September 29, 2005 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Even before Hurricane Rita, the American Red Cross was in the midst of what its leader calls “an epic
response” in the Gulf Coast.
“There’s no other word to describe it,” says Marsha J. Evans, who since 2002 has served as the charity’s president. “It is the largest by any measure, multiple times over, response that the Red Cross has ever undertaken.”
In an interview last week, Ms. Evans described some of the challenges such an undertaking has presented and how Hurricane Katrina relief efforts are shaping plans for the Red Cross’s responses to future disasters.
How would you describe the Red Cross’s efforts so far?
Considering that we are dealing with a geography that is roughly the size of Great Britain, it has gone as well as one could have expected. We knew that there was going to be some event, but we didn’t know the scale and scope. And we would say we could do better, because this is truly a continuous improvement process.
What I focus on is the fact that we were able to provide shelter for hundreds of thousands of people. If you look at Red Cross resources mobilized, and then other resources, it was the grandest response that I think one could have imagined, and as a result, many people’s lives were saved. Sadly, for a lot of reasons, lives were lost, but many more lives were saved that, had we not been able to shelter and feed people and get them out of harm’s way, would have most likely perished.
With the benefit of a few weeks’ hindsight, are there things you would do differently?
We probably would have had even more resources. We had a tremendous amount of resources staged in the region, but given the difficulty of transportation and communication, we could have used more resources staged in the region. For example, we had 500,000 pre-prepared meals, which by any measure before the storm was an enormous quantity. It would have lasted us for three or four days under different scenarios. We probably now would say that we need three million or so stored.
We’re also looking at our information-technology responses. The question has to be: How much do you invest on an annual basis in core capacity that you may not use for 10 or 15 or 20 years? These new systems now have to be maintained and upgraded over time, and you have to pay for capacity that’s unused on a day-to-day basis. There’s a cost. Are nonprofits going to be able to invest in the cost of these systems that may only be used — I mean, when is the next catastrophic event? I don’t know. I mean, we haven’t had another one like this for 125 years, so I think that’s a really important question.
What about complaints that the Red Cross was disorganized or too bureaucratic or insensitive to the needs of predominantly black populations?
People are entitled to their opinion. And I think the challenge for us is to sort through and figure out what [problems] were idiosyncratic — just an individual who on that day of the disaster perhaps wasn’t as forthcoming or was too bureaucratic in the response — and what [problems] are really core and central and occurred more than once in some location during this really monumental disaster.
I would say that we were every place we could be, but we clearly, and particularly in the initial days, weren’t every place we would have wanted to be.
Since the hurricane, I have had pretty significant contacts with both national and some local African-American church leaders, for example. I think this is a great opportunity to further the efforts that had been happening prior, and really scale up, ramp up based on the new collaborations and partnerships.
What changes made after the 2001 terrorist attacks made a difference during this disaster?
Almost three years ago we reached out to key nonprofits, such as the Salvation Army, the United Way, and additional partners, and developed the Coordinated Assistance Network. We said, it makes no sense to have each person who is seeking assistance go individually to each of our agencies. We ought to have a coordinated database. And so we developed that. It’s an incredible partnership, and a key to the response.
How do you plan to spend the $2-billion your organization estimates it needs for Katrina relief?
So much of the $2-billion is devoted to family assistance, so that is pretty straightforward. And then the sheltering and the feeding, the mental-health support, the physical and mental-health services.
Already we have spent over $500-milllion.
Will the Red Cross be involved beyond the emergency phase of the disaster?
Our mission is to prepare and respond to emergencies and other life-threatening incidents. So we have focused primarily on the emergency response. The pre-storm sheltering, the sheltering during the storm, and the immediate response afterward. And that really is our focus.
Katrina just lengthens that emergency phase. But it doesn’t change the fact that we don’t see ourselves as taking on many additional longer-term types of mission.
