what yolanda taught us

"This is a wake-up call. People cannot depend solely on the Federal Emergency Management Agency…We all have to sit down and figure out how to collectively improve”— Brock Long 

Today has a terrible significance for those of us in the disaster business. Five years ago today, in the early morning hours of November 8th, 2013, the strongest storm ever recorded brought her fury to the low-lying shores of Leyte Island in the central Philippines. Sitting along the narrow mouth of the San Juanico Strait, Tacloban City was hit hardest. Super Typhoon Haiyan (known to all Filipinos as “Yolanda”), crushed it with two hundred mile per hour winds and twenty-foot waves.

In an interview on Philippine television, the Mayor of Tacloban said, “There is no Tacloban City right now”; journalists on the ground described the devastation as, “off the scale; apocalyptic.”

Nearly every family lost someone; they came in from outlying provinces looking for relatives, especially children, who may have been washed away. The entire first floor of the Convention Center, which was serving as an evacuation shelter, was submerged by storm surge. People in the building who had come for shelter were caught off-guard by the fast-rising waters and drowned.

As bad as Yolanda was, her aftermath was even more devastating. Five, ten, even fifteen long days passed before relief arrived too little and too late. As we watched the devastating scenes of families and children crying out for food, water, and medical care, we asked ourselves, "Where is the government? Why aren’t we better at this?"

In a television interview on November 12, CNN's Christiane Amanpour asked Philippine President Benigno Aquino III why it was taking so long to get help to the people of Tacloban City. This is what he said:

 “...our efforts rely on the local government units...our system says that the local government has to take care of the initial response...and unfortunately [they] were simply overwhelmed by the degree of this typhoon that has affected us....”

President Benigno’s words mirror what many national leaders, including our own, have said in the early days of the government-led disaster response. That is because the system in the United States mirrors that of the Philippines. Federal officials use the Stafford Act and Home Rule laws to draw bright lines around their responsibilities. They tell the President that the state and local governments ‘own the job’ and that they are leaning forward to ‘support’ them with anything they might need. 

For decades, presidents have been fed this myth by disaster professionals only to discover—too late in the job—the painful reality. President H.W. Bush discovered it in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew, thirteen years later his son learned it after Hurricane Katrina. Donald Trump should have learned it after Hurricane Maria. 

When Maria made landfall in September 2017, the Trump administration seemed to be doing all the right things to respond to the disaster in Puerto Rico. The President called local officials on the island, issued an emergency declaration and pledged that all federal resources would be directed to help. But for four days after that—as storm-ravaged Puerto Rico struggled for food and water amid the darkness of power outages—Trump and his top aides went dark. Air Force 1 took the President for a long weekend at his private golf club. Neither Trump nor any of his senior White House aides said a word about the growing crisis.

A similar situation unfolded in August 2005, when President Bush was oblivious to the crisis spawned by Hurricane Katrina, spending day after long day at his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. His staff didn't want to burden him with detailed information about the situation in New Orleans. As the crisis grew, Bush's aides decided they had to inform the president about it in stark terms. One of his aides showed the president a video with scenes of a hurricane-ravaged city and the hellhole of the Superdome. Bush immediately cut his vacation short and flew back to Washington.

In all of these cases, the federal government was sitting back, waiting for its “all disasters are local” policy to kick in. 

Unfortunately for us, when the next catastrophic disaster comes, which it most assuredly will, scenes like those will play out yet again. The burden will fall on local governments as FEMA and the states offer the “support” that means nothing less than an absence of accountability.  

This is where our national system is failing, now, in the preparation phase. Instead of practicing coming together, the various levels of government are preparing to work like they always have, each inside their own silos – each an independent and detached disaster response system. So instead of one team, we will have many.

Brock Long, FEMA's current administrator, has worked hard to make sure that his agency will never again be accused of moving too late or too slow. That is all to the good. But FEMA alone could never move early enough or fast enough to meet the demands of a catastrophic disaster. For that we will need everyone – local, state and federal agencies, non-profits, voluntary organizations and the private sector – all-in and working together.

A period of finger-pointing follows every catastrophic disaster as the involved players struggle to shed responsibility for its failures. These failures come in the form of suffering on the part of children and families. And somehow we know that this suffering, dreadful and visible to the world, could have been avoided with a better and more proactive response.

Here in New York City, the Mayor is responsible during a disaster. He "owns" the job. But outside New York City and a handful of others – locals have neither the resources nor the ability to prepare for a catastrophic disaster. And rather than build a capability themselves, their preparedness instead relies on an assumption of “support”. When the next inevitable catastrophic disaster comes to us, the local government – if it even exists – will be overwhelmed. And once again that assumption will be revealed as the illusion that it is.

Kelly R McKinney is the former Deputy Commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. From 2013 to 2016 he was the Chief Disaster Officer for the American Red Cross in Greater New York. He is the author of “Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them” that was released in July by Post Hill Press.