August 29, 2005, 6 a.m.
A half-hour before dawn, Hurricane Katrina shook sleeping residents of Plaquemines Parish with 144-mile-per-hour winds and relentless rainfall. Cells phone towers lay down before her, broadcast airwaves went blank, and telephone lines thrashed impotently in her wake.
New Orleans, always so full of sass and brio, suddenly went deathly quiet.
By lunchtime the levees protecting New Orleans had breached, and Katrina romped like a brazen, unwelcome houseguest. From the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to the Lower Ninth Ward, her penetrating, stench-bearing trickles proved as insidiously lethal as the more terrifying power of her formidable cascades and surges.
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), remained in Washington, DC, assuring a concerned nation that things were under control. Only one person from FEMA was actually in New Orleans, monitoring the devastation helplessly from the remote viewpoint of a Coast Guard helicopter as he struggled in vain to communicate the burgeoning horror of floating bodies and stranded residents pleading for salvation below.
With cell towers down, the FEMA representative resigned himself to the fact that e-mail was the only form of communication available. He furiously typed urgent pleas for help, advocating for the declaration of a national emergency—a humanitarian cataclysm.
There was no response. At the time, few of the top officials in the US government used e-mail. (Only at a Senate inquiry many months later did officials acknowledge that the crucial e-mail wasn’t read until the next day.)
Some 80% of the city was inundated; residents likewise found themselves unable to communicate locally, relying on unheeded e-mails. In despair, 20,000 huddled at the convention center, another 20,000 were stranded inside the Superdome, and thousands more were scattered on interstate bridges and atop other high-water refuges. Hospitals languished without power or potable water. Scrounging for survival gave way to social breakdown in commercial and residential districts alike. Looting was rampant. Desperation hung in the air. The dead and dying were everywhere.
When frantic locals finally were able to reach FEMA, they were confronted by tiring channels of traditional communication protocol. Local public service agencies reaching out to FEMA were asked to hold—even though every minute counted. Decisions needed to be made quickly, and some dutifully recorded voicemails fell on deaf ears—used only months later for Senate hearings.
For days—while the mortally wounded city foundered—bureaucrats bickered. FEMA clung to its rigid chain of command. State and local officials blustered at the hierarchy, even as they nagged at each other for control and authority. Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast withered and grieved in dealing with developing-world type conditions.
Buses sat idle on the outskirts of the devastation, lacking official permission to deliver crucially needed supplies. Authorities stymied bottled water supplies just outside the city. The list of outrages is as long as the list of issues . . . and it wasn’t that the federal government didn’t care, or that state and local officials were totally lacking in skills and urgency.
There were, however, fundamental struggles over who was to do what, when, and where.
Katrina spawned myriad complex communication needs—a massive demand for a coordinating voice that (and this is crystal clear in retrospect) needed to be pushed outward rather than sucked into accountability-conscious bureaucracies.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff called this communication breakdown a “perfect storm,” conceding the impotency of traditional command-and-control paradigms.
Walmart’s Support and Communications
What most people don’t know is that Walmart’s support and communications had a huge impact—more punch, apparently, than our own government was able to summon. A case study by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government cites the efforts of Walmart CEO Lee Scott, who immediately issued an edict at a corporate upper management meeting: “This company will respond to the level of this disaster. A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available. Walmart’s upper managers passed a simple edict down to store managers: Get it done! Armed with that mission, managers and employees of 126 Walmart stores closed by power outages and structural damage acted on the message. Some 20,000 strong, they labored to open more than half those stores within hours. With their internal wounds quickly being sutured, the Walmart family turned outward. Empowered by upper management, Walmart managers began aggressively handing out free bottled water and other essentials.
While FEMA was still trying to figure out how to requisition supplies to New Orleans, one assistant manager mounted a bulldozer and rolled through the ravaged aisles of her damaged Walmart, literally scooping up usable supplies for distribution to locals in the parking lot. She even took a pharmaceutical order for the local hospital—all with the enthusiastic urging of Walmart management.
Walmart officials understood one benchmark fundamental: Complex problems like Katrina don’t require instructions. They knew that crisis management of Katrina’s magnitude required empowerment—enabling people to “do what’s right” without a leader telling them it’s “OK” to take charge. They focused on keeping people talking and enabling those on the front lines to do what needed to be done. Walmart worked as a team, and even the Red Cross worked with them.
The federal government, significantly, refused to team up with Walmart’s efforts.
Hurricane Katrina Survivor
One Katrina survivor, an upper middle class guy—let’s call him “Larry”—is typical of those thousands of stranded souls. Larry had virtually grown up in New Orleans, and when the pre-hurricane evacuation orders came down, he thought back on the many, many hurricanes he’d witnessed and experienced. With news of yet another hurricane, he drove his wife and son to stay with relatives a couple of states away . . . then drove back to ground zero to board up his windows and make other usual preparations. But even when Katrina started to promise a whole new standard of devastation, Larry didn’t worry much about evacuating. The day before Katrina hit truly was the calm before the storm, he recalls. Like flipping a light switch, the air grew crisp and calm. But by early morning, he knew there would be no leaving.
The water blind-sided his home, Larry said, with devastating speed and impact. By the time the water reached the floor of the attic, his newly purchased Mercedes Benz had long since joined other objects bobbing in the waters like a child’s toy.
Larry cuddled as best he could in the attic, keeping molds at bay by creating a tent from tarps he’d squirreled away over the years. Communications were cut off. The city went dark with the setting sun. The food and water he’d stashed soon began to look meager. He realized early on that Katrina was going to take more than a few hours to fade away. He soon would be witness to a devastation that would forever change his life and take away too many others. It would fundamentally redefine New Orleans.
It was like “a zombie apocalypse,” he said. Debris was everywhere. No power. No fuel. No lights. No transportation. Equally frightening, though, was witnessing the underbelly of society that came alive—looting, stealing and wreaking havoc—leaving nothing to stand in the way of the desperate competition for scarce necessities: water, food, medicines, fuel, transport. It seemed everyone carried weapons. Graveyards were literally giving up their dead. Hospital personnel abandoned the sick for their own survival. IVs dripped until they emptied. Money was worthless, and the skills needed to hide from strangers proved essential.
Some two weeks later, the military brought food and water—precious gifts that Larry stood in line for hours to get. On incredibly hot, muggy September afternoons, ice was dropped onto parking lots for those that had a means to get there.
Larry said the experience actually made him a better person in many ways, but perhaps the most profound lesson was the importance of committing a plan to paper: of how to handle a real emergency, and how to cope with any of a hundred of contingencies that could prove fatal without such forethought. FEMA’s red tape made it essentially worthless. Coast Guard helicopters were literally being shot at—he witnessed one coming down. He heard of potentially lifesaving trailers sitting in the mud on the outskirts of town. In the end, only the Red Cross—along with Walmart and other private sector entities—had any presence that was helpful.
There is no underestimating the devastation Katrina brought to New Orleans. There is also no underestimating the need to really understand what to do in the case of a water or wastewater emergency.
No matter how good the plan or how often it is written down, nothing commits it to memory like practice. We don’t send the military into combat without training. Doctors don’t learn their craft by experimenting mindlessly with life-saving operations. Pilots take lessons, and practice, practice, practice before flying solo.
The Purpose of Water and Wastewater Networking
Survivors of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes continue to preach important lessons of the necessity of preparation and practice preceding the actual devastating experience—the importance of actually going through the motions of what to do in the event of a disaster.
Even emergency plans commonly considered to be models fail to contemplate coordination with outside entities such as FEMA and energy providers—overlooking the logistics of seeking out food sources, safe drinking water, medical personnel, and other essentials—and too often fall short of basic objectives of sustaining life and laying the groundwork for financially recovering from a natural disaster.
California has a system in place that originated in 1992 in the wake of three Bay area events: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a record-breaking freeze in 1990, and the 1991 East Bay Hills firestorm. The system is called WARN—an acronym for Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network. Encouraged by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Cal-WARN is broken down into six regions, each one having a representative. Each region, in turn, has a steering committee of volunteers from the members of the water and wastewater utilities. Each of the six steering committees conducts an annual meeting for member utilities to discuss questions and concerns regarding mutual assistance and emergency preparedness. Similar WARN programs exist in 49 states, the National Capital Region (surrounding Washington DC), and two Canadian provinces.
The essence of WARN is to break down barriers of communication and shared resources—barriers of the sort that prevented badly needed assistance from reaching Katrina’s victims. In a nutshell, WARN is designed to expedite responses between water and wastewater utilities by establishing protocols regarding reimbursement and related legal matters prior to any incident.
Such pre-disaster planning minimizes logistical concerns and paves the way for coordinated response along clearly defined, predetermined guidelines.
Colorado’s CoWARN
Colorado, like so many other states, continues to face a host of natural disasters that threaten to compromise water and wastewater services. Coloradans even had their own “Jamestown Flood” when the normal trickle of the James River swelled following drenching storms in September 2013. The roughly 300 residents of the historic gold-mining town 40 miles northwest of Denver hastily evacuated, but when they returned, they found homes crushed and bridges and roads connecting them to the outside world washed away. And the normally quiet little Jamestown became an island of devastation—its water no longer safe to drink, its delivery system virtually destroyed.
Enter Colorado’s Water and Wastewater Agency Response Network (CoWARN).
Dozens of surrounding entities quickly marshaled resources on a mission of salvage and repair; Jamestown’s water system was flushed and rebuilt as neighbors followed preplanned protocols to get the town back on its feet.
No e-mails needed to be read.
No complex and time-consuming approvals were required.
No, the response was immediate, efficient, and appropriate: The City of Boulder Public Works, Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, and the Colorado Rural Water Association spearheaded the dispatch of specialized equipment and trained personnel. Meanwhile, the Red Cross and Salvation Army provided bottled water and strategically positioned cisterns to store graywater.
The small neighboring town of Empire helped rehabilitate the treatment plant to get that critical infrastructure up and running again. The giant Denver Water leaned on nearly a century of experience in providing operators with storage tank cleansing and flushing needs. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shared in the recovery plans and proved instrumental in restoring safe drinking water by the end of October.
Members of WARN recognize that the damage can always be worse than the last natural disaster, and the potential for man-made emergencies must also be respected. By joining forces with other water and wastewater systems, they can be ready to take care of mutual aid and recognize that every day of recovery brings new challenges. Pre-build or have a plan for potable water stations—and document everything in order to gain financial recovery from FEMA.
If your water or wastewater entity hasn’t done so already, join the WARN in your state. And if your state doesn’t have one—help set it up. Then be sure to communicate with your ratepayers that, while you cannot always prevent disasters, you can and have planned for how to restore water and wastewater services in the most efficient and timely manner.
Resources
American Water Works Association (AWWA). www.awwa.org.
AWWA. www.awwa.org/resources-tools/water-knowledge/emergency-preparedness/water-wastewater-agency-response-network.aspx. July 2015.
