CHAPEL HILL -- Four years later, no one can forget the horrifying images from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after hurricanes Katrina and Rita: Many were killed and thousands more were rendered homeless, helpless or hopeless. Too many of those were among the most vulnerable to disasters -- already poor, elderly, disabled or otherwise not able to survive and recover on their own. They had everything to lose, and did.
Ten years ago, Eastern North Carolina saw its own catastrophe brought on by Hurricane Floyd: 18,000 square miles flooded, 17,000 homes destroyed, more than 50 people killed. In New Orleans, blame was focused on the breach of two levees -- but for an inordinate number of people who struggle for years to recover from disasters, more significant is the breach of faith in an emergency management system that is supposed to be a safety net.
"You know, the tragedy wasn't the water," Lewis Turner, one of Floyd's victims, told the Rocky Mount Writing Workshops. "The tragedy was the way the system treated the people."
Too often in disasters, the problems of the most vulnerable are compounded when they arrive at an inadequate, understaffed and under-stocked shelter and continue with endless frustration as they navigate a confusing relief bureaucracy. Yet they have no place else to turn, and, repeatedly, a system that is supposed to reduce loss of life and property and assist in recovery has not met their needs.
As we mark the beginning of hurricane season tomorrow, it is essential that North Carolina look hard at whether we're doing enough to make sure this doesn't happen again -- that state and local emergency managers have adequate plans and resources to respond to the needs of those least able to help themselves. It is even more critical now, when a recession has many already on the brink of losing everything.
We know how to do it. For the last four years, through a $2 million cooperative agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, MDC Inc. -- with the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center -- has been working in eight states and the District of Columbia to research and test solutions. We have learned that doing better means working differently: engaging the most vulnerable members of a community in a process coordinated with local emergency management to identify community concerns and capacities and link them with state, national and private resources so every member of the community can protect his hard-earned assets, survive and recover.
For instance, in Hertford County, in rural, northeastern North Carolina, we learned that standard emergency preparedness lists called for items that were unrealistic for many with limited incomes, such as weather radios and extra medications. With input from Hertford residents, county emergency managers amended plans and maps to better reflect the conditions, concerns and capacities of the most vulnerable groups and enlisted them in efforts to spread information about shelters, injury prevention and hurricane and winter storm preparedness. A new Citizen Corps Council was created, and 17 people were trained to support county emergency response efforts when the need arises.
In Bayou LaBatre, Ala., on the Gulf of Mexico and hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina, we are working with a community of Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai and Cambodian shrimpers and crabbers. There, we helped the local office of emergency management identify community leaders and get a better understanding of the most culturally appropriate strategies. In partnership with the local community foundation, we are connecting the community to new resources for preparedness and recovery. One result is the retrofitting of a building next to a Buddhist temple for storage of emergency supplies and food familiar to the community.
We've come up with a set of tools that emergency managers anywhere can use. These are promising strategies for addressing the needs of immigrants, the homeless, renters, mobile home residents, children, low-income families, individuals with special medical needs and more. Applying the strategies in advance could save lives and would cost a fraction of the near half-billion dollars spent to recover from Floyd and the still mounting billions spent on Katrina.
North Carolina has long been a national leader in emergency management. Right now, communities around the state are revising and updating their emergency plans. To maintain the state's leadership role, we must set a new standard for the extent to which our collective efforts account for the needs of the most vulnerable so that when the next hurricane, tornado, fire or industrial disaster strikes, the tragedy isn't the way we treat our people.
John Cooper, Ph.D., is director of the Emergency Preparedness Demonstration at MDC Inc., a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit. Previously he was with the N.C. Division of Emergency Management and participated in the agency's responses to hurricanes Fran and Floy
