TRANSCRIPT: American Red Cross Press Briefing
on Preparations for 2006 Hurricane Season
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WHO: | Joseph C. Becker
Senior Vice President of Preparedness and Response
American Red Cross |
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WHAT: | Briefing to outline American Red Cross Preparations for the 2006 Hurricane Season |
WHEN: | Tuesday, April 11, 10:00 a.m. EST |
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WHERE: | 2006 National Hurricane Conference
Signature One Room
The Rosen Centre Hotel
9840 International Drive
Orlando, Fla. |
Joseph C. Becker:
Good morning and thank you for being here.
We’re here at the Hurricane Conference to join others to make sure that we learn all that we can from our response and others’ responses to last fall’s storms. We at the Red Cross have just finished a, a pretty extensive lessons-learned process, led by our board. But we want to learn all the lessons that we can from our response to Katrina and join our partners here at this conference in doing that.
There are things the Red Cross did well last fall, and there are things that Red Cross needs to do different and better next time. There are things we need to do better in the next catastrophic disaster, but there are ways that we need to become different in our normal, daily disaster work.
This morning I’d like to share two of those key areas of focus. The first is building capacity to serve and the second is building partnerships to serve. First, I’ll talk about capacity in its various aspects.
We had supply-chain issues in the earliest, very chaotic days of last fall’s disasters, moving things to the affected area, moving things through the affected area. To make sure that we can better position our folks and support out people, we are pre-positioning, in advance, more supplies.
You’ll remember that during Katrina we maxed out at about a hundred and fifty thousand people on the biggest night in our shelters. We sheltered about thee and a half million people, the larges night was a hundred and fifty thousand.
We will put in place, in warehouses throughout the affected area and around the country, the supplies that are needed to shelter five hundred thousand people—the cots, the blankets, the supplies that are required for that. We will pre-position meals prepared to eat for a million meals a day and have those near the affected areas, the potential affected areas.
These supplies represent an investment of about eighty million dollars that the American Red Cross is making as we speak.
Also, working with FEMA, we’re building…
Unidentified Male Speaker:
[Unintelligible]
Becker:
…we’re building a national disaster shelter base. Uh, this will help states help communities know where people are sheltered and how many people are in those shelters.
You know, in those earliest days of a disaster, while we’re feeding, while we’re sheltering, we then join others and distribute the items that people need—the bottled water, the diapers, the baby food—things that people need who left their house with very little.
At this point, as the economy starts to recover, the Red Cross then moves to also provide financial assistance. This is meant to cover things best not distributed—clothing, the next set of shoes—things that people need where sizes matter. Or, or gas for their car. This is for mom or dad who ran out of the house with very little, that got their family, and they just need the very basics to go through the next days.
Frankly, our systems to do this last fall were not big enough. They were not robust enough. We had to create new systems on the fly. So while we were sheltering, while we were feeding the sixty million meals and snacks, we were serving about one-point-three million families with financial assistance. It took us about seven weeks to do that. But that’s where we had very long waits in line. That’s where we had very long waits for our call center, as people were on hold.
We’re building an IT infrastructure to be able to support two million families that have need of financial assistance, and we’ll have that in place by July 1st. We’re a call center capacity to handle a hundred thousand families a day. And we have pre-positioned a million debit cards, the cards that we use to provide that financial assistance.
I think it’s important to stress here, though, if the first storm, Alberto, is not catastrophic, if, if it becomes a hurricane, like a Gene or a Francis or an Ivan, we will use the more traditional method of a volunteer working one-on-one with a family. That’s the best way to help people recover—people who can wrap their arms around people, work with them, work with other agencies, and bring recourses to people. It’s only in a catastrophic disaster where will use the call center technology and serve people on a more broad scale like that.
There are other changes in capacity, as well. Our information hotline, the number that you call—“Where is the nearest shelter? Where can I get a meal?”—that will grow again by a third by this hurricane season. And we’re piloting, installing redundant communications equipment and systems in twenty-one cities along nine key-risk states as the first year of a longer-term project.
Each of these building-capacity projects will have its critical elements completed by July one. They’re all projects that are in various stages of development, that the last pieces will be done by July 1st.
But, you know, we can have the ro—most robust systems possible, but what we need to have are the right volunteers in the right places doing the right work. They need to be volunteers that speak the right languages. They need to be volunteers that come from the community and understand the unique special needs of that community. They need to better understand the people who we’re serving. In short, in some ways we need to change who we are.
You’ll remember, during Katrina, in the earliest days, countless organizations, faith community, civic groups, opened their doors and became shelters. And these wonderful people became part of the community’s response, but they fatigued after the early days and they needed support.
The key is to know who those partners are ahead of time and know who we can count on next time. So what we will be about is finding and working with the right partners, community by community. Faith groups. We need more civic groups, more businesses.
And part of this is we recognize that some people are more comfortable being served where they’re ser—where they get assistance in non-disaster times. When my family needs help, maybe I go to my local congregation and they help. So in time of disaster it’s natural for me to turn to them.
We need to seek them out as partners ahead of time. And what we will be asking our local chapters to do is to do is to find the right partners, to offer and train their, their members in how to operate a shelter, or how to operate a kitchen, or how to operate a service center. We will give them the supplies ahead of time. We’ll give them the cots. We’ll give them the blankets.
Very importantly, we wanna work them into the community’s response plan. This is with local emergency management, with local civic leaders. Who are the right partners and how can we bring them into the community’s response? And very significantly, we need to support these partners financially in time of disaster; we need to pay the bills that they incur in operating a shelter, for example.
I’ll give you an example of this. Outside Gulfport there was a significant Vietnamese fishing community, and they were very comfortable and used to being served by their local church. How much better it would have been if we would’ve partnered with that church long before the disaster and we had been able to train them, and we had been able to resource them, and we had been able to support them in time of disaster so that they could do a great job of serving those people, with folks who speak the right language, with folks who understand their special needs.
We do this in some cases in our chapters around the country. What we need to become is an organization that is very good at this. We need to find our right local strategic partners and we need to engage our local communities to decide who those partners ought to be.
You know, at the end of the day, what really matters is that people are serving me who understand me and who know me and can help me. The rural congregation down the country lane should know that it can be part of the community’s disaster response, and the Red Cross can help them become part of that response.
We need to partner in way beyond service delivery. We recognize that we need to become a better partner with state government, and by July 1st we will have hired Red Cross professionals to work full time with state emergency managers in thirteen key-risk states.
We need to work more closely with other nonprofits, sharing information and coordinating. And we have a model for how this looks when we do it right. It’s called the Coordinated Assistance Network.
And this was one of our lessons that we learned after 9/11. We had victims from 9/11 coming to us and saying “I’ve worked with you, I’ve worked with this other organization, I’ve worked with this other organization. How many times do I have to take this death certificate and go tell my same story over and over again? Why can’t you all talk to each other and share that information?”
So we did. And the Red Cross and other national and some local organizations created the Coordinated Assistance Network, and it’s now in over five hundred communities. And if the client says “Okay, if you talk to one of us, you’ve shared the information with all of us.” That way we know who’s done what, we’re not missing service, we’re not duplicating service. That tool works. We’ve been at that for about three years now.
But that’s a recovery phase tool. That’s for the months after the disaster. What we need to become, in the nonprofit world, is a group of organizations that can do that same work in the earliest days, the response phase of a disaster, that we’re working that closely together on feeding, on sheltering, on meeting those immediate emergency needs.
All of the folks at this conference have said for a long, long time, in the large disasters, it takes everybody. And we lived that last fall. But we recognize the role that the Red Cross can and needs to play in bringing others into the response, bringing others in to solve problems, too.
We’ve learned a lot as an organization in the last six months, and we’ve taken a large number of steps to be better this hurricane season. We will be more prepared for the worst-case scenario. If Alberto’s a big one, we’ll be demonstratively better than we were last fall. But we won’t be where we want to be, where we will become long term.
But we also know that the worst-case scenario might not happen again this year, might not happen again for a number of years. But the work that we’re doing to prepare for the catastrophic makes us better for our everyday. Makes us better to serve the victims of the tornadoes of the last weeks, for example.
At the end of the day, people in a disaster just wanna know that people who care are gonna be there to help ‘em. And our volunteers, and the volunteers of the other nonprofits, these are folks that leave their homes for days, weeks, or months at a time. They sleep sometimes in their feeding vehicles.
I remember being in Biloxi at the end of the second week last fall, when the showers finally came, and what that meant to the volunteers that had been there.
These are special people that do whatever it takes. What they need to know is that we’re providing the best possible systems to support them so that they can show how much they care.
We’re here to learn more about how to create those best possible systems. And we’re here to learn how we can get better to respond to the next hurricanes.
Thank you very much. And at this point, we’ll take questions please.
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