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By Alison Dunn
Hurricane Katrina rocked the nation in general and our industry in particular.
It changed the way we write our plans and prepare our business and families for disaster.
Or did it?
That's the question Brandon Bond is asking. Bond, a disaster preparedness manager with Kaiser Permanente National Security Services, was a member of the US Department of Homeland Security's Bay Area Disaster Medical Assistance Team, and was flown in to the Superdome after the levees failed.
"As another major incident happens, everyone will get excited about it for a short period of time,' he says. "But at what point do we stop having a 'raised awareness?'" He says that while Hurricane Katrina offered many lessons, have we actually learned any of them?
In the days and months following the disaster, we realized we weren't as prepared for disaster as we thought.
"We don't wake up until we get slapped in the face," says Ret. Col. Jeff Smith, Director of Louisiana's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. "Well, we, as a nation, got slapped in the face. And we need to wake up."
So what are the lessons of Hurricane Katrina? We asked some of the top names in the field to find out. Are they lessons we have learned? Only time will tell.
We need to remember the all-hazards approach to preparedness
"It is very easy to demonstrate that, after 9/11, the focus shifted very dramatically [toward terrorism] at the federal level, if you wanted to keep the funding," says Col. Smith. "We forgot that, in many cases, the largest terrorist out there is a natural disaster."
"We need the true all-hazards approach," he adds. "We need to decide that both functions are critical - fighting terrorism and the response and recovery from a disaster - but they are two separate things. You can't mix the two together. You can prevent a terrorist attack. You can only prepare for a hurricane. You can't prevent it."
It's a lesson that businesses, too, need to learn. "We have to build our plans around a worst-case scenario of totally losing the business and having no building left," says Gerry Printz, President of AMSADOR, Ltd. "I don't care what caused it. The bottom line is we lost the building."
Personal preparedness is as important as ever - and we all need to do it
With so many people displaced along the Gulf Coast, Katrina showed that most of us just aren't prepared to get ourselves and our families through a disaster.
"You had between 60,000 and 125,000 people in the city of New Orleans who didn't plan," says Bond. "And when the civilian population, and that includes private industry, doesn't plan for a disaster...the available resources are only going to go so far."
While there is an onus on the population to prepare personally, private companies can help by educating their employees. After all, if employees are dealing with a catastrophe at home, it's unlikely they'll be able to come into work.
"When you look at Katrina, the message there is you can't count on your staff," says Paul D'Arcy, Vice President of Marketing for Message One. "Once there's an impact to people's families, people choose their families, and rightly so."
Office Depot knows only too well you can't run a business without your staff. That's why the office supplies retailer works hard to encourage employees to prepare at home, says Tom Serio, Office Depot's director of global business continuity. For the past two years, the company has hosted a "Hazard Fair" for its employees to help educate them on what to do before, during and after a disaster.
Not only that, but the company took significant steps to ensure their employees weathered Katrina with minimal impact. "The amount of people impacted by those events was huge," Serio says. "And those people are your employees...we had an obligation to reach out to them and say, 'Hey, you just went through your own personal disaster. Let's help you."
We need to re-think evacuation planning
Probably one of Katrina's biggest lessons, which came up during Hurricane Rita as well, is that we have to go back and fundamentally reevaluate our capability to evacuate large urban areas. That's not an easy task, says John Copenhaver, President and Chief Executive Officer of DRI International.
"I don't know how we can do it, to be honest," he says. "I'm not even sure that it's possible to evacuate a very large urban area very, very quickly. We have to understand, what are legitimate expectations? If we set performance goals for being able to evacuate people, what should they be?" he asks.
And it's not just about getting people out before a disaster hits. You have to begin the plans from start to finish, says Col. Smith. "When do you tell them to leave? In what sequence do you tell them to leave?"
In a city like New Orleans, for instance, where there is limited transportation infrastructure, people who live down at the coast have to come through the city to evacuate. If you don't get them out just right, you have gridlock. Emergency managers need to carefully determine what type of evacuation, in what phase, needs to be done.
We must prepare shelter-in-place plans and plan to be away for longer times
During his time at the Superdome, Brandon Bond says the conditions steadily worsened. Clearly, the need to prepare - and improve - shelter-in-place plans is a big lesson from Katrina.
"Whenever you have that many people out on the road, there aren't enough hotels, motels and relatives where people can stay, so you have a sheltering issue," says Col. Smith. "And that shelter has to have not only food, water and ice, it has to have security. It has to have medical access."
Ann Pickren, senior vice president for SunGard Availability Services, says Katrina also taught us that plans must account for the possibility of more than 30 days away from home.
"I see many more people engaging in writing plans," she says, "but they are getting very complacent about long-term outages. They're thinking the average [time away] has been much shorter, but with Katrina alone, it dramatically changed. They never thought of the fact that they might have to be there for 30-plus days."
Public/private partnerships are the key to preparedness
"Private industry has a tremendous amount of resources, and can take a larger role [in disasters,]" Bond says. "If you look at companies like Wal-Mart, and how they were providing supplies to the community...that's taking one person away from the problem of having to be reliant on the available public safety and federal resources."
"It's going to take the executives of large corporations functioning as role models and saying we, as the private sector, have to get our act together," agrees Copenhaver. "And now, they need to do it for two reasons. One: because it's the right thing to do for their corporations and the communities in which they reside. Two: because it may be the case that the federal government's not going to be able to do what it has in the past."
Office Depot's Serio agrees. With a head office based in Florida, his BC planning revolves around hurricanes and he wants to ensure a seat at the table to keep on top of impending disasters.
He's working with Palm Beach County to have a "virtual seat" in their emergency operations center. "When the county decides at 10 o'clock that they've got to close the schools at 12 o'clock, I want to know at 10:01 they've made that decision, because that's going to dictate how we do our evacuations and our closing here," he says.
Politics cannot get in the way
during a disaster
"One of the things that got so frustrating was people pointing fingers everywhere, whether it was the feds at the state, the state at the feds, or the feds at the locals," says Col. Smith.
Whether it was Michael Brown's ignominious departure from FEMA or the amount of blame laid on the various agencies responsible for the Katrina response, the whole situation was a lesson on how politics gets in the way of disaster.
"When you're up to your [eyeballs] in alligators, that's not the time to worry about draining the swamp," says Carlo Boccia, Director, Mayor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, City of Boston. In other words, the middle of a disaster is not the time to start getting political.
And it still may prove impossible to keep politics out of it, Boccia says. "We can plan, we can exercise, we can train, we can drill, but if we don't take into consideration the political reality of a disaster, we are bound to fail," he says. "Make sure you have the appropriate political buy-in, and the understanding on the part of the politicians that they may have to sacrifice some political expediency to make sure that lives and property are saved."
We must cut back on red tape
Those people responsible for the post-Katrina recovery in Louisiana are concerned about the amount of red tape and bureaucracy surrounding the issue, Col. Smith says.
"One of the things that we need to learn as a nation is that the Stafford Act, which is the nation's only vehicle for recovery, is totally inadequate in almost all respects...but for a catastrophic event, it does not provide the type of things that are necessary to truly recover rapidly," he says.
The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, more commonly known as the Stafford Act, is the nation's recovery legislation. But Smith is adamant the Act needs an overhaul, if only to cut back on the amount of red tape recovery teams must wade through.
Smith gives just one example of how crippling the bureaucracy is: The Act has prohibitions against going on private property unless it's a matter of life or safety. If the team has to remove a fallen tree on a piece of private property, they must go out and take a picture of the fallen tree to prove it is a safety issue.
"In a normal disaster, maybe you've got to go out and take pictures of 50 trees," he says. "Well, to do it for 50 trees, it's aggravating but it's feasible. But if you have to do that for 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000, it just stops the process completely."
And government red tape isn't the only thing that stops recovery. AMSADOR's Printz says companies are also guilty of getting bogged down in bureaucracy.
"I've dealt with some people that wouldn't buy a paper clip unless it was approved," he says. "Whatever bureaucracy you have, you've got to think about it ahead of time and figure out how to reduce it so in a disaster, you can just operate."
Training is vital for emergency managers
"There's a funny kind of mentality that everyone thinks just anybody can do a disaster," says Jane Bullock, a former top FEMA staffer under James Lee Witt and a Research Scientist and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Crises, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University. "That anybody can be an emergency manager. But Katrina showed so clearly that to be good at emergencies, you have to make decisions very quickly, often with limited information."
John Copenhaver agrees. It is training and experience that makes a good emergency manager. "You have to understand that when you're in the middle of a disaster, people are going to react in certain ways, and you have to understand what the altered reality of a disaster looks like," he says.
"If you've got a hospital that's short on doctors, do you just want to go hire people off the street and call them doctors?" he adds. "Or take a bunch of kids out of high school football and put them up against the Pittsburgh Steelers?"
Work out communication plans
ahead of time
Katrina was a unique disaster in that it knocked out every possible mode of communication. "If there's no way to reach someone, there's no way to reach them," Message One's D'Arcy says. "You've got to make sure there's an easy way for them to reach you."
SunGard's Pickren says it was startling how many people weren't available, and that showed how we need to start seriously incorporating communications into our BC planning. "There is a need for crisis management tools to help you manage through an event," she says. "To be able to communicate and keep people on the same path is very important."
Some companies did a good job at communicating with employees. Office Depot gave employees a conference call number they could use. According to Tom Serio, employees called the number, left their employee ID, gave a number where they could be reached and let the company know if they needed help.
"We had a hard time finding folks," Serio says. "They evacuated to four corners of the country. We didn't have contact information. So, we turned it around. We said, 'you call us. You tell us where you are. If you need help, tell us and we'll help you.'"
The industry needs to mobilize
They key to learning something from all these lessons is action. To ensure we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again, we need to mobilize as an industry to make change.
"I would have thought that in the aftermath of Katrina, with so many people asking so many questions and it being such a hot issue in front of congress, that more would have happened by now," says Copenhaver. "But it just doesn't seem like it is."
"The problem with emergency management is it never had a real constituency," says Bullock. "They never got together and organized."
How can the industry mobilize? One idea is to create a "United Nations" for the industry, where everyone who works in emergency management, business continuity and disaster recovery unites to increase our effectiveness. Unless we work together, we won't be able to make the necessary changes to turn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina into lessons learned.
"I think a coalition of people who have a vested interest in reducing the impact of disasters is a very good idea," says Bullock. "The private sector can bring a lot to bear on local elected officials...change is going to have to come from the outside."
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