February 23, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A blistering report issued last week by an 11-member House committee investigating the preparation for Hurricane Katrina and the responses to its devastation focuses primarily on failures by government at all levels, but it also charges that charities were ill-equipped for a disaster of that magnitude.
“Contributions by charitable organizations assisted many in need,” said the report, “but the American Red Cross and others faced challenges due to the size of the mission, inadequate logistics capacity, and a disorganized shelter process.”
The section of the report on charities details the challenges that the American Red Cross faced in its response to the hurricane. The federal government’s national emergency plan designates the Red Cross as the lead agency responsible for mass care, housing, and human services.
The Red Cross is the only nongovernmental organization to play such a role in the plan and it is supposed to work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“Katrina, however, was too much for the Red Cross,” said the report. “Like FEMA, the Red Cross did not have a logistics capacity sophisticated enough to deal with a catastrophe of Katrina’s size.”
Because the Red Cross was dependent on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense for food and other types of supplies, the organization suffered from weaknesses in the federal logistics and supply chain, the committee found.
The Red Cross, for example, submitted 99 requests for supplies to the federal disaster agency, 22 of which were fulfilled, although often so late that the organization had already purchased the items itself, the report said.
While the report detailed shortcomings in the Red Cross’s response to Hurricane Katrina, it stopped short of recommending changes in the nonprofit organization’s role in the National Response Plan.
The report written by the House lawmakers is available online at http://katrina.house.gov.
