A new approach to tackling hurricane disaster response

I think the most frustrating thing for me, of the way the hurricanes have been handled this year isn’t about politics in the narrow sense, or what did the President or the Vice President do?  The most frustrating thing is that 17 years ago, I was co chair of a program to review how we handle hurricanes brought about because Katrina in New Orleans was such a disaster that the US Congress asked an organization, the business executives for national security, to do a year long review of how we deal with hurricanes. They asked me to be one of the co chairs. And so we spent a year looking at the issue in the modern age, with modern technology, modern corporate skills. What could you do to dramatically enhance the speed and effectiveness of helping people  well, particularly as I watch my friends in western North Carolina and my co author, Bill fortune, who’ve written many books together, were very close friends, lives in Boone, right in the heart of the disaster, and he and I were talking regularly all the way through this, and all I can tell you is that the FEMA bureaucracy has not learned anything or changed Anything in 17 years. I’ll give you an example. When we looked at it we realized that, basically, when you’re dealing with an emergency this size, you want to be able to deliver food, water, medicine, etc, as rapidly and as accurately as possible. 

Well, guess who does that every day? FedEx, UPS, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, Target, the big grocery stores these folks, they practice it every day. They cover the country Every day they have trucks and drivers everywhere.  And so we had recommended that we rethink from the ground up, how we do emergency activities, and that we integrate from the very first hour, all of these big, successful companies that know how to get things delivered that you see every week in your neighborhood.I mean, you know how many of those trucks there are out there, and you know how effectively they deliver goods and services. 

My wife Calista, who was the ambassador to the Holy Sea, the Vatican, was right there when Italy was hit with covid, Italy was the first place hit with covid because there are about 100,000 Chinese workers in northern Italy, centered around the town of Bergamo. They came back from China after the Chinese New Year, and they brought covid with them. The Italian public health system began to break down. So my wife, Calista reached out and worked with Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse, and they literally flew in a 68 bed hospital with 65 doctors and nurses. I cite that because Samaritan’s Purse. Franklin Graham are based in Western Carolina. He lives in exactly the area of the hurricane. And guess what? They were there from day one.

So the real lesson here is we need to overhaul the federal bureaucracy. We need to use modern techniques. We need to be able to hook people on day one anywhere in America, no matter what the challenge