Lessons learned from Hurricane Floyd
Soldiers talk of a "fog of war." The term describes not only the haze of smoke that suffuses the field of battle, but the confusion that afflicts fighters in the chaos of combat.
Something similar confronts those who find themselves in the middle of a disaster. They can mistake friend for foe. Rumors run rampant. Bureaucrats make mistakes. Insurance adjusters, federal inspectors and repair contractors shove papers into the hands of the bewildered, urging them to sign.
These are some of the key lessons taught by Hurricane Floyd when it flooded vast areas of eastern North Carolina in the fall of 1999 ...
... A coastal mayor complained that federal officials weren't equipped to help her townspeople recover from sea surge and wind damage but were prepared to help inland dwellers deal with floods. Political leaders from inland towns scoffed at the complaints of beach dwellers ...
... Take the case of the town of Oak Island, N.C. The tourist town on the Atlantic Ocean near the mouth of the Cape Fear River took a pounding when Hurricane Floyd hit it straight on.
Co-mayor Joan Altman said in 1999 she was shocked when FEMA inspectors arrived in Oak Island, took a look around and declared that they had come with the wrong software on their laptops.
"It turned out the program wasn't for coastal towns," Altman fumed at a meeting with then-FEMA director James Lee Witt, who expressed sympathy.
The FEMA inspectors came to town with software for estimating damage caused by inland flooding. A different kind of insurance -- and a different way of estimating damage -- applies to buildings near beaches. Worse, Altman said, business owners received conflicting information from government agencies.
Altman worried that the software glitches and conflicting information could delay the rebuilding process.
"After a disaster people have a need, and the economy has a need, for a fast recovery," she said ...
Dealing with disaster
PRINCEVILLE, N.C. -- Charles R. Dew can carry what he didn't lose in the flood: a set of work clothes, a framed Army discharge certificate and little else.
The honorable discharge, wrinkled but legible behind clouded glass, still hangs on a bedroom wall in his house, where the water rose inside to the height of a basketball hoop and stayed 12 days.
Two weeks after the September flood caused by Hurricane Floyd, Dew returned to his home to find all the furniture from his bedroom in the living room. The living-room furniture was in the kitchen, where a light bulb in the ceiling fan was filled with water. The soaked ceiling, burdened by drenched insulation, had crashed to the floor. The house is a total loss.
"I lost my job, I lost my business, my home, my cars, my clothes," Dew says, ticking off each item on the fingers of a hand. "But I got out with my life." ...
... Take the example of James Harper, who says he hasn't returned to his job at a steel mill because he doesn't have a car. But a look in his eyes suggests that he is so filled with despair that he can do little but get out of bed in the morning.
He is staying just north of Rocky Mount, where he, his wife and four daughters squeeze into a government-provided, 20-foot-long trailer -- one of 335 crammed practically wheel-to-wheel amid cotton fields. These aren't mobile homes -- they are trailers that you can pull with a pickup truck.
Residents of this makeshift village have nowhere else to stay. There just aren't enough houses to go around because so many were destroyed in the floods. Harper says he and his wife were lucky enough to find a rental house recently, but their application was turned down because of credit problems.
Harper -- a man who lived in the South Bronx for several years before fleeing back to his native North Carolina -- is desperate to get out of the trailer village. Eyeing idle neighbors with distaste, he says: "The only problem I have with FEMA is I want them to inspect my house so I can get out of here. I don't want to be here and my kids don't want to be here and my wife don't want to be here."
But here they are, their exodus delayed by a misunderstanding with a FEMA inspector. They were supposed to meet at a firehouse 19 miles away in Tarboro, then drive to the Harper family's rented house (they had moved into it the day before the flood).
But as Harper tells it, he and the inspector went to different firehouses. Harper set up another appointment, but that inspector canceled and left when Hurricane Irene threatened the east coast. Six weeks after losing his uninsured 1977 Ford Ranger pickup and the family's possessions in the flood, he still awaits an inspection of the house they were renting and its contents.
Watching listlessly over his two daughters who aren't yet school age, Harper says, "All I can do is wait and pray. That's all I can do right now." ...
... Communications breakdown
One of the worst things about being displaced by a disaster is the isolation. In the trailer village outside Rocky Mount, none of the trailers has a phone.
Residents use banks of outdoor pay phones, which makes it tough to receive calls. Mail is not delivered to the trailers. Most residents hail from Princeville, and their mail is delivered to the post office in Tarboro, the nearest to their former homes. That post office is 19 miles from the trailer village. It's quite a distance for people who have lost uninsured cars.
Despite these difficulties, disaster refugees are expected to keep in touch with government agencies and to pick up and respond to documents in the mail.
"I was pushed out of town so far, there was no way I could meet with a FEMA inspector," Princeville resident Milton Roberson says. He tries to hitch a ride to the post office once a week.
Even people who are able to meet with FEMA inspectors and deal with government agencies aren't necessarily happy with the results. Some are angry with the government or resigned to the idea that government won't help them.
This is what's going on with Dew. Six weeks after the flooding, he still appears dazed. He is frustrated and angry with the government and he feels sorry for himself.
Suspicious of government help
He just wants things to return to the way they were before. He is suspicious of government efforts to help.
"The flood has hurt us, but the federal government's going to screw us," he says as he escorts me through the remains of his house, with its collapsed ceiling and exposed rafters. He scorns Bill Clinton's promise, during a visit to Tarboro soon after the disaster, that the federal government would do all it could to put people back on their feet quickly.
That promise, Dew says, "is like taking a kid to the candy store and going up to the counter and then saying, 'No, you can't have that candy.' You don't do that to people." ...
... "What really bothers me is the government can bomb these foreign countries, then pay to rebuild them," he says. "But they won't do the same for citizens of this country who lost everything in a disaster."
SBA spokesman W. Donald Waite hears complaints about foreign aid all the time. "I just tell them that's a foreign policy matter and I don't have anything to do with it," he says with a shrug.
Sometimes it works
Compounding Dew's frustration is the story of his son-in-law, Ray Page, who has had an easier time dealing with the disaster.
The Pages bought a mobile home and moved it onto Dew's property, 30 feet from his house, a week before the flood. As they stepped into a boat to escape the rising water that fateful morning, Page grabbed a fireproof ammunition box containing vital papers.
His father had always told him to keep his important papers in a place where he could grab them at a moment's notice, and Page listened to his dad.
As the rescue boat floated so high above a flooded highway that the occupants could reach up and touch stoplights, Page wondered what the papers in the ammunition box would tell him. Was he insured against floods?
That night, Page went through the papers and discovered that, yes, the mobile home had flood coverage. It would be replaced. An insurance adjuster inspected the home as soon as the water subsided and wrote a check that day. A FEMA inspector came out soon after, and the Pages received a check two weeks later to help pay for a place to rent while awaiting a replacement mobile home. The FEMA inspector did not appraise Dew's house 10 yards away because Dew wasn't present.
Dew feels envious.
"FEMA -- after trying and trying, I finally got them to come out last Friday and they inspected the house," he says on a Wednesday six weeks after the flood. "I haven't heard any more from them." ...
1999 Hurricane Swamped Clinton's FEMA
Democrats led by Sen. Hillary Clinton are blaming the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to respond adequately to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
But FEMA didn't do much better under much less taxing conditions, when the floods that followed Hurricane Floyd left tens of thousands stranded up and down the Eastern seaboard, wondering what happened to federal rescuers.
New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida were hit hard when Floyd slammed the coast on Sept. 16, 1999. It was the worst storm to hit the U.S. in 25 years - yet it killed only 61 people. That death toll expected to be dwarfed by Katrina.
Clinton FEMA Director James Lee Witt won high marks for hurricane preparation, but the flood that followed swamped his agency.
A full three weeks after the storm had passed, Rev. Jesse Jackson interviewed Witt on his CNN show "Both Sides Now" - and complained that flood victims were still suffering from a "misery index."
"It seemed there was preparation for Hurricane Floyd, but then came Flood Floyd," Jackson began. "Bridges are overwhelmed, levees are overwhelmed, whole town's under water . . . [it's] an awesome scene of tragedy. So there's a great misery index in North Carolina."
Witt explained that the storm's devastation was unparalleled, prompting Jackson to ask what was being done for the thousands of families left homeless by Floyd.
Though nearly a month had passed since the storm first hit, Witt said his agency was just beginning to address the problem.
"We're starting to move the camper trailers in," he explained. "It's been so wet it's been difficult to get things in there, but now it's going to be moving very quickly. And I think you're going to see a -- I think the people there will see a big difference over within this next weekend."
The Clinton FEMA Director came in for more criticism during another CNN interview - this time for failing to do a better job with Hurricane Floyd evacuation efforts.
"I hate to do this to you so early in the morning," host Carol Lin began apologetically.
"But I want to show you some video of Hurricane Floyd. This was the evacuation scene out of Florida last year. And you can recall, some three-million people in three different states were hitting the highways, jammed back-to-back trying to get away from the danger. And much of the local as well as the federal government was criticized for this backup. What is being done this year to prevent something like this from happening again, keeping people out of harm's way?"
Witt explained that evacuation problems were to be expected under such dire conditions. "It was very unusual when you had multiple states all evacuating at the same time," he told CNN. "It was the first time that that has happened that way and it did clog the highways."
While Witt's reputation remained largely intact after the Floyd fiasco, more than a few of the storm's thousands of flood victims complained that the agency had failed them.
"I had heard FEMA was going to be downtown, so I got up early to get down there and get in line," one North Carolina woman told the Associated Press, recounting her ordeal months after Floyd had passed. "The time came and nobody was there, just all these people waiting in line."
FEMA's sorry performance left her overwrought.
"I had been let down so many times, I just lost it," the flood victim said. "A friend of mine came walking up, and I just started toward her. She said, 'Robin, what in the world is wrong?' I was just standing there in the middle of the street crying, totally disoriented, practically hysterical."
Weeks after Floyd's floodwaters subsided, the suffering for many had yet to be addressed.
"We passed hundreds of families sitting outside their now-uninhabitable homes, with their water-soaked possessions spread out on their lawns," the Raleigh's News & Observer noted on Oct. 3, 1999.
"Desperately picking through the mess for anything to salvage, most people - particularly the elderly - seemed to be in a state of shock."
And where was FEMA?
"The larger towns had a visible FEMA and Red Cross presence," the paper said. "But in smaller towns it looked like utter confusion and despair - no one in charge, no one knowing what to do or where to go for help."
Timbernote: Yeah, its Newsmax - however, note the article is built on quotes from CNN, Associated Press, and The Raleigh News & Observer, and note the corroborating articles preceding the Newsmax piece. It happened (and Jesse Jackson was outraged).
Mexico stages large-scale evacuation of Caribbean coast, offshore oil platforms as Hurricane Emily approaches
By Mark Stevenson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
8:09 a.m. July 17, 2005
CANCUN, Mexico - A massive evacuation of tourists in one of the world's biggest resorts was underway Sunday, as hundreds of buses were dispatched to move tens of thousands out of the path of Hurricane Emily.
With the Category 4 storm expected to strike the Yucatan peninsula Sunday night, about 500 buses were ordered to move 30,000 tourists in Cancun to temporary shelters, while 70,000 to 80,000 people were being evacuated statewide.
Hundreds of tourists clutching pillows waded out of hotels in the twilight hours Sunday morning, waiting at curbs in a light drizzle to be loaded aboard buses.
"It's a little scary because it's happening in Mexico," said Brittney Denhart, 23, a recent college graduate from San Diego. "If it was on U.S. soil, it would be a little more reassuring. We don't know what the level of planning is." ...
... On the island of Cozumel, just south of Cancun, tourists in beach-side hotels were moved to accommodations closer to the center of the island, which lies almost directly in the hurricane's projected path.
Local residents also were expected to flee their homes to some of about 170 schools and community centers. Authorities said they had enough food ready to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people ...
Mayor to Feds: 'Get off your asses'
Transcript of radio interview with New Orleans' Nagin
Friday, September 2, 2005; Posted: 2:59 p.m. EDT (18:59 GMT)
(CNN) -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow pace of federal and state relief efforts in an expletive-laced interview with local radio station WWL-AM.
... I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.
I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."
That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.
I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people over at the convention center. It's bursting at the seams. ...
"It's a little scary because it's happening in Mexico," said Brittney Denhart, 23, a recent college graduate from San Diego. "If it was on U.S. soil, it would be a little more reassuring. We don't know what the level of planning is."
