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June 10, 2007 - The Times-Picayune
Church rewrites its storm script
By Bruce Nolan
Shaken by the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina, the Archdiocese of New Orleans, like many institutions, has spent months hardening its organization, investing in hardware, planning and training to weather another disaster, church officials said.
A year ago, Catholic Charities, the charitable arm of the archdiocese, hired two full-time disaster planners to help the organization think through how to navigate the next emergency.
Their instructions were to prepare the church and its parishes, schools, nursing homes and social service agencies to cut through the chaos of another disaster, stabilize itself quickly and get its relief resources into the field as rapidly as possible, said Colleen D'Aquin, Catholic Charities' new emergency management coordinator.
Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina swamped the archdiocese's disaster plan, no less than those of many other institutions and government agencies.
Few organizations were prepared to be driven out of the metropolitan area, to have to grope blindly for scattered employees and reconstitute operations far from home.
By the first anniversary of Katrina, the archdiocese had armored its communications systems for the next emergency. It set up check-in phone numbers, assigned key employees out-of-town cell phones less likely to fail, and safeguarded e-mail and Internet channels by moving computer servers upstate to Monroe.
Now the plans are more elaborate, said D'Aquin, who with deputy Samantha Pichon works with Catholic Charities to prepare that agency, and to some extent the rest of the archdiocese, for the next big storm.
As part of its plan, the church is prepared to get its own relief workers back on the ground as quickly as possible to work with other emergency responders.
A years-old informal commitment to share crisis workers with the American Red Cross has been formalized, said Catholic Charities President Gordon Wadge. During a disaster, Wadge's agency is committed to reinforce the Red Cross with as many as 50 case workers, people who can provide damaged families with food, clothing and other customized needs, D'Aquin said.
Internally, Catholic Charities has developed a plan -- a phone tree of sorts -- to spread important information through the system through an ordered hierarchy, said D'Aquin. In a few months it might have a technology that can blast a universal text or voice message to scores of employees simultaneously across several technologies: e-mail, cell phones and faxes and land lines, she said. Archdiocesan leaders have formalized an agreement to move church offices to space loaned by the Diocese of Baton Rouge, and Catholic Charities employees will work out of Sacred Heart Parish in Baton Rouge if necessary, D'Aquin said.
Key Catholic Charities employees, or those needed for early relief work, are being credentialed so they can return to New Orleans according to the city's re-entry plan, she said.
In addition, D'Aquin has centralized and coordinated the evacuation plans for more than two dozen church-run nursing homes and residences for the disabled. All those institutions have long had such plans, but now they are more tightly coordinated. Most will evacuate to Alexandria and its immediate vicinity, said Wadge.
And as a landlord for 1,000 to 1,200 able-bodied tenants in its Christopher Homes program, the archdiocese will leave those tenants to make their own evacuation plans, but it will show them how to register with city authorities for public evacuation when that becomes available, she said.
More broadly, D'Aquin said planners have begun to meet with clergy to brief them on emergency procedures contained in a new parish-based disaster manual.
Adopted from a similar blueprint used by the Diocese of Galveston-Houston, the new manual coaches clergy and lay parish leaders on how to prepare their congregations for a storm, flood or man-made disaster, as well as, how to keep in touch with the archdiocese and parishioners.
Separately, archdiocesan school officials have provided parents of Catholic school students with a check list of things to save -- textbooks, standardized test scores, report cards and immunization records and the like -- to help displaced children re-enter school elsewhere, if necessary, said the Rev. William Maestri, outgoing Catholic schools superintendent. |
