STOCKING UP How rescue and relief workers are drawing on the lessons learned from Hurricane Harvey to prepare for the next big disaster. By Tracy L. Barnett
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t was the relief effort watched around the world. As big as Hurricane Harvey was, the human spirit of Houston was bigger: A Texas-sized show of solidarity came through in the aftermath of the hurricane. The number of neighbors helping neighbors — in kayaks, in motorboats, in pickup trucks, in human chains — seemed to break all past records. And yet gaping holes in the social fabric still affect the daily lives of thousands of people. A year later, nonprofits and grassroots disaster-relief organizations are trying to patch these holes while they prepare for the next disaster — because at this point, Houston has accepted that it’s not “if,” it’s “when.” Some grassroots groups coalesced spontaneously during Harvey, after Houston’s institutional response became bogged down by the storm’s magnitude. When the streets around the Houston Food Bank flooded, groups like the Midtown Kitchen Collective and the Giving Hub worked to fill the food-delivery vacuum. DIY rescue and relief groups including Recovery Houston and the Cajun Navy operated around the clock without pay, relying on social media networks, fast-paced innovation and pure grit. Meanwhile cash-strapped community organizations like Casa Juan Diego, Boat People SOS Houston and the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) depended on an influx of volunteers who helped pick up the slack during the storm. Event planner Kat Creech,
who started the Facebook group that became Recovery Houston, marveled at the number of hearts and hands working to help in the days after the storm. As the year wore on and relief efforts turned to rebuilding, however, the numbers dwindled. Creech blames compassion fatigue — and what she calls “survival fatigue.” “These people are doing everything they can to keep putting one foot in front of another as the rest of the world has gone back to normal,” she says. Dr. Betsy Escobar, who volunteers at Casa Juan Diego — a Catholic charity that serves immigrants, refugees and the poor — said the center was overrun after Harvey by immigrants who feared detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they went to shelters or the convention center. “FEMA gave us a bunch of cookies, but we have a lot of people who are diabetic so that was not very helpful,” she recalls. Thankfully, the Houston Farmers Market came through with produce, rice and beans. Their next problem was the opposite: they suddenly started getting more help than they could handle. “We got a mountain of clothes, and that’s nice — but we were a little overwhelmed because it was too much,” Escobar says. This feast-or-famine problem was not exclusive to Casa Juan Diego, according to Balaji Koka, associate professor of strategic management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. On the one hand, Koka witnessed a highly effective response by individuals and small organizations in his area. On the
other hand, there were significant gaps in service, something that could be addressed by better coordination among city and county organizations, he said. “Social media definitely enabled people to become a community with some amount of organization and coordination without any hierarchy,” Koka observed. “But sometimes the same lack of hierarchy would result in one house affected by the disaster being visited by three or four different volunteers, while another house would get lost in the shuffle.” Rice Business Wisdom surveyed seven community leaders who were involved in Hurricane Harvey rescue, relief and recovery efforts. Here, we distill their collective wisdom about how to maximize our effectiveness in the next big storm. BEFORE THE STORM Should I buy a boat or a truck so I can escape or rescue people? The consensus on this one is a definite NO. Unless you’re an experienced boater with training in navigating floodwaters, you
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can quickly become a liability, according to Captain Taylor Fontenot with the Cajun Navy. Instead, find people in your neighborhood who do have boats and trucks and are willing to use them or volunteer them for the rescue efforts, recommended Jonathan Beitler, a volunteer with the ad hoc Midtown Kitchen Collective. In the desperate days after Harvey, the Midtown Kitchen Collective developed ihavefoodineedfood.com, a platform that helped coordinate many of the 300,000 meals distributed by the group, linking thousands of people eager to donate food with the volunteer chefs and service organizations who needed that food. A similar platform could easily be developed to coordinate and connect people who have boats and trucks with people who need them, Beitler said. Should I stock up on extra canned goods and water so I can have them on hand when the storm hits? By all means stock up,
