Learning Katrina’s Lessons

This fall’s hurricanes test changes made by relief charities

By Caroline Preston

Kay W. Wilkins, who leads the Southeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross, spent Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath isolated from most of her employees, learning only days after the storm hit that it had flooded New Orleans and killed the relatives of three staff members. During Hurricane Gustav, she was in near-continuous contact with her employees and the Red Cross’s national headquarters as she welcomed thousands of people to shelters they began preparing days before the storm made landfall.

The stark difference between Ms. Wilkins’s storm experiences is like that of many charity workers in the Gulf Coast. Nonprofit organizations have ploughed tens of millions of dollars since Katrina into fixing problems that were exposed during the 2005 relief effort.

While charity workers, government officials, and observers say the response to Gustav still had flaws, they emphasize that nonprofit groups and government agencies have made significant progress toward restoring confidence in the disaster-response system.

“It’s not perfect, but, boy, is it better,” said John Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. “There are some small concerns, some which we may never be able to fix. But the Red Cross and everyone performed at a much higher level.”

Charity leaders say they are taking away new lessons from Gustav and will also work to further improve aspects of their response that may not have been tested by Gustav’s weakened winds and rain. They say that, unfortunately, this year’s active hurricane season means more opportunities to put their plans to the test.

At the same time, many nonprofit officials warn that, because news-media attention focused on how Gustav largely spared New Orleans, residents of harder-hit areas to the south and west will be left with little help. Some residents could be without power for the rest of the month, they say.

“We’ve got people who are in the same boat that the New Orleans area was in after Katrina,” said Ms. Wilkins. “They don’t have a home to go to anymore.”

A longer-term issue for relief groups is that the preparations now required to be ready to handle a large-scale catastrophe come with a high pricetag — one that can be hard to cover with donations.

The Red Cross, for example, had raised only about $5-million as of last week for its relief effort primarily related to Hurricane Gustav, yet its costs were expected to run between $40-million and $70-million.

What’s more, the charity’s disaster-relief fund is empty and it is currently borrowing money to pay for its relief operations.

Extra Gasoline

In a visit to the Gulf Coast immediately following the storm, signs of the changes charities have made since Katrina were evident. Some were small: For example, Ethan Frizzell, area commander for the Salvation Army in Greater New Orleans, drove from one hurricane-damaged town to another carrying an extra tank of 100 gallons of gasoline in his truck, to avoid getting stuck in long lines that snaked for miles outside of the few working gas stations.

Other changes were sweeping. Feeding America (the charity formerly known as America’s Second Harvest), moved more food to the disaster zone than it had before Katrina and conducted regular training sessions to make sure staff members knew how to respond to emergencies. Catholic Charities USA worked to improve its relationships with other charities.

And, most significantly, the American Red Cross spent more than $80-million after the 2005 storm to buy additional warehouse space and supplies. It also sought to overcome challenges presented by that storm, including a failure to work effectively with other nonprofit groups and an over-reliance on untrained volunteers.

At a shelter in Jackson, Mississippi, for example, a Red Cross volunteer and an official of the state’s Department of Human Services worked together to run the building’s operations. That relationship predated Hurricane Katrina, state officials said, but had become more sophisticated in recent years.

Employees and volunteers from other charities were also working at the shelter. Staff members from the local affiliate of Catholic Charities USA sat at tables in the building’s hallway, offering mental-health support to evacuees. Several employees from the Urban League of Greater Jackson served food at the shelter through an arrangement developed after the 2005 storm.

Save the Children had set up a room filled with coloring books, videos, and toys so that young children would have a place to go to take their minds off the storm. The Connecticut charity introduced such “safe spaces” in shelters overseas some 15 years ago, but had forged a relationship with the Red Cross in June of 2007, after Hurricane Katrina, to employ them in domestic emergencies.

Several evacuees said they were pleased with the services they were receiving at the shelter, which housed approximately 950 people the morning after Gustav hit. However, there were a few who said they might not leave in advance of future storms — an emerging concern for many charity leaders.

“Next time, I’ll stay,” said Niyona Jackson, a cook from Biloxi, as she waited in line to get a meal ticket. “It’s freezing in here. We don’t have enough blankets or towels.”

Trained Volunteers

About 150 miles south, in Covington, La., Ms. Wilkins said she benefited from the planning her charity and the national American Red Cross had done in advance of this storm.

Approximately 2,700 trained volunteers from across the country were sent to help local chapters. Some came from other affiliates. The chief executive of the Red Cross of the National Capital Region, for example, spent the storm assisting Ms. Wilkins.

Ms. Wilkins said she was pleased with the closer collaboration between her group and other organizations. Employees with the Salvation Army, for example, stayed overnight in the Covington building with Red Cross employees and volunteers.

“It’s less about the organization and more about the need,” she said.

But there are other steps she says her organization still needs to take, including strengthening ties with groups that represent minorities. Joe Becker, senior vice president of disaster services at the national Red Cross, also said his organization would continue to emphasize developing partnerships with local and national organizations.

“I’m never going to say that we have the partnership concept perfect,” he said. “But we saw a lot of good evidence in Gustav that we have made progress.”

Power Outages

In the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana to the southwest of Covington and New Orleans, few people had returned three days after the storm hit. Electricity wasn’t expected to come back to some areas until the end of September.

A few cars were submerged on flooded roads and bayous. The storm’s winds had snapped electricity poles in half. Most houses were still boarded up, some with messages of “Go Away Gustav” painted on them.

Red Cross and AmeriCorps volunteers arrived in the town of Grand Isle on Thursday morning, three days after the storm made landfall, to find it abandoned, save a Salvation Army canteen and a few local law-enforcement officials.

The volunteers spent the day cleaning a flooded community center to serve as a shelter for residents whose homes had been damaged.

“We asked for a difficult post,” said Keith Culhane, a Red Cross volunteer from Los Angeles. “I think we got it.”

Charity leaders in the Bayou worried about both the immediate and the long-term impact of the storm.

Robert Gorman, executive director of Catholic Social Services for the diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, said that nine days after Hurricane Gustav, he was still finding people who had not eaten a hot meal since before the storm struck.

He worried, too, about how people whose homes had been destroyed could possibly afford to reconstruct their lives. “When folks start to rebuild, there is going to be a huge request for money to help them, and the donations haven’t been as plentiful as they were after Katrina,” he said.

Mr. Gorman said he was also concerned about the area’s sizable population of migrant workers. Some are undocumented, and, while Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials had promised not to make arrests during the storm, Mr. Gorman said that few charity workers or immigrants knew about the policy.

Educating charity volunteers and migrant workers about that policy, he said, was one thing he planned to do over the next few weeks in preparation for another storm.

Other charity officials and observers had their own list of recommendations for the disaster-response effort.

Some officials said that the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a group designed to coordinate the volunteer efforts, was chaotic. Ben Smilowitz, founder of a watchdog group called the Disaster Accountability Project, said a hotline run by his group had received telephone calls from Red Cross volunteers in the region who were confused about their responsibilities.

Some groups were also still reeling from costs they incurred after Katrina. Some churches in Baton Rouge that had served as shelters during Katrina didn’t open for Gustav evacuees, fearing a further drain on their resources, said Mr. Davies of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

Jeanne-Aimeé De Marrais, director of domestic emergencies programs at Save the Children, emphasized that many shelters were still unsafe for young people. Mothers were often forced to wash their babies in sinks used by hundreds of people. Children’s cots were placed within inches of strangers. Communal showers in many shelters posed a safety risk for young people.

“Improvements have not been across the board,” she said. “Some shelters were over capacity and didn’t allow us to set up ‘safe spaces,’ and that makes children very, very vulnerable.”