http://junkyardblog.net/archives/2005/09/busted-update.phpThe Ray Nagin memorial motor pool.
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http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1589Public and Private Responses to Katrina: What Can We Learn?
October 20, 2005
Mary L. G. Theroux
This talk was presented at the Chief Executive Organization's Women's Seminar October 7, 2005.
For the lessons to be gleaned in the aftermath of Katrina, I look to two non-profits with which I have been involved for many years and that I see as providing a two-pronged strategy for solving problems—immediate-term and long-term.
I’ve served for 10 years on the San Francisco board, and three years on the National board of The Salvation Army, which Peter Drucker has termed “the most effective organization in the U.S.” It does an amazing job at addressing and alleviating immediate problems and suffering. It brings people in off the street to become clean and sober and learn to lead productive lives through its detox and transitional housing and programming. It provides job training, character-based after-school and summer camp programming for children, toys at the holidays; shelters for battered women and their children; senior feeding and housing; delivery of hot meals to the homebound, housing and programming for aged-out foster care young adults; and is one of the largest relief agencies worldwide. Based in London, it operates in 109 countries every day, with 65,000 employees in the U.S. alone. So when disaster strikes, the Salvation Army is already there, ready to spring into action.
The Independent Institute, where I am a director and Vice President, tackles many of these same problems on a long-term basis. We commission and produce research into the underlying causes of problems like homelessness, urban problems, health-care costs, energy, the crisis in education, drugs, and global poverty. We use these studies to devise and promote innovative, market-based solutions to these problems.
The Gift of Markets
Why market-based? Well, here are some statistics from 100 years ago that I think well illustrate my point:
In 1905, our average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47. Only 14% of homes had a tub; 8% had a phone; 95% of all births took place at home; women washed their hair once a month, using borax or egg shampoo; and the average worker made about $300 per year.
Our rapid advancement to the bounty found in even the poorest home in the U.S. today is due not to any government program or non-profit initiative, but primarily because profit-pursuing individuals have innovated to produce hitherto unknown prosperity.
And it’s also due to the for-profit, market-based sector that many of our threatened crises never materialize. For example, when I was a girl, it was widely predicted that there would be mass starvation in the near future, as exploding populations would overwhelm the planet’s limits on food production. Instead, the development of higher-yielding plants and better farming methods created an international green revolution.
Yet when was the last time you received an invitation for a gala black-tie event honoring a for-profit hero? Don’t most of us instead find ourselves inundated with celebrations of those who have “given back” or honoring “public servant” politicians?
Social Innovation and Civil Society
That said, there certainly are problems we see in our communities that we would like to be able to do something about, and we form non-profit organizations to do so. And innovation and entrepreneurship can do much to address those as well. Americans have a long tradition of banding together to do just that. Probably the best-documented study of this can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. A young French aristocrat, Tocqueville toured America in 1831-32, and he made an amazingly extensive study of our society and institutions. One thing that struck him the most was our penchant for forming what he dubbed “associations”:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or dimunitive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools....
Unlike the societies Tocqueville had known—the England of a privileged aristocracy, where Noblesse Oblige would tend to the poor, or post-revolutionary France, whose strong central government was assumed to be responsible for taking care of all such problems, in the American democratic society power and money were widely diffused among individuals, such that they had to combine forces to solve any given problem:
Among democratic nations ... all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. [emphasis added]
So, I think our tradition of innovative individuals forming alliances to solve problems stands us in good stead. The Independent Institute’s book, The Voluntary City, similarly brings together case studies of innovative alliances that historically met and many which continue to meet, needs from housing, transportation, education, medical care, to police and law courts. Long before there was unemployment or health insurance, for example, many people belonged to mutual-aid societies, into which they would pay dues. When they found themselves out of work, facing unexpected medical or other costs, they could receive funding from the society. By 1925, there were 120,000 such societies across the country.
And so we have a rich and proven-effective tradition of voluntary associations solving problems. Yet, in case after case, we see government taking over more and more of our voluntary sector. And that is why I’m so concerned about the calls in the aftermath of Katrina to expand FEMA and other programs.
First of all, there’s just the plain evidence that the public sector doesn’t do the job nearly as well as the private. Let’s take a look at the vast differences in the responses to Katrina from the public vs. the private sector.
Responses to Katrina: Public vs. Private
FEMA, and all levels of state and local governments in the affected areas have claimed that a disaster of Katrina’s proportions could not have been foreseen or planned for and they should thus be given a pass—or better, yet, a bigger budget and more power—for having performed so badly.
Yet let’s take a look at what happened in the private sector:
The giant private hospital company HCA held a “Hurricane Lessons Learned” planning meeting last fall, following last year’s devastating Florida hurricanes. Some key gaps they identified were: cell phones often fail, so alternative phone systems are needed. Roads become impassable, so emergency supplies have to be stored closer to hospitals. Back-up generators are needed. As a result of the meeting, HCA provided its hospitals with satellite phones, hurricane shutters and additional backup generators. It struck deals with local businesses like refrigeration, water, diesel and gasoline companies, to provide supplies quickly in the event of an emergency. In hurricane-prone areas it also warehoused food, medical supplies and other gear closer to its hospitals. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, senior management set up a “war room” and quickly decided they would need to lease 20 helicopters to evacuate their Tulane hospital. HCA’s chairman and CEO didn’t hesitate in ordering them to do so. They used ham radios to create a makeshift air-traffic control system and immediately began ferrying critically ill patients out, without one mishap.
Literally across the street, the state-run Charity hospital was without emergency supplies and unable to get any governmental help in evacuating. Subsisting on fruit cocktail and a dwindling supply of water, Charity’s patients were only saved by being ferried by boat to Tulane and evacuated by HCA’s privately-leased helicopters.
Similarly, Wal-Mart and Home Depot had emergency-response plans in place and their senior management immediately sprang into action ordering them implemented, sending supplies like generators, food, water, flashlights and batteries into the areas hit. They were able to quickly establish and maintain a supply chain throughout the region. Pfizer distributed needed drugs and medicines via Wal-Mart and other retailers. Budweiser delivered truckloads of water and ice. Ford provided vehicles for search and rescue.
At the heart of the corporate response was a stunning array of advanced communication networks that kept firms in touch and coordinating. Following last year’s tsunami aid effort, the Business Roundtable had arranged for each of its 160 member companies to designate a disaster-relief point man. They were in place and ready before Katrina hit. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce set up a clearinghouse to compile lists of needed supplies. Each donor company indicated what order it could fill, eliminating duplication or delay. Black & Decker’s employees worked through Labor Day weekend to produce more generators.
And on and on.
Meanwhile, what was going on the New Orleans mayor’s and Louisiana governor’s offices? Both expressed frustration and helplessness, caused by having no plans for an emergency of this magnitude. The mayor’s office set up operations in the privately owned and operated Hyatt hotel, judged the safest base. They were equipped with old field-type phones that couldn’t be recharged. Both the governor and mayor claimed they were paralyzed by lack of communication, and pointed the finger at the feds’ failure to come to the rescue. The entire governmental response, from top to bottom, was beset by lack of leadership, action, and absolutely no coordination or communication between any two agencies. It had been immediately pointed out following 9/11 that much of that rescue effort was hindered and many of the deaths of firefighters and police were due to the inability of rescue agencies to communicate among and between themselves. Yet four years later, and despite billions of dollars distributed to and by the new Dept. of Homeland Security, the exact same systems were in place.
When one mayor in Louisiana called FEMA to get supplies, he was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor. Evacuees on a boat could not receive permission to dock along the Mississippi river. A sheriff was told he could only get the help he was seeking if he emailed his request—of course, his parish was flooded and without electricity.
School buses sat idle in parking lots—contrary to the City of New Orleans’ emergency plan that called to use such buses to evacuate residents to safety—not to the Superdome, which lay within the threatened area. Furthermore, the Superdome had been used as emergency shelter before, and there had been violence and civil disorder within it on those occasions. Yet no provision had been made to prevent the recurrence of such violence that had occurred before and worsened under the “hell-like” conditions following Katrina. The people in the Superdome were essentially held under house arrest, not allowed to leave or even go outside for fresh air. No provision was made to provide them food, water, sanitation, counseling, or even communicate to them what was happening and what they could expect. It’s little wonder that such desperate “Lord of the Flies” conditions led to a breakdown in civil society. It could have been a laboratory study in what happens when you treat people like cattle—only worse, because cattle owners feed and water their stock.
A group of 500 guests in French Quarter hotels pooled their resources to come up with $25,000 to charter buses to come and rescue them, subsidizing those without the means to contribute. They waited 48 hours for the buses whose arrival was said to be “imminent,” only to learn that the military had commandeered them as soon as they arrived in the city. Once kicked out of the hotels, “by orders,” they learned they would not be allowed in either of the two city shelters—the Convention Center and the Superdome—which had descended into humanitarian and health hellholes. Yet neither could they leave the city—those trying to leave the city on foot were turned back by armed police, “protecting” neighboring cities from fleeing evacuees. Only those with transport could leave, yet, as we’ve seen, transport was denied them.
Companies wanting to send in planes and helicopters to rescue their people were prohibited from doing so. One company contacted Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal’s office for help identifying who could grant them permission to send in a helicopter to rescue their stranded employees. Unable to find anyone at FEMA, the FAA or the military who would accept responsibility to grant permission, the congressman advised the company to just go ahead.
