Lessons of Katrina a help with Gustav
Posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008
Efforts to help those who fled Hurricane Gustav find shelter in Arkansas and other states were widely viewed as a success by Arkansas officials and community organizers although plans set up to deal with evacuees faltered, they said, when it came time to help people return home.
More than 5, 400 evacuees were housed in Arkansas at the state-managed Fort Chaffee in Fort Smith as well as at county shelters managed by the American Red Cross and churches. An unknown number of people stayed in hotels and motels. By Friday afternoon, more than half had left, according to data from the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management. Beginning Friday night, officials began returning the more than 2, 300 people who stayed at Fort Chaffee.
However, about 1, 800 refu- gees who arrived at other Arkansas shelters on their own still remained in the state Friday, in part because many couldn’t afford the return trip, shelter managers and local officials said.
“Anecdotally, we’re hearing they’re going to need some assistance,” said David Maxwell, Arkansas’ director of emergency management.
Those running local hospitals also reported problems returning people evacuated from hospitals in Louisiana.
Overall, state and local emergency planners and volunteers said the evacuation process went smoothly with few problems — particularly when compared with the evacuation that took place during Hurricane Katrina three years ago, the largest the nation had done until this year.
“It was a much more controlled situation,” Maxwell said about the Hurricane Gustav evacuation.
Maxwell was deputy director of the state Department of Emergency Management during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation in 2005. Between 13, 000 and 15, 000 people took shelter in Arkansas then, according to estimates made by his department.
The number of evacuees overwhelmed state resources, he said. On the first day of the 2005 evacuation, buses dropped off more than 4, 000 evacuees at Fort Chaffee — equaling the total number the state had prepared to accept. “There were a lot of phone calls between us and Louisiana and us and [Federal Emergency Management Agency ] and the governor’s office on how many we would be able to support, how many we would shelter and how they should arrive,” Maxwell said. “And that just kind of fell apart, due to a lot of reasons. I blame most of it on the federal government.” In 2007, Arkansas signed an agreement with Louisiana limiting the number of evacuees it would accept during a disaster to 4, 000. The agreement also dictated how those evacuees would arrive at Fort Chaffee, the state’s largest shelter. “We told them we had to have at least half of them by buses, and the buses had to remain with them,” Maxwell said. “You don’t want them to be prisoners there on Chaffee.” Lt. Col. Robin Reeves, operations officer at Fort Chaffee, said that agreement helped the evacuation process during Hurricane HurGustav be more organized and efficient. “We learned a lot of lessons,” Reeves said. “Everything we did this time was well planned. The coordination, communication and cooperation between the Arkansas National Guard, the Sebastian County Department of Emergency Management and Arkansas Department of Emergency Management has been outstanding.” A DIFFERENT PLAN A key part was the decision to close Fort Chaffee to evacuees who arrived in the state on their own.
Unlike during Katrina, Fort Chaffee was open only to evacuees who arrived in Arkansas on public transportation. Around the state, Red Cross shelters and those run by churches were set up to help evacuees who had their own transportation.
Those shelter managers also reported improvements in the overall evacuation process during Hurricane Gustav.
Information, they said, flowed much better this time. A daily conference call at 2 p.m. provided details about evacuees and conditions in Louisiana and helped the state’s Emergency Management Department coordinate with local officials and volunteer shelter managers.
“Night and day,” Kathy Botsford, director of Pulaski County’s Office of Emergency Management, said of the difference in the process. “It was much more organized. We had a really good idea of how many evacuees we were going to get.... Before there was a lack of information from state to state.” The communication and coordination also was improved with the use of the state’s new emergency operations center at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock, which opened in June 2007, Maxwell said. Three years ago, the state’s emergency operations for evacuees were conducted out of an old facility half its size in Conway.
“The governor didn’t feel comfortable leaving the capital city, and our biggest problems were in making sure that decisions made there were communicated,” Maxwell said.
Resources, too, were stockpiled and made readily available, in part because after hurricanes Katrina and Rita the American Red Cross opened a disaster field-supply center in Pine Bluff. The warehouse, which opened in February 2007, is a 28, 000-square-foot building that stores cots, food and other items needed in an emergency such as ice chests, garbage bags, buckets and cleanup kits.
Roger Elliot, state disaster director for the Red Cross of Greater Arkansas, said having the warehouse nearby enabled shelters that needed resources, such as extra cots, to get supplies faster. “We made the phone call, sent the faxes to make that happen, boom. We were done,” Elliot said. The local division of the Salvation Army also found the things it needed more easily. David McDonald, state disaster coordinator for the Salvation Army — a new position created in 2006 in response to the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita — said serving meals at Fort Chaffee was far less burdensome. “We had everything immediately available to us,” he said. “Last time, we didn’t have it. We had to go out to Wal-Mart to try and buy food supplies.” The Salvation Army also divided its duties with the Southern Baptist Association, which cooked food for the more than 2, 300 evacuees at Fort Chaffee while the Salvation Army took care of the serving and the cleaning. During hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Salvation Army was in charge of it all. “They just took a huge load off of us by doing the cooking,” McDonald said. “When you are serving that amount of people, it takes everything you’ve got to keep up with it.” UNRESOLVED CONCERNS While officials and volunteers across the board praised Arkansas’ emergency response to Hurricane Gustav, there were glitches. “There’s still a lot of work to be done as far as everything being totally organized,” said Hempstead County shelter manager Janice Mann. Mann said the county, which at its peak sheltered 149 evacuees, received some families with special accessibility and medical needs that it was not equipped to help. “Later, we found out that there was a shelter in Texarkana designated for special needs,” she said. She said, too, that four evacuees with special needs — one stroke victim, one with Down’s syndrome and two others with mental illness — were put in a taxi in Shreveport and sent to the shelter in Hope.
“We don’t know why,” she said.
And, throughout the state, shelter managers reported that many refugees who left on their own in response to mandatory evacuation orders were running out of money and struggled to pay for the gas needed to get home.
Matt Burks, emergency management administrator for Little Rock, said Friday there were about 130 people still in the city’s shelters.
“The majority of them had personal transportation, but claimed they did not have enough money to get back home,” Burks said.
He said the city was still trying to find a way to help.
“That coordination probably could have gone a little better,” Burks said.
Leaders in hospitals participating in the federal government’s National Disaster Medical System also reported problems with finding ways to enable refugees to return.
“I don’t think the federal folks thought about how to get people home,” said Peter Banko, president and chief executive officer of the St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock.
The hospital accepted 63 evacuees from Hurricane Gustav within a 24-hour time period last week.
He said those discharged from St. Vincent’s were, for the most part, on their own, adding that the hospital did drive some people home in vans Thursday and was trying on Friday to coordinate more transportation with bus companies. Patients who still need medical care will remain at St. Vincent’s instead of being returned to Louisiana.
“We’re taking it on as if they walked off the street in Little Rock,” Banko said.
Ron Crane, emergency preparedness manager for UAMS, also said the federal transportation of medical patients was flawed.
“We might be taking quite a substantial monetary hit,” to transport people back, he said.
He said UAMS accepted 24 patients, some of whom were nursing home residents, and that he was afraid it would fall on the hospital to ensure their return. “The National Disaster Medical System needs to take heed and listen to the local hospitals that have gone through this not once but twice, and they need to figure out what they are doing and find a way to fix the system.... If you get them out, you need to have a plan in place to get them back.” INFORMATION GLITCHES Hospital staffs also reported some misinformation regarding the patients they would be receiving, and said they were inundated with calls at the height of the evacuation from family members trying to find out where their loved ones had been sent. In one case, Banko said, a woman who delivered her baby in a hospital in Louisiana was sent to St. Vincent’s while her newborn was sent to Alexandria, La. The father was also left in a different part of the state. “Babies should always be with moms,” Banko said. Banko said the new mother had left the hospital by Friday after hospital staff helped her with clothing and money, but he did not know if she had been reunited with her husband or child. Laurie Driver, a spokesman for the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, which in times of disaster helps coordinate transportation for patients, said she had heard about the new mother but had no more information. She said the decision to separate the mother and the baby was not made by Arkansas officials.
“Communications back to the family is one of the issues we’re trying hard to improve,” Driver said.
She added there can be some difficulty contacting family members in emergency situations, either because they’ve evacuated and can’t be located or because of power failures and difficulty getting through on phone lines.
A toll-free number has been set up for family members to track loved ones, she said.
She said the evacuation from Hurricane Katrina was the first time the National Disaster Medical System had been activated. There were lessons learned, she said, but since the response is to a disaster of some kind, “There are always going to be a few glitches here and there.” She said the system will also need to work on getting better information about the patients being evacuated.
“We would like to get patient manifests ahead of time,” Driver said. “That did not happen this time. We got a manifest, but it was not accurate.” But she also noted that getting patients out is usually the priority.
“Sometimes in a disaster you take what you can get and you deal with it,” she said.
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