Plan B

Katrina forces charity officials around the country to rethink what it means to be truly prepared

Charities operating in the Gulf Coast region are not strangers to the threat of hurricanes. Many have long had disaster plans in place to help them protect their operations and continue their missions when faced with a menacing storm and an evacuation.

Then along came Katrina. Not unlike the breeched levees surrounding New Orleans, the disaster plans

at charities large and small were often swamped by the enormousness of the storm and its aftermath.

At one New Orleans social-services organization, following procedures it already had in place made it easy for the group to bus 150 disabled clients to Houston in advance of Hurricane Katrina. But then the charity’s leaders were left high and dry in another way: The plan only outlined how to shelter the people for three days, not the months ultimately required.

A small arts charity’s plan carefully delineated which staff members were to remove key computer equipment from the office in the event of an evacuation. But due to vacations and illness, no one was on hand to perform this key task before Katrina struck.

And while many disaster plans included ways of sharing employees’ cell-phone numbers, information about which people had the ability to receive text messages was rarely included. Text messaging, it turned out, proved more reliable and useful than regular cell service.

“The stories we’ve been hearing suggest that this storm was bigger than anybody’s plans,” says Susan Hymel, technical-assistance coordinator at the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Baton Rouge. “People had to develop new processes and procedures because the thing was so big.”

Waterproofing

With another hurricane season under way, many charities in the region are retooling their disaster plans with an eye toward incorporating the lessons of Katrina.

Ms. Hymel’s organization, in conjunction with the United Way of Southwest Louisiana, in Lake Charles, has held disaster-preparedness workshops where charities swap tales of what worked and what didn’t when it came to weathering the calamity and continuing to operate.

Few were immune from destructive waters, even charities whose offices were on the upper floors of buildings and well away from floodwaters.

“What we learned is, if a window breaks, you may get some water coming in,” Ms. Hymel says. “We now suggest that people cover all the computers they are not taking with them with trash bags.”

Water and computers clearly don’t mix. New technologies have simplified the methods for backing up computer data so it isn’t literally washed away. Palm-sized flash drives can hold several gigabytes of data and cost less than $300. They make a good choice, Ms. Hymel says, for quick partial backups in the event of an emergency.

Better options for performing regular, full backups of a charity’s data range from a $300 DVD writer to hiring an information-technology firm to perform online backups that are then stored at a remote location.

Ms. Hymel says such services can cost between $150 and $1,000 a month, depending on the amount of data to be stored and the frequency of backups. She has heard of a pair of small charities going in together on such a service at a reduced rate.

Beyond computer hardware, charity leaders need to be sure they have crucial documents with them if they are forced to evacuate their offices for an unknown length of time. Ms. Hymel recommends creating an “evacuation box” to hold documents, such as a group’s charter and bylaws, financial statements, insurance polices, employee-contact information, checkbooks and credit cards, and other legal and organizational papers.

(The Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations’ Web site has a detailed list of items to include in such a box, along with other disaster-preparedness tools at http://www.lano.org.)

“The evacuation box is actually a plastic box that you can pick up and leave with,” Ms. Hymel says. “We recommend having two of them. One should leave with the executive director and another with a staff member or board member.”

Key Documents

Contact information for a charity’s largest grant makers should be included in the box.

“We heard story after story of compassionate outreach by concerned grantors,” Ms. Hymel says. “The box should include the emergency ways to get in touch with the people that are your biggest funders and philanthropists who are going to want to know where you are and how you are doing.”

Laurie Conkerton, vice president of development at the Audubon Institute, which runs a zoo, an aquarium, and other nature-related attractions in New Orleans, learned firsthand what it was like not to have key documents after an evacuation.

Her group, she says, had disaster plans before Katrina designed to get employees “back to work pretty quickly” in the event that they were forced to leave their offices. The plan had them taking computer equipment and laptops out the door with them.

But when what they thought would be a few days away from New Orleans turned into a lengthy stay in improvised office space in Baton Rouge, Ms. Conkerton realized the need for the group’s articles of incorporation, bylaws, and latest audited financial statements.

“Somebody got back into the city and took them out for us,” Ms. Conkerton says of the papers (their offices being largely undamaged and outside the main flood zone). “What we’ve done now is scanned a lot of our corporate documents and we’re keeping them on hard drives, laptops, and flash drives. You really need to bring anything you might need to submit a grant application or take out a loan.”

The relocation of the Audubon Institute’s management offices to Baton Rouge, Ms. Conkerton says, happened “on the fly” when a friend of the group’s chief executive officer loaned them some office space. “We were in a warehouse of an outdoor-advertising company,” she says.

While this arrangement worked out for the charity, Ms. Hymel stresses that it would be better to form such collaborative relocation arrangements ahead of time. Some of the more “sophisticated” disaster plans she’s seen involve charities that have formed relationships with groups with similar missions outside of the coastal region — relationships that could include sharing office space and other facilities if necessitated by a storm.

Jim LeBlanc, chief executive officer of Volunteers of America of Greater New Orleans, a social-services organization that serves the disabled and mentally ill, found out the hard way how important it is to have existing relocation relationships and long-term disaster plans in place. His group sent busloads of its most vulnerable clients to Houston before Katrina struck.

“We’ve done several evacuations in the last few years and it’s always worked out for us,” Mr. LeBlanc says. “In previous years, after three days and nights in Houston, the storm passes and we all headed back home. The big hitch in our plans this year was that that didn’t happen.”

He says the charity was able to “buy some time” by extending its stay at the hotel where its workers and clients were already booked. An effort to rent an apartment building failed when the apartments proved to be in horrid shape and “maggot-infested.”

The group ended up staying two months at a Methodist camp and conference center, and has been invited to return in the event of future evacuations. But before the problem was solved, Mr. LeBlanc spent more than a few anxious days wondering where his organization’s people would end up.

“My advice is to plan for the worst-case scenario,” Mr. LeBlanc says. “You don’t have to know every step you’ll need to take, but don’t be afraid to brainstorm about what’s the worst that can happen and how you’ll need to react.”

Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity for the Homeless, a New Orleans group that coordinates activities of 60 other organizations, agrees. Her employees returned to the charity’s offices only in late July, after nearly a year in temporary office space provided by Southeastern Louisiana University, in Hammond.

“We had always focused on evacuation plans for our clients, but had never focused on an evacuation plan for our organization,” Ms. Kegel says. “We didn’t have another server set up someplace else. We didn’t take any organizational records. We didn’t even take the checkbook.”

Her group has since developed comprehensive disaster plans that include thorough and regular reviews of insurance coverage. Nearly 30 residential properties owned and managed by charities her group works with were severely damaged in the flooding caused by Katrina. Several buildings didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover the damage and one property had no insurance at all.

“I think everyone just assumed that it was insured,” Ms. Kegel says. “Doing a check to make sure of proper insurance is definitely a lesson of Katrina. We also found that business-interruption insurance was very useful as well for those groups that had it.”

Perhaps no aspect of Katrina’s forced diaspora was as frustrating as the breakdown in communication systems. That hit some groups hard, such as the New Orleans Ballet Association, which ended up having its six full-time staff members spread out across five states.

“Our cell phones did not work,” says Jenny Hamilton, the group’s executive director. “Unfortunately, we did not have backup e-mails for people, their personal e-mail addresses outside of the company e-mail. I didn’t even know where two of my staff members were.”

Text messaging continued to work in many flooded areas long after cellular voice service failed. This service usually costs a few more dollars a month, and disaster planners advise charities to keep track of which employees have this capability and include the information in their evacuation boxes.

Catherine Thomas, disaster-response specialist at the United Way of Southwest Louisiana, acknowledges in the end that much of the information in a successful disaster plan is common sense. But then that doesn’t make having such a plan in place any less important.

“People don’t always have common sense in a crisis,” Ms. Thomas says.

Recognizing that fact, she recommends that charities post on their office walls a one-page, point-by-point list of what they need to do in the event of an evacuation or other emergency situation.

“This way you are always looking at it and will remember it’s there,” she says. “So in times of crisis, instead of digging through boxes for the disaster-plan binder that’s three-inches thick, you just go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s on the bulletin board,’ and get busy.”