Rumours will fly, no matter what

Commentary by Joe McWilliams

Last week’s forest fire near Slave Lake was a good lesson in the role and power of rumours. Afterward, people were talking as much about the rumours as the fire itself, which should tell you something. Nearly every person I interviewed about the fire had another story to tell about the wild damage reports that were going around. They didn’t quite amount to, ‘The sky is falling!’, but covered just about every other disaster imaginable. One house was destroyed. Two houses for sure. Three houses at least had gone up in smoke; somebody even saw one of them burning. A helicopter went down. A plane had crashed into the communications tower on Marten Mountain; hence the failure of the radio station signal. Those were the biggies. The authorities – those who end up manning the phones and answering questions – say it’s like that every time. With or without a functioning local radio station, the stories still fly thick and fast. Why it happens is an interesting question. For starters, it’s human nature to want to know what’s going on. This goes especially when there is some imminent risk. In the absence of hard facts, speculation is the next best thing. For some people, I suspect, speculation is even better than hard facts. But in any case, hard facts are hard to find in the middle of a wildfire, when the highway is blocked and there’s no ‘official’ news on the radio station. But how about cell phones? Shouldn’t they make it easier for people to get to the bottom of things? Not in situations where the only folks on the scene are firefighters and they’re only talking to each other. Another rumour was that Slave Lake was on evacuation alert. Apparently that, too, was false. When people are nervous, they need to talk. It’s one way of dealing with anxiety, I guess, and the spreading of rumours is the result. The rumours about houses burning in Wagner moved at least as fast as the fire itself – probably faster. All that the magic of modern telecommunications did was help the process of spreading bogus information. Perhaps it did no harm. It could have increased the anxiety for some people, I suppose, at the same time as helping to ease it by giving people something to talk about. And it wasn’t boring! Just imagine a few thousand people standing around looking at a thick column of smoke coming toward them and saying things like, “Nope, can’t confirm it’s a fire just because I see smoke. Nope, nothing’s burned because I didn’t see it with my own eyes.” It doesn’t happen like that and it never will. Instead, somebody repeats somebody else’s speculation and it soon becomes fact. People need to talk. Lacking facts, they’ll talk anyway. Those among us who prefer to keep their mouths shut until they know something for sure are few. And that’s just the way it is and the way it’s always been.

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