Bush Urges Shift in Relief Responsibilities

On Sunday, President Bush called on Congress to consider a larger role for U.S. armed forces in responding to natural disasters, as he completed what White House aides called a weekend "fact-finding" mission to determine whether the Pentagon needs more control.

Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary for the American Friends Service Committee.

" For almost 90 years, the American Friends Service Committee has worked in disaster areas and war zones. Our staff and volunteers have aided tens of millions of people around the world. All of our experience, and that of numerous similar organizations, tells us that the military is no substitute for trained relief and reconstruction personnel. "

Relief is not a core competance of any military. In other words, they aren't very good at it¹. Nor should they be; they have another job.

. . .

¹ Which is not to say that militaries cannot be good at parts of relief work. But "lead agency"? No.

This is a simple brainstorming exercise I often use in my training courses:

You’re an assistance agency and you are here at point A.

(draws an A in the upper left corner of the flipchart)

There are hungry people here at C.

(draws a C in the lower right corner)

Here at B (draws a B in the center of the board) there is a conflict.

Your task is to feed C.

Turn to your neighbor. You have two minutes to come up with as many options as you can. The team with the most options wins a prize.

. . .

Does that scenario sound familiar? Hmm. Where have we seen something like this recently?

It is a common enough situation in humanitarian work. The “conflict” at B can be left undefined, allowing people to fill in their own experience or the facilitator can make it explicit: B might be a group fighting C, B might be groups fighting one another but unrelated to C, B might be gangs of random thugs, B might be rising floodwaters, etc.

No group ever fails to come up with more options than there are people in the group. If there are twelve people in the workshop, collectively they’ll come up with about 18 options in two minutes. Forty people will come up with about 60 options. It’s almost uncanny and profoundly hopeful.

This particular game was developed by Bosnian aid workers facing such a crisis. They stripped their circumstance of all identifying, and therefore prejudicing, characteristics in order to get to the heart of the problem they were facing. They came up with dozens of options, one of which they worked out in detail and used successfully.

The whole exercise takes about thirty minutes; two hours if we’re developing and refining options for an actual problem.

The prize in my workshops is a bag of candy.

Let’s see what we’ve learned.

Three weeks ago we watched the inundation, immersion, and destruction of a major American city. The population of New Orleans was scattered, with a sizeable number heading to Houston (150,000!). Because of this and the media attention that came with the evacuees, Houston residents have had a more personal experience of the costs of Katrina than most of the rest of us.

So, when an even bigger hurricane heads toward Houston, what do we expect the people there to do? Maybe they’ll pack up and leave? You think?

Mayor Bill White suggested that people in low-lying areas of his city might want to evacuate. That’s estimated at about 1 million people. Several hundred thousand people from the Gulf Coast are also moving north. That’s a lot of folks on the roads. Add to them all the people who learned one of the key lessons of Katrina: get out before the government – any level of government – becomes responsible for you.

Why weren’t the inbound lanes of the roads opened to outbound traffic? Why weren’t the police directing traffic more efficiently (they can do a much better job than that)? Why wasn’t there enough gasoline in and around the city? Where are the buses to evacuate those without transportation? Where are the citizen caravans of neighbors helping neighbors?

(I expect that we’ll soon be hearing some heartwarming stories about neighborhoods working together. But why do we also hear the Mayor direly warning that for people who don’t have any options "There will not be enough government vehicles to go and evacuate people in all the areas"? Why the fuck aren’t there enough vehicles, Mayor White?)

Is there enough water and food in the city? Are there stores of it in appropriate locations (how far will people have to walk)? How many National Guardsmen are in the city? How quickly will the airport be able to reopen for relief flights? How quickly will the city’s electrical grid be repaired? Are there enough engineers and maintenance workers still in the city? If there is “no gasoline left in the city”, are there still some stores for the rescue vehicles, the maintenance vehicles, the chainsaws?

How is the morale of the police department? Will they stick to their posts?

Are there convoys of water and food and fuel heading toward the city? Are there rescue efforts underway to take people off of the highways? Or will some people have to weather the storm huddling by their broken down jalopy?

Is there a chain of command? Is there anyone who is responsible?

Will anyone be held accountable?

I just got off the phone with my New Orleans friends. They got out of the city and headed west before Katrina hit. They were calling from the road because they’re evacuating again.

They were calling to ask about my father who has been in the hospital.

This is neat! Cutting $400 billion is nothing. It's that hundred billion of additional spending that keeps me in the red.

(Why, yes, my America does spend more on international assistance - and education and other domestic anti-poverty programs. A lot more.)

at Harper's

“It's possible that authorities were wise to hold back food and water for five long days because it was too dangerous to proceed into the city. Perhaps the gangs of thugs were so numerous and so dangerous that police had to keep women and children from leaving the city on foot because some criminals might sneak out with them.”

One trusts that Digby says this with a certain irony.

All over the world, there are dedicated humanitarian professionals who take assistance into conflict zones. Simply, New Orleans doesn’t even register on my scale of “dangerous”.

Disasters. That's what my company does: we learn about them and then offer lessons for dealing with the variety of crises. Sure, we focus on international work and not domestic, and most of our recent work is conflict related, but disasters - of all sorts - is what we do.

One of my older colleagues is an expert on disasters, on both humanitarian relief and the transition to development - one of the real, knows her shit and has forgotten more than you will ever know, experts. She's as level headed as they come and is always working her way through events, analyzing, picking things apart and finding the good, the bad, the opportunities and separating them for action.

On the Wednesday after Katrina hit, we were discussing the response and this colleague began to rail. She never rails. She was spitting furious at FEMA, at Blanco, at Bush, at Nagin, at the Red Cross. It was shocking to see her so angry.

In the weeks since, I've heard the same fury from colleague after colleague, across organizations.

This wasn't supposed to happen in the US.

Disasters cannot be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the aftermath of disasters can be made much worse and recovery can be slowed (and sometimes even halted) by too much money spent poorly.

Too much money has already been raised and no plan to spend it. When I consider that the folks in charge of writing the checks are the same folks who turned a hurricane into a disaster, then I'm not hopeful.

What people on the Gulf Coast need is not money, but jobs. If you have one to offer you'll do more good than any donation.