Working in Charley’s Wake

Biggest disaster since 9/11 tests improved coordination efforts

It’s 11 a.m. at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster command office, and about 15 charity

leaders at national relief organizations are participating in a daily conference call with government officials to discuss what they are doing to help the victims of Hurricane Charley, the biggest U.S. disaster since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

One participant asks, Will the federal and Florida governments grant amnesty to the many illegal migrant workers whose lives have been turned upside down by the storm?

Another charity official reports that out-of-state calls to the state’s donation hotline aren’t getting through.

Officials at two other groups offer up their surplus of cleaning supplies in response to a request made by the Salvation Army representative during the previous day’s call.

The conference calls, which are also held each afternoon at 2 to discuss issues specific to local Florida charities, are just one of several new approaches being tested to bolster coordination among relief organizations and to smooth how the groups work with government agencies.

Another change is the presence of Anne D. Miller, whom the federal disaster agency invited into its offices to lead these conference calls and oversee communications with charities. Ms. Miller is executive director of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a 34-year-old coalition. The group, which started with seven national members, now has 41.

Avoiding Turf Battles

Some charity observers say such new approaches by the federal government have led to real improvements in the way disaster aid is delivered. While relief groups have long said they wanted to improve communications with one another, turf battles often have gotten in the way. The willingness to work together has grown, however, ever since charities drew criticism for lapses in coordination after the September 11 attacks.

J.B. Hunt, a Red Cross employee who serves as a charity liaison in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster office in Orlando, Fla., says that “in the past people have been kind of protective of their data.” Having been through the events of September 11, “we all are much less so now.”

But others say that, three years after the terrorist attacks put the national spotlight on the way nonprofit organizations respond to disasters, much still needs to be done to prepare for the challenges of large-scale disasters.

Among the trouble spots: The American Red Cross, which came in for widespread criticism for its handling of the $1-billion it raised after September 11, has almost depleted its general disaster fund, which can’t take money from the donations earmarked for victims of the terrorist attacks. Before Hurricane Charley hit the Florida coast with 145-mile-an-hour winds and cut a 200-mile swath of destruction, the Red Cross had a balance of just $835,000 in its fund.

And while charities had pledged to find a way for victims of a disaster not to have to traipse from charity to charity to get help and fill out forms at each organization, it is only now that a coordinated system is being piloted.

Charities have also been struggling because they lack access to expensive communications equipment, such as satellite telephones, that could help them share information. In the days after Charley hit, many nonprofit leaders found it hard to coordinate their work and convey the extent of the damages to government officials and potential donors, since the power was out and cell-phone coverage was spotty because transmission towers had been blown down.

Adding to the challenge: The country’s emphasis on fighting terrorism has shifted some federal money away from efforts to help victims of natural and other disasters, which means that charities may be expected to step up their efforts. Also, more and more people are expected to seek help from charities and government agencies because their insurance won’t cover as much as they had anticipated. Following Hurricane Andrew, which devastated south Florida in 1992, many insurance companies, having sustained big losses, raised the amount people and businesses must pay to repair or rebuild lost property.

Lack of Public Attention

Hurricane Charley has posed many especially thorny problems for charities. Thousands of elderly people and migrant workers have lost their homes or jobs, and many lack the savings or insurance they need to recover. And, because the damage was spread over many small towns rather than centered in a major city, organizations have had a hard time conveying to the public the full extent of the needs. Charley has been rated the third most costly storm in U.S. history, after Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Hugo, which battered South Carolina in 1989.

With the rest of the country following the Olympics and the presidential campaign, charities have struggled to focus the nation on the magnitude of their problems. Charities now fear that they may have lost their best chance to communicate the scope of the issues they face and the need they will have for funds, volunteers, and supplies in the months and years to come.

Those challenges notwithstanding, Florida relief groups have some reason for optimism. The state has a reputation for providing efficient disaster relief after years of experience coping with hurricanes. Charity and state officials have held frequent meetings in recent years, and groups in central Florida participated in their first major hurricane-response simulation in May.

Nonprofit centers that have put to work volunteers who walk in off the street have proved so successful that they will probably be expanded, observers say.

Managing such volunteers after a disaster has long challenged even the best-organized relief efforts. After September 11, many volunteer managers said charities failed to take advantage of the outpouring of people who wanted to help in New York and elsewhere.

Relief workers in the state know each other, says Jody Hill, executive director of Florida Interfaith Networking in Disaster, known as FIND. “There are no strangers in this sandbox,” she says.

Still, Ms. Hill says she hopes Hurricane Charley will provide a way to bring additional groups into the informal relief network that has evolved. Groups that provide low-cost housing, for example, will be needed to help the many low- and moderate-income people who have lost their homes or may not be able to afford to repair them. “This is a wonderful opportunity to build capacity in many small communities,” she says.

Collaborative Approach

The efforts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which were first tested on a small scale after Hurricane Isabel, a storm that hit the mid-Atlantic region last fall, have brought together such players as American Disaster Service, the American Red Cross, Lutheran Disaster Response, federal and state emergency-response leaders, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, United Way of America, and dozens of others.

The result, says Ben Curran, human-services branch chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is a “level of communication that’s the best it’s ever been.”

Bringing charities together is a challenge because they are private — not government — groups, and each considers itself an equal player, not part of a hierarchy. Ms. Miller, the charity coordinator working at the federal agency, makes it clear she does not tell any group what to do, saying her role is “strictly collaborative.” In addition, she says, she can help publicize the expertise many small groups have.

For example, she says, few people probably know that “Adventist Community Services is one of the tops in managing donations, or that the Southern Baptists have their own chainsaw teams doing debris cleanup, or that the Church of the Brethren specializes in child care.”

Veterans of relief efforts now at work in Florida say they see tangible signs that coordination efforts are starting to pay off.

In Tampa, J. Kevin Smith points to the stacks of toilet paper, canned peaches, and other donated products that now fill the Salvation Army’s cavernous warehouse. Just a day after the storm, the warehouse was stocked by charities that work with the Salvation Army as well as by corporate donors like Home Depot.

“Before Hurricane Charley, this was almost empty,” says Mr. Smith, emergency disaster-services director for the Salvation Army’s Florida division. In previous disasters, filling such a warehouse could have taken many days, he says.

Among other efforts after September 11, charities agreed that they needed a shared computer database, so that families being sent from one group to another for aid would not have to spend days or weeks filling out forms, and charities could see at a glance what other groups had already done. Seven charities worked together to develop a single database that will allow information about disaster victims to be shared.

Last week, the organizations began distributing access codes so charities could use the Coordinated Assistance Network in what will be the first large-scale test of the effort. The system is designed to help charities track disaster victims over time.

In the short term, however, some charities say they haven’t been trained in how to use the database, and they say it could be difficult to use when they are outside their offices, working with people who were harmed by Hurricane Charley. The Salvation Army’s Mr. Smith says caseworkers will be traveling throughout the state in the coming weeks, using pen and paper to take down information from families in zones where power is just being restored.

“There’s a time when that network will be a valuable mechanism, but at this point we do not have the infrastructure to support it,” he says. “Currently, we’re just looking for five minutes of shade so we can talk to people.”

Weaknesses Uncovered

The response to Hurricane Charley has highlighted other weaknesses in the disaster-recovery system.

Many charity workers and government officials, for example, lack the expertise needed to help migrant farm workers who lost their jobs when much of Florida’s citrus crop was destroyed.

For example, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it would not require people seeking most types of aid to show their Social Security cards or other identification, its offer to provide a bus to transport migrant refugees to temporary shelters hit a snag. “The FEMA guys don’t realize this: A bus is going to scare them to death,” says Margarita Romo, executive director of Farmworkers Self-Help, in Dade City. “A bus tells them they might be going all the way back to the border. We’ve got to find another way.”

Ms. Romo also worries that not all federal workers are following the same policy, saying some immigrants were turned away at a FEMA-run shelter last week because they could not show Social Security cards.

In addition to helping migrant workers in coming months, charities are also focusing on retired people, some in poor health, who lost their homes.

Wendy Hopkins, vice president of programs at the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, says the foundation has started a fund-raising effort to help the hurricane victims, and some of the money will probably pay for replacement housing for elderly people. So many are homeless that it’s been “very, very difficult” to find somewhere else for them to live, she says.

Relief experts say many of the lessons from Hurricane Charley will take many months and probably years to fully unfold.

But they say every disaster offers an opportunity for groups to make a closer connection with each other. For example, migrant-workers groups have been especially active in helping victims of Hurricane Charley.

Other efforts, however, such as new communications equipment or centers that can survive storms and power outages, will require far more money than groups have so far been able to raise.

That’s always a challenge, says Anisya S. Thomas, managing director of the Fritz Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit group that studies how to strengthen relief organizations. “What do you spend for direct relief now, and what do you spend on improving your infrastructure, so next time you’re better prepared.”

Advanced communications during the lulls between the storms, most relief experts agree, will continue to be key.

Says Mr. Smith of the Salvation Army: “Our partnerships need to be practiced more than during disasters.”