You probably heard that a parking garage collapsed in Atlanta this week. Soon afterward, a spokeswoman for Hardin Construction, the company that built the structure, emailed a statement that included these two sentences:

“To put this in perspective there are 1,415 spaces in this deck,” said Barkley Russell. “One section was involved, and it is estimated that approximately 35 spaces were affected.”

Luckily, no one was hurt in the collapse, but at the time Russell released this statement, police planned to make another sweep of the property. What if someone had been found dead? The statement from Hardin would have looked very cold-hearted.

Even without death or injury, trying to minimize a crisis insults the people who have been or could have been affected—like those whose cars were crushed in the collapse, or families who worried about someone they thought could be injured.

Minimizing what happened may make the company feel better about the situation, but it’s likely to come back and bite you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Crisis Communication, Media Training, Mistakes in the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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