing my career. Me having a different career because I’d never done online writing and I did a lot of stuff during the floods and loved it. I love the immediacy of it. Of actually doing something and what you’ve done is published and it’s there. And also when you’re getting people coming back and saying I’ve been on your website and seen this and they’re asking me questions about it. And you can get stats from a website really easily. You can get them in real time so you can actually go in the last hour we’ve had x-thousand people looking at that particular page or looking at whatever. I just loved that immediacy of it. […] And after I did the website stuff that year, later that year a job came up and I was approached to say you did such a good job during the floods would you be interested in it. I looked after just a couple of radio stations and now I’m an editor right across the Heart network. So I actually write across about 42 radio stations. […] So it’s all that. For me it ended up changing my career. So the floods ultimately changed my career.
But not only on a personal level have the floods turned out to be a highly significant period. According to the interviewee, the common tackling of this formidable challenge shaped her generation, similar to the blitz having shaped the people who lived during World War II.
It’s our war! Does that make any sense? People say you should have lived during the war. You don’t know you’re born, if you like, for a different generation that lived through that couple of weeks it’s like the equivalent of our war. We lived through the floods, and I think it kind of felt a bit like that. The fact that you did feels as though you survived. And just the camaraderie, here, because we were working a ridiculous amount of hours and people were coming in to help, and we were taking lots of calls, and we had volunteers because it was busy in here. There was that kind of blitz that people talk about don’t they, the kind of blitz mentality, when you’re all in difficult situations and you just get on with it, and you have a great time. I loved it, absolutely loved it which must sound strange, but I really felt as though I was doing something really useful. You could go home at the end of the day and think I really felt as though I really helped people that day and that’s a great feeling[…] For me, that was the big thing to remember. Yes, you had stupid people, you had stupid people who were damaging bowsers, people that were taking, we had some small corner shops who went on selling water from the distribution points for years afterwards, because we do know that people were going round and collecting water from every distribution point. Same as everything isn’t it. You could say it, with the floods, it brings out the best and worst in people. I think for me that’s the thing I’ll remember, is that anything like this brings out the best in the best and the worst in the worst.
Sustainable Flood Memories 