My experiences with FEMA and disaster relief
My experiences with FEMA and disaster relief
From Katrina, Ivan, Michael and the Tuscaloosa tornado
I can’t tell you what is happening on the ground in western North Carolina. I am reading all sorts of things.
Recently, following the first assassination attempt on former President Trump, I relayed my two experiences with presidential security to provide context.
With that in mind, I can just add a little to the conversation by telling you my experiences with disasters and FEMA.
On April 27, 2011, I sat at my desk at the office of the Dothan Eagle and watched Birmingham television on my laptop. It showed a massive tornado approaching Tuscaloosa.
“A lot of people are probably going to die soon,” I said to a coworker as we watched in silence.
Two days later, I was with a group of men on the way from Dothan to Tuscaloosa, carrying supplies, chainsaws, rakes and anything we believed could help.
Agencies rushed into the area, including FEMA. The twister cut a swath straight through Tuscaloosa that claimed 64 lives and did an estimated $2.4 billion in damage. The city’s emergency operations office was destroyed, cell towers were blown down and most residents were still in shock.
We grabbed what we could and headed for Tuscaloosa. We were told to meet at a certain location and we would be assigned a place to go to begin helping. When we got there, the place was overwhelmed. No one seemed to be sure who we were, who told us to be there or where we were supposed to be.
One person there suggested a place where people were believed to need help. We went there, but either misunderstood directions or the person talking to us had been given bad information.
So, we decided to just help who we could, where we could.
What we learned from our couple of days there was that disasters are chaotic. That’s why they’re called disasters. We can believe we are prepared to respond, but nature has a way of putting us in our place. It takes time to set up the infrastructure necessary to respond to a disaster.
As an aside, the best prepared agency for responding to a disaster is Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. You can give to their Helene efforts here.
I also covered disasters created by hurricanes Ivan, Katrina and Michael. I drove to dropoff sites and saw heaping mounds of socks, blankets, toys, sweatpants, baby clothes and hundreds of other miscellaneous items piled 15 feet high.
“A lot of this will never get to anyone,” someone told me at an Ivan dropoff site. “People mean well and are doing what they can. Most of what we get here, people don’t need. And, a lot of what they do need, we aren’t getting yet. The best thing people can do is give money to an agency or send gift cards.”
I went into Bayou la Batre a few days after Hurricane Katrina. The damage was so widepsread, FEMA still hadn’t arrived to begin assessing needs, despite so many in the town having lost their homes.
“I’m 46 years old,” said a woman who wandered in to the town’s community center for a hot meal and a place to sleep.
She wept.
“I just can’t start over again. I can’t.”
The assistance could never come fast enough for the displaced. Whether it was in a city like Tuscaloosa, where the damage could be traced across a map within a fairly concentrated area, or in a little town of 2,400 like Bayou la Batre.
Now imagine the disaster is all across the mountains of Western North Carolina, where people purposely decide to live because they can be by themselves on the side of a mountain, away from everything, one little scraggly vertical road reaching their home.
What little mountain infrastructure there was has been washed down the hills and deposited into small villages further down the mountain.
It is a disaster on top of a disaster on top of a disaster.
If hiccups occur in delivering relief to concentrated cities and towns like I experienced, why would we think it could be done smoothly to thousands of remote little pockets on the sides of mountains with no roads leading there anymore?
I relay these experiences because this is what I learned: The government is slow. It was never really meant to be nimble in most instances. Bureaucracies aren’t fast by definition. It comes to me as no surprise that there are hitches in the disaster response.
This could be one reason seemingly inexplicable stories emerge during disasters where good samaritans are told to go home or victims appear to be given a cold shoulder. We’ve been reading about these a lot since Helene dumped a small sea on the mountains.
If you want to know what it is like to respond to a disaster like this, imagine putting 2,000 people into a basketball gym and tell them 100 people need help immediately.
Then turn out the lights. Then tell them that every time they bump into each other in their effort to respond that someone is going to post about it on social media and it’s going to go viral.
This is no defense of FEMA, or any random small town official who told volunteers to stop helping people or any high ranking government official who may have been asleep at the wheel.
It is simply a compilation of personal experiences to add to the conversation.
Finally, in addition to Southern Baptist Disaster Relief I mentioned above, my wife and I donated to Operation Airdrop, who has been dropping supplies to remote areas in the mountains.
Find a way to help.