September 7, 2006 Host: Jen Woods Guest: H. T. Linke
H. T. Linke, Chief Communication and Marketing Officer of The American Red Cross of L.A., gives advice on how to be prepared for an emergency. Duration: 00:11:16
Jen: Hello, I am Jen Woods from LawCrossing, and today I am going to be talking with Chief Communications and Marketing Officer, H.T.Linke, from the American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles about preparing for a crisis.
Jen: So, September is national preparedness month. What actions can people take to be prepared for an emergency?
Linke: Well, Jen, the simple answer is, they just need to be ready for an emergency. We like to say, "Be Red Cross ready," but that has three components, and they're simple and easy and something that any individual or family can do. The first thing is, get yourself a disaster kit. You can make it. There are lots of places to buy it .You can look on any Red Cross website and probably find a way to either get the components of the kit or buy a kit already made. The second thing is, make a disaster plan. Have one for your home, one for your work, and if your kids are in school, know what the school's disaster plan is. And then the third thing is just to be informed. Learn what to do in a disaster, and different disasters may have different actions. An earthquake is different than a flood, which is different than a fire or wild fire, which is different than a tornado. And there are things for each of those things that you need to be prepared for. And then, once there is a disaster approaching, obviously you won't have any warning on an earthquake, but you will have warning on a tornado, perhaps. You will certainly have a warning on a hurricane. If you're in a wild fire area, you'll have warning on that. So you have to stay informed. You've got to keep yourself informed; news radio, TV, that sort of thing.
Jen: How does the Red Cross help keep the public informed on appropriate actions to take during a crisis?
Linke: Well, the most important thing, I guess, that we do is we try to inform people before a crisis. That's what we call preparedness, or readiness, or whatever you want to call it. But that's really the most important part, and that is providing people with the information they need before a crisis in order to survive it. The disaster itself might be in inevitable. A hurricane is, in some sense, inevitable, as is an earthquake. But making it a disaster, making it a non-survivable proposition, is not inevitable. There are things we can do now before a crisis, and the Red Cross is ready to help people with that. We have printed materials that we offer. I think probably every day, my office sends materials out to somebody who has called and requested or sent us an email and asked for something. There are websites with all sorts of information. There's an awful lot available on the internet for people to learn about how to get prepared before a disaster. We do a lot of community outreach, we make presentations to schools and clubs, and we're visible at fairs and community events. And usually we're passing out information about disaster preparedness. So, I'd say that the most important thing that we do is, before the crisis, helping people with the knowledge that they need to get ready and to do the things that they can do to make their disaster survival greater, rather than lesser. And then during the crisis itself, of course, we are going to be updating our websites constantly. We will always have spokespersons talking on radio and television, particularly on the news radio shows and on television news broadcasts, on cable, and on other outlets, to let people know what to do now, where the Red Cross shelters are, how they can get Red Cross assistance and what they can expect from the Red Cross.
Jen: What can people expect from the Red Cross after crisis?
Linke: Well, I think the most important thing they can expect, and they should expect from us, is to be there quickly with emergency assistance. Now, I think people sometimes don't understand that, while the Red Cross is what I would call an early responder or an immediate responder, we are not a first responder. We are not the fire. We are not the police. We are not the National Guard. We are not doing search and rescue. We are not doing medical evacuation. What we are doing is trying to meet people's immediate and short term disaster-caused needs. We are not in this for the long term. What we do is we feed and we shelter people. We provide limited financial assistance right then, when they need it, right after the disaster. During Katrina, for example, we sheltered about 500,000 people. That means that we put them up for the night somewhere in a Red Cross shelter. We fed about 36 million meals. Some nights in the gulf coast areas, and in other surrounding areas, we had as many as 900 shelters in operation. That's what we do. We do that immediate disaster assistance to help people with their disaster-caused needs. We don't do long term stuff. There are other agencies that do it better. So, if you have lost your house and everything that you have, for example in a tornado or a flood, we are going to be there to feed you, to shelter you, to provide you some immediate financial assistance and some other things that we also do; but we are probably not going to rebuild your house. And the reason we don't do that is because that's a longer-term job, and frankly there are other agencies that do that better. Habitat for Humanity, for example, has done a great deal after Katrina to help rebuild the gulf coast. And they're much better at it than we are, so there is no point in us duplicating their efforts. We stick to what we do best: immediate short term feeding, sheltering, grief counseling, all those kinds of things that we can do right then to meet people's disaster-caused needs when they really need the help.
Jen: Why does the Red Cross provide mental health services after a disaster?
Linke: Ah, good question! And the answer is very simple, and that is that disasters, as you might imagine, are stressful, they are traumatic, they are life-altering events. And as I said earlier, we're early responders, although not first responders, but we're there dealing with people's disaster-caused needs. We're dealing with people who have just become a victim of a disaster. They've just had that life-altering event, and it's not enough for us simply to feed them and put them in a shelter. We have to deal with their disaster-caused mental health needs, as well. And that's what that mental health response is, it's part of that. People need to be comforted, they need to be reassured. In some respects, it's a lot like the grieving process. I think everybody, by now, is familiar with the grieving process, and the steps you go through. Well, for those who've lost everything in a disaster, particularly one that comes out of nowhere like a tornado, or even a hurricane like Katrina where there is some warning but nobody really quite grasped the complete devastation that was going to happen there; there is shock, there is trauma, and there is grieving. And our mental health professionals, we call them the "disaster mental health volunteers," they are all mental health professionals. They all have mental health as their "other walk of life," if you will. They are volunteers for the Red Cross, they are trained Red Cross volunteers, but in their other lives, they are mental health professionals. This is a special core within our disaster services human resources group that just specializes in that. And they're ready to go in a moment's notice. And whenever there is disaster, people grieving and desponding and needing reassurance and comfort, that's what they do. They are there to provide that right alongside the people that are feeding them and setting up the shelters and doing all the other disaster-related tasks.
Jen: In the aftermath of September 11th, is the Red Cross better prepared to handle a crisis?
Linke: Well, let me answer that in two ways. One is, 9/11 was a terrible tragedy, and there was a huge Red Cross response to that, but it wasn't completely typical of what we do in a disaster. Really Katrina, hurricane Katrina, is a better model for what we need to be prepared for. And we now know that Katrina overwhelmed all of our expectations and all of our capabilities. So, in response to Katrina, we have been working hard now for about 10 months to get ourselves ready for this hurricane season and also in order to be prepared for a catastrophic disaster of that magnitude. What we have done is, first of all, we've spent somewhere between 80 and 100 million dollars just on being ready. We have bought additional disaster supplies, we have pre-positioned them, not just only in the Gulf Coast area, although many of them are there, but we have also spread them around the country. I happen to be based in Los Angles. In Los Angeles, we have more cots and blankets and other disaster supplies now pre-positioned in the Red Cross disaster field supply center than we had before Katrina. I think we had about 10,000 cots before, now we have somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand cots. We keep taking them in and out as we need them, but that's an asset that's on hand and available to the community in the event of a major disaster here. And we have done that all across the country. We've updated our call center capabilities. We had a call center before that would handle thousands of calls a day. It turned out that wasn't enough, so we've now built a call center capability that will handle up to 100,000 calls a day. We have created a new family connection website, and a new family connection voicemail system, which we will publicize when there is a disaster so that people will know where to go on the web to try to reconnect with their families. Because one of the things we saw in Katrina, for example, is families in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast got separated as they tried to evacuate. And some parts of a family might have ended up in Atlanta and another part in Denver, and they had no real way to reconnect. They didn't even know where the other parts were. This way there would be a website, and in all of our shelters we'll have access to the web--or in most of our shelters, I can't guarantee that in all shelters--but in many of our shelters, we'll have access to the web. And people can go in, go on that website, and see, and they can register themselves and say, "I'm so-and-so, and I'm at this shelter in such-and-such a place," and their family members elsewhere can check in and do the same thing. Or even family members who aren't affected by the disaster, but have just lost contact with their family members in the disaster area. So, we have added that, and we have also added a voice mail capability, as well. And the other thing, and perhaps as important as everything else, we've built a lot of new partnerships, real partnerships I hope, with community and faith-based organizations all across the country. So that when there is a disaster--which as I said, Katrina overwhelmed all of our systems, and a disaster of that magnitude would probably do a good job in overwhelming us again--we have additional resources, and we have additional ways for people to receive assistance because we're working with community and faith-based organizations there, where they can provide help to people when they need it most.
Jen: Thank you, H.T. Linke, for speaking with me. And thanks for listening.
Linke: I'd like to say that much of the hard work of the Red Cross gets done in the 800 chapters that serve the whole country. And national preparedness month is a really good time for people to get involved and see how they might help their local chapter because those chapters don't get any government funding. They are totally dependent on the community for support. They need people to volunteer, and of course, they need financial donations. So September, being national preparedness month, is a good time to think about that and a good time to take some action there.
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