VCU news

By Tom Gresham

Hurricane Katrina was an indisputable tragedy that placed overwhelming pressure on the people, animals and institutions that lay in its path, according to a panel of speakers at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business Auditorium on Nov. 3.

“Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath: Five Perspectives,” a forum sponsored by VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, provided a revealing look at the impact the catastrophic hurricane inflicted on the communities it battered. A five-member panel provided commentary on the consequences of the storm, highlighting the political, economic, medical and domestic problems that emerged.

The panel included Bill Leighty, chief of staff to Virginia Gov. Mark Warner; Ronald Merrell, M.D., a professor of surgery in the VCU School of Medicine; Patrick Roberts, senior assistant to the chief administrative officer for the city of Richmond; Kim Hunter, a staff member in the VCU Survey and Evaluation Research Lab; and Kier McGuire, a VCU graduate student pursuing a Master of Public Administration degree.

Four members of the panel spoke of their personal experiences traveling to the Gulf Coast area to assist in relief efforts in the days following the storm, while McGuire, a Louisiana native, detailed the way the hurricane disrupted her family.

Homeland Security and emergency preparedness expert William Parrish, an associate professor in the Wilder School, moderated the talk. He said the forum represented an opportunity to learn important lessons from Hurricane Katrina.

By studying the hurricane’s impact, Parrish said, “we can be better prepared in the future.”

Leighty, a VCU graduate, told an audience of about 100 people that the devastation left by the storm was indescribable, saying the images shown on television “do not convey the magnitude of what occurred. The scale of the devastation was so much worse, so much more enormous.”

Leighty traveled to Louisiana to assist Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s administration in its response to the storm. Leighty said he essentially served as a night chief of staff for the governor, allowing Andy Kopplin, Blanco’s chief of staff, to get some sleep.

Despite the gravity of the situation, politics was not set aside during the crisis, said Leighty, who claimed that assigning blame for the inadequate response to the storm appeared to be a preoccupation for some federal officials.

“There was an overt plan to blame this on the governor of Louisiana,” Leighty said.

Leighty said there were frequent communication problems between federal officials and their state and local counterparts in the days following Katrina. Leighty was particularly critical of the much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Roberts coordinated Richmond’s efforts to provide a variety of aid to its adopted sister city of Moss Point, Miss. Roberts said the city worked with Moss Point officials to identify the ways its resources could most effectively be marshaled.

Those resources included cleaning supplies and trucks, Roberts said. A city mobile health unit was also sent to Moss Point, as well as two code officials and an animal control officer. The latter was particularly important, Roberts noted, because several specimens were missing from a large alligator farm in town.

Roberts worked with the code enforcement officials to examine buildings and to determine which ones needed to be condemned. Unsurprisingly, he said, the reception from local residents was “not good,” and he and his companions were careful to visit houses when no one was home.

While Leighty and Roberts faced the government’s challenge of responding to the storm, Merrell and Hunter journeyed to the area to offer hands-on aid in the recovery to the storm.

Merrell traveled to the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to support medical relief and to coordinate telemedicine networking with other NASA facilities. Merrell said his team was sent to an occupational health center at Stennis that was “overrun.” The Stennis facility had received some 4,000 evacuees displaced by the storm.

When Merrell arrived at the facility, an 81-year-old doctor, the sole physician at the location, had been awake for two consecutive days attempting to serve approximately 800 people. The evacuees were battling a diverse mix of health issues, including hypertension, diabetes, chest pains and even schizophrenia. The medical facility had just two offices and little of the medicine and equipment necessary to treat the patients, Merrell said.

Merrell was a good fit for the daunting task at hand in part because he had “jungle” experience and was accustomed to improvisation, having served on medical teams in such far-flung places as Mt. Everest and a remote area in Pakistan.

Merrell said he and his team knew they would be unable to rely on FEMA or any state agencies.

“We had to take what we had and get creative,” Merrell said. Ultimately, Merrell said, the medical team managed to answer the challenges and “what we were asked to do worked out pretty well.”

Hunter decided to travel to the Gulf Coast area after learning that many people displaced by the storm were not being allowed to return to collect their pets. Hunter and other volunteers with Operation Bring Animals Home scoured the ruins of several municipalities to locate dogs, cats, horses and other pets that needed attention.

Hunter showed the audience an extensive slide show of the animals she and her fellow volunteers encountered. Many of the animals appeared to be sick and starving, making for a heartbreaking show. The volunteers’ persistence paid off, however, and many of the animals were rescued.

“A lot of them were really hard to catch,” Hunter said. “They were very hungry and very scared. We had to earn their trust.”

McGuire watched Katrina and its aftermath unfold from her Richmond home, gripped with worries about her family and friends. McGuire, who grew up in Kenner, La., a small town west of New Orleans, described the movements of her various family members in the days before and after the storm.

She said her parents left town safely before Katrina arrived, but her grandmother, who lived elsewhere in Louisiana, had attempted to wait out the storm. She was eventually sent out by police when the floodwater began to rise inside her house.

McGuire said it took days for her to get in touch with some family members and weeks to track down many of her friends. Her parents and two younger siblings returned to Kenner three weeks after Katrina hit. They learned they were fortunate: their house sat in a four-block radius largely unaffected by the flooding.

However, McGuire noted that the changes Katrina has brought to her hometown are dramatic. For instance, she has learned that many residents have decided to live elsewhere, reluctant to return to the rebuilding now required. McGuire used to coach a swim team in town, but she knows many families with children are now migrating to new locations.

“When I go back (to Kenner) and visit, those people won’t be there anymore,” McGuire said. “That’s really hard for me.”

Still, McGuire said there are already signs that the rebuilding will be a determined effort. Small advances, like the reopening of the local mall, are promising.

“People are getting back their normal lives,” McGuire said. “It just is significantly different there now. It is significantly altered.”