Since 1980, I've worked with hundreds so-called 'first-responders' or employees perpetually on call to fight "incidents" like fires and explosions at refineries, chemical plants and other oil-and-gas facilities.

In the pre-Macondo, Texas City days, before the energy industry seemed to really "get" safety, first-responders routinely made company newsletters and intranets. I would dutifully head out and photograph them at all angles as they scaled units, demonstrated how to wear gas masks, and posed with all manner of firefighting trucks and equipment. Genial to a fault, first-responders carefully oversaw my photo shoots so that the highers-up would not axe photos due to my ignorance about the nuances of sanitized safety.

Working in and around energy infrastructure is always dangerous. But the steadfast dedication of these men and women -- who almost invariably harked from the lower ranks of refinery fiefdom -- gave me the confidence to visit operating units and control rooms in order to talk and write about maintenance and operations. 

If you follow oil-and-gas disasters, which I do both professionally and as horrified observer, almost any statement about those incidents comes from a JIC. I'll spare you the details of how energy companies work with federal, state and local officials in times of crisis. But in this particular instance, I served as the public information officer (PIO) in  a JIC at a troubled refinery with serious process-safety issues. An employee had improperly used a wrench on a vessel, and explosive gas now hissed out of the unit in question. We were in lock-down mode, and I was sitting in the administration building's main conference room, wondering if we were all about to be blown to smithereens.

The refinery manager calmly fiddled with the window blinds, suggesting that if he closed them, they might shield us from some of the destruction should the gas-cloud ignite. I recall a specific conversation about how we should drop to the floor in the nano-second before an explosion vaporized the building.

A smart PIO might have walked to find a safer flack profession, such as pitching real estate ventures to the Houston Business Journal. But I was in full-blown JIC mode. Working at a facility is like being in the Army. When push comes to shove, you have a job to do because you never let your co-workers down.

One co-worker in particular, the refinery's fire chief - the leader of first-responders - was out in the plant, quietly communicating his efforts to staunch the gas flow via radio. The suspense was palpable in the JIC. We followed closely as he interacted almost matter-of-factly with the high-level engineer who monitored refinery operations in real time inside the JIC. The fire chief gradually made his way into the heart of the unit with a leak, calmly apprising us of his progress. When he located the source, and a subsequent all-clear sounded, several of us almost applauded.

(And so I lived to ply my trade another day, albeit with a strong preference for the corporate office.) 

Did I mention this very same fire chief once collapsed, trying to save other firefighters during an H2S leak? The plant doctor and I spent many an hour re-living how she de-fibbed his heart back into life. Of course, he should have known better than to run towards men and women inhaling poisonous gas. But such is the nature of first-responders.

To this day, their zeal and passion for service brings tears to my cynical eyes. 

Now for Oklahoma, where first-responders descended into the hell of a vaporized elementary school in the wake of yesterday's F4 tornado. 

I was glued to CNN first in horror, then with professional interest. I wanted to quarterback the way state-and-local officials communicated with the public and the media. What struck me was the time and effort authorities invested into thanking first-responders for their selfless response. Instead of specific, useful information, those interviewed both on and off camera wasted their sound bites thanking responders up and down the disaster food chain and across municipalities. Perhaps this was because they had little to report. Several, in fact, observed what they did know during the immediate aftermath of the storm came from media helicopters hovering above.

Until Oklahoma's medical examiner phoned in to discuss fatalities with CNN, there was very little substantive reporting ie facts about the disaster.

As one who communicates for a living, this disturbed me greatly. First-responders are not the news. They are part of the story, but they're not the news. This didn't stop the media from participating in the cluster-thanks for those who train for the worst and hope for the best. Nor did it stop the media from almost infantalizing the first-responders, homogenizing the disaster as if to stave off the sad news to inevitably follow.

Every disaster needs heroics and a semi-happy ending so the rest of us can process and contextualize -- and shield us from -- the horror.

Fortunately, when I awakened this morning to my Facebook stream (yes, I sleep next to .... but not with ... my iPad) the good news du jour came froma widely shared news clip of an old, semi-toothless old lady who refused to be sanitized. The TV bimbo (the bane of all corporate executives) politely asked the woman, standing atop the matchsticks of her former residence, if she could really process what had happened.

"I know exactly what happened here," she snapped. "I know exactly what happened."

Cue the tears. At exactly that moment, her presumedly dead Schnauzer stirred in the rubble.

"I guess God answered both my prayers," she said as they pried the dog loose from the detritus of the storm, the camera person so excited by this breaking news that his boom mike got in the way of the canine. "I prayed that I would survive, and my little dog, too."

This is the prayer of all first-responders. Not to become the news, but to effect recovery. 

Corporations spend a lot of money training lower-level men and women at facilities to become effective spokespersons until "corporate" takes over.

Teaching them how to deal with lights, camera and spin is important.

But there's one thing all of the crisis training in the world can't buy, and that is the genuine sincerity and concern of the first-responders who protect their co-workers, communities and companies in the wake of disaster. These employees prefer rushing into disaster to talking to reporters. They also embrace the searing camera lights and the possibility of universal ridicule if they goof up live, on CNN. I've known many a senior executive to blanch in the face of media hell that first-responders duly face as just another part of their jobs.

I don't want to infantalize the first-responders. This blog is for professionals and managers who count on first-responders to preserve assets and reputation. First-responders don't need media lessons in sincerity.

Like the little old lady in Tulsa, they process everything. As a result, there isn't a reporter in the world who can budge their genuine sincerity. The rest of the PR world and upper-level management deal later with spin and lawyers. But nothing we can/say/do will ever match the media power of the on-site employee who effects news instead of affecting response.

In terms of credibility, they're right up there with the old lady and her dog.

Disclaimer: I once rode in an elevator with Richard Edelman and his father. This was in the late 1970s. I was infatuated -- not with his looks, but the Edelman brains! Working for Edelman in Chicago, typing away during summer break from the University of Missouri-Columbia, I earned enough to buy new clothes. When I returned to the journalism incubator that Fall, the seed was planted: Newspaper work...low-paying...no emphasis on hair color in those androgynous newsrooms...PR...smart people, trendy styles and a lot more money. A lot.

So now that you know, I'd like to weigh in on the PR war now raging between two giant agencies of my business-communications realm, Edelman PR and FleishmanHillard.

At issue is how PR agencies can meet the needs of marketer clients struggling to engage audiences.

Fleishman-Hillard, founded in 1946, thinks it's time to add content-marketing and advertising to its roster of services.

" 'True' is the central concept we're rebranding on, to deliver our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices," opined Dave Senay, president and chief executive at company headquarters in St. Louis. "It's not that we're going to become an ad agency. We're moving into a different space. The vision is to be the most complete communications company in the world. Somebody's got to be able to put it all together."

There you have it. FleishmanHillard is now a "total communications resource" that coveys "what a brand wants to say." 

They're following the money. Their traditional emphasis on trying to connect people with brands is morphing into connecting people with people about the brand.

Enter the Edelman brains. In a blog item published April 30, Richard Edelman argues that PR is different. PR tells stories that stimulate discussion and engage stakeholders. PR's "inherent advantages" are "credibility, speed, two-way interaction and continuous story creation. In the end, the consumer may not care about the source of the content, but quality counts."

Edelman's following the money, too -- even though PR "has grown more slowly than advertising and much slower than digital in the past year."

He argues that "massive white space opportunities" exist to create "intelligent debate."

We at Lieber Johnson agree, which is why we specialize in online stakeholder engagement. We manage content so it informs and Googles well. We reach out to audiences with carefully crafted press releases, focused crisis-communications strategies, community relations and public affairs programs, and websites that converse directly with stakeholders.

As they say in marketing, it's all about the brand. PR, as I've noted many times, is a subset of marketing, not advertising. The Web completely leveled the playing field for PR practicioners.

We'll see where that takes us. 

Someone's already posted a social-media response (of sorts) to last night's rescue of three young women in Cleveland. If you haven't watched the news yet this morning, turn on CNN. Cleveland resident Charles Ramsey, Big Mac in hand, kicked in his neighbor's door after hearing screams for help. He freed young women - and a child born in captivity - from 10 years of chained, sexual enslavement.

"I knew something was wrong when a pretty little white girl ran into a black man's arms," he told reporters. Less than 24 hours later, YouTube immortalized his heroics in song. A link to the video is posted on news sites, next to tapes of the 9-1-1 call and heartwrending photos of a victim's sister meeting her niece for the first time.

The vid is either funny, poignant, appropriate, or reflective of the giddy relief and tears we're all daubing back thanks to this happy ending to a horrific story.

For those in business PR, this latest eruption of digitzed emotion is further evidence that anything your client says or does that's remotely edgy can be fodder for cagey young wits worldwide. Reporters, dying breed that they've become, are the least of a company's worries when trouble hits. Clients used to worry about how to respond to media. I used to worry about how to spin them. 

That's not enough nowadays. Figuring out how to avoid becoming an Internet meme (unless you're a true hero, like Ramsey) is paramount. Controlling messaging is paramount. Understanding how ever-evolving social media works is critical. Willingness to engage transparently, to use everyone's favorite business buzz word, is essential.

Because if you don't, someone on the Internet will help you along.

A student on LinkedIn's American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) thread asked about the origins of the term "shale gas."

Replied geologist Dennis Thomas: "Setting wells in my early carrier, long before George Mitchell learned how to make the Barnett Shale productive, I would get a show of gas on the 'hot wire' when drilling through some shale beds. You learned to ignore this 'shale gas' as a false show. Gas was released into the mud as the bit ground the shale into small pieces but you couldn’t produce the gas commercially with the completion techniques we knew at the time. So, this was called 'shale gas,' informally, long before anyone considered shale as a possible reservoir."

I remember now, reading those drilling reports back in the early 1980s, back when the "only" depth was TVD. Wonder what else we missed? What a great story for a reporter.