Relief Groups in Hurricane Gustav’s Wake Assess What They Need to Learn for the Next Disaster

Covington, La.

Downed tree limbs and power lines dot this small Louisiana city. But for most of the aid workers who have been working in the region since early last week to prepare for Hurricane Gustav, the storm’s passing has brought relief.

Many evacuees starting returning home today from shelters the American Red Cross opened in and around Covington in advance of Hurricane Gustav. Red Cross officials predicted there would be only a few hundred people left in shelters here tonight, compared with 3,100 on Monday. Shelter officials said they were prepared for as many as twice that number.

For Kay W. Wilkins, chief executive of the Southeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross, the storm was a chance to test changes that her charity has made in the three years since Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Wilkins spent that storm holed up in a shelter with three members of her staff. It was nearly a week before she reconnected with the rest of the charity’s employees and volunteers – and learned how the storm had destroyed the group’s office and many staff members’ homes.

But Hurricane Gustav was also a reminder of how much more progress she said her charity needs to make, in strengthening partnerships with local organizations that represent minorities, working closely with the charity’s headquarters in Washington, and supporting the mental-health needs of employees and evacuees.

She also worried about whether there would be enough money to rebuild parishes southwest of New Orleans that received the brunt of Gustav’s winds and rain.

“I’m relieved that some communities we’ve been working with since Hurricane Katrina escaped major damage,” she said. “But I know what I’ve had to do over the last three years and how long it’s taken us to help those communities recover. I know the road ahead in the Bayou is going to be a long one.”

Trained Volunteers

Ms. Wilkins, a petite blond woman dressed in white Nike sneakers, jeans and a Red Cross vest, began preparing for this storm a week ago. She helped oversee the supply of food and trucks to shelters, provided food to people taking state-run buses out of New Orleans, and coordinated assistance to people calling in to a hotline.

One of the biggest changes since Hurricane Katrina, she said, has been the supply of volunteers from outside the Gulf Coast. No volunteers from organizations in other parts of the country were sent before Hurricane Katrina to the 13 parishes represented by her charity. This time, 260 people flooded into Covington alone.

“The system had never embedded people with our chapter before. That was one of these lessons we learned from Katrina, that we needed trained shelter personnel to support the chapter response,” she said, sitting in an elementary-school classroom from which Red Cross staff and volunteers have been running the local response.

Ms. Wilkins also tried new ways to inform people about how to evacuate. In a single day last week, her staff members distributed 130,000 pamphlets providing directions on how to evacuate the city. They relied on contacts at hospitals, churches, and other organizations to help pass out the flyers.

Those efforts, along with the dire warnings to evacuate issued by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other government officials, contributed to the largest evacuation in the state’s history. Fifty-eight thousand people were housed in shelters during this storm, compared with 30,000 during Hurricane Katrina.

Huge Improvement

Hurricane Katrina offered a brutal awakening in the weaknesses of the emergency-response system. Lessons from Gustav have so far not been as numerous or as profound. But Ms. Wilkins said there are already changes she plans to make ahead of another storm.

“It was a huge improvement over Katrina, but we will refine this,” she said.

For one thing, she wants to have more people with mental-health training embedded with her staff members and volunteers. She wants to work more closely with the national headquarters to make sure that volunteers and supplies arrive to the region as smoothly as possible.

Her charity has worked with other nonprofit groups since Katrina to ensure that minorities aren’t ignored by the charity’s disaster-relief efforts. Partnerships forged between the Salvation Army, the NAACP, the Sovereign Nation of the Chitimacha, and other groups were tested during this storm.

But the effort hasn’t been as successful as she would have liked. “We’ve been busy over the last three years rebuilding our lives,” she said. “We’ve made some progress but that needs to continue.”

Costs of Evacuation

Government officials have faced criticism for over hyping the threat of Gustav. While Ms. Wilkins and other charity officials said they’re relieved that governments took the storm seriously, they also recognize the financial costs to the charity of such a massive evacuation.

So far, the Red Cross has spent $20-million on efforts in response to Gustav.

“That’s a lot to spend on preparedness,” said Ms. Wilkins. “As a CEO, I’m very aware of that.”

She acknowledged that spending money on preparing for storms that don’t materialize might discourage some donors. “If a donor says that, one of the things we know now is to bring them into the operation and let them see what we’re doing,” she said.

She also worried that news-media attention has focused on how Gustav left New Orleans relatively unscathed, rather than the impact it has had on Plaquemines, Jefferson, Lafourche, Assumption, Terrebonne and a handful of other parishes in southern Louisiana.

The extent of that damage, meanwhile, is still largely unknown. Red Cross officials were beginning to assess the damage to areas south and west of New Orleans on Wednesday.

Tree Davidson, public-information officer at the Salvation Army, said that she had seen downed power lines and trees in Houma, in Terrebonne Parish, and didn’t expect the city to get power back for at least a week. But houses in the city seemed to have escaped damage, she said.

Baton Rouge, which was also hit more directly than New Orleans, wasn’t expected to get power for another nine days.

But Ms. Wilkins said she was worried about the longer-term costs of rebuilding: “We’ve got people in the same boat as people in New Orleans were after Katrina.”

In addition to the physical damage sustained by cities, she and other aid workers were worried that people returning to their homes after Gustav would suffer from flashbacks to Hurricane Katrina and would require psychological counseling.

Even as she was collecting ideas for how to prepare for the next storm, Ms. Wilkins said she was trying not to worry too much about the costs of the evacuation and her charity’s budget.

“We can always second guess ourselves,” she said. “But I’ve seen it pay off. No one talks about anyone drowning in New Orleans. No one talks about drowning in the Bayou. No one talks about dying. I don’t think you can put a cost to a life saved.”