Sellers fails to say the words citizens wanted to hear

 On Sept. 29, 1982, the first person in the Chicago area died after taking an Extra Strength Tylenol that had been deliberately contaminated with cyanide. Within a week, six more persons had died and Johnson & Johnson had pulled 31 million bottles of Tylenol off the shelves. Tylenol had commanded a 35 percent share of the U.S. market for acetaminophen before the poisonings. That plummeted to 8 percent immediately after. To date, the person responsible for the injecting the Tylenol capsules with the cyanide has never been found and a $100,000 reward offered by Johnson & Johnson remains unclaimed. 

The poisonings were not the fault of Johnson & Johnson. Even so, J&J still took quick and decisive action. Within weeks, the company introduced tamper-proof packaging for its medicine featuring a container “with three barriers to entry.” It replaced the Tylenol capsule with the “caplet” that could not be penetrated with poison. Within a year, Tylenol sales had rebounded to its pre-poisoning levels and J&J’s response to the crisis is still regarded as a premier example of superb crisis management.

I spent 20 years of my professional career in the field of crisis management. I wish I could claim even a small amount of credit for the Tylenol program, but the facts are I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I did have my share of crises to manage, however: the Coors Beer boycott, the Killeen Luby’s massacre as well as the San Ysidro, Calif., McDonald's massacre, a city’s contamination of its entire water supply, the Austin yogurt murders, the salmonella scare at major  snack maker’s Tennessee baking facility, to name just a few. In all those situations, my goal was the same: “Find the caplet.” What could be said and done to restore confidence among consumers.

City Manager Scott Sellers outlined the City’s response Tuesday night to the damage inflicted on its residents because of last month’s winter storm and although he said a lot of things that were positive and nice to hear, he failed to deliver the caplet. He never uttered the reassuring words: “Here are the steps we are taking in an effort to prevent our citizens from ever again having to endure five days, at least, without running water because of another winter storm.”

What he did say was “Typically, when we receive weather reports that our temperatures are going to drop into freezing or sub-freezing temperatures we will weatherize our pipes and our equipment. We did do that for this event. We went through our protocols with weatherization — sanding roads, etc. What we were not prepared for was the blackouts. When we lost power to our pumps at our well sites and when GRBA (Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority) lost power to their pumps, things started to freeze up pretty quickly. Once they froze we were not able to get our pumps up and running.”

Admittedly, the City took admirable actions during the crisis, many of which Sellers spoke about. “We created a warming shelter at the United Methodist Church,” he said. “We had agreements with PEC (Pedernales Electric Cooperative) to try to isolate our water tower sites or our pump sites at the wells to keep those from being shut off. We had warming buses. We did a mass food distribution event. We supplied potable water at Hays High School. We even had portable showers taken to some of our residents that were without water for an extended period of time.”

But two important questions weren’t answered: (1) why isn’t auxiliary power available at the pumps to be employed in such emergencies and (2) why doesn’t the city have alternative water sources that can used when similar weather events occur?

As to that second question, Sellers said such an alternative source will be available, but not for another two years at least.

“Council has been very pro-active over the last five or six years — really back to the early 2000s when it was realized that our water situation was not going to keep up with our growth,” Sellers said. The Alliance Regional Water Authority (ARWA), the city manager said, “identified a large supply of water in the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer and we have been working for years now on securing those rights and building infrastructure to get that supply of water to us. That would be our third source of water — from wells, from GRBA and then ARWA. Our estimated timeline of when that construction will be done is a couple of years now — basically 24 months to bring that additional water source to the city. So in the event we do have another outage, another event like this, we’ll then have another source of water to rely on.”

As regards the first question, Sellers essentially said the City is going to abdicate that responsibility to the state.

“We have been in communication with our state representatives,” he said. “Our hope is that through this legislative session there’ll be relief not just for Kyle but for all Texas cities that would be a large assistance especially for weatherization for generators that we need. We’re optimistic that our state representatives can authorize that legislation for us.”

Translation: the City is willing to replace action with optimistic faith in state legislators. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

(UPDATED MATERIAL BEGINS HERE)

“I apologize if I sounded as if legislation was required to winterize our generators,” Sellers said the day after the council’s meeting. “What I meant to communicate was that our state representative (Erin Zwiener) is sponsoring legislation to provide funding for weatherization for our critical infrastructure and generators. If state/federal funding is not approved for these items then we will need to utilize funds from our water utility.”

(END UPDATED MATERIAL)

Sellers also told that Council that:

• Citizens may go this website to learn, among other interesting pieces of information, who supplies their water.
• The City’s annual resident survey will go on line by the end of the week and will include additional questions about trails in the city
• The City Council’s Vision Workshop that was cancelled because of the winter storm has been rescheduled for Saturday, April 17, but he did not say where it would be held; and that its first budget retreat has been rescheduled for Saturday, May 1.