When Hurricane Katrina stormed through South Louisiana 10 years ago, LSU administration was unprepared for the Category 3 afflictions they would suffer both during and post-devastation.
Former assistant to the chancellor and now executive director of the Student Health Center D’Ann Morris said the LSU Emergency Operations Center did not exist at the time of the storm.
“‘What is an EOC?’ was the first response I gave when former Chancellor Sean O’Keefe asked if LSU had one,” said Morris, who is also the interim director for campus emergency operations. “Looking back now, we should have had the structure we currently have.”
Morris said the EOC’s development would not have been possible without O’Keefe’s leadership. He was a former administrator at NASA and secretary of the Navy whose strength, Morris said, was crisis management.
At NASA, O’Keefe managed the fallout from the 2003 Columbia shuttle crisis after the spacecraft broke into pieces en route to space between southeast Dallas and Alexandria. O’Keefe was at LSU for seven months before Katrina hit Southeast Louisiana.
Morris said O’Keefe was the first to recognize the need for the EOC and for LSU to act as a medical emergency and relief services center.
Once those facilities were established, he pinpointed and eventually overcame challenges of mismanagement and disorganized resources.
“It became evident in the opening hours of our operation that we were in a diaspora,” O’Keefe said.
Realigning and reorganizing the forces of volunteers, students and supplies was the first step in making the relief operation more cohesive, Morris said. Teaching them how to communicate and operate as a central emergency “hub,” as Morris referred to the organization, would come second.
“Each piece of the operation thought they were in charge of the entire operation rather than just their own,” Morris said. “We had multiple organizations managing crisis, but not successfully, and they needed to recognize they’re in our house, and in our house, we share — in an emergency, you do just that.”
O’Keefe’s foresight kick-started LSU’s relief process with his suggestion to immediately create a well-defined mission for LSU’s role in handling the disaster: to support the medical needs of the state and human life.
The mission also allowed Morris to establish emergency policies with the state, make negotiations with FEMA and agreements with the state Department of Health and Hospitals, none of which had existed before.
In total, LSU’s medical personnel cared for 6,000 patients. In 10 days, its administration registered roughly 3,000 displaced students and housed 535 of them.
“If it could have been done better, I don’t know how,” O’Keefe said.
Assistant vice president of communications Kristine Calongne Sanders, who worked as director of media relations during Katrina, said bringing relief to the community meant communicating externally with the public.
“So much has changed in the area of crisis preparation since the incident at Virginia Tech,” Sanders said, referencing the university’s 2007 mass shooting. “We were living in a time without social media — just a website and phone call access, but that service was down initially [after the storm].”
Sanders called on faculty to combat language barriers and create a 24/7 hotline for parents — an organization Sanders and her staff manned for a month.
Former CFO and vice chancellor for finance and administrative services Eric Monday also played a tremendous role in post-storm recovery, said Sanders and Morris.
“My motto for this whole operation was, ‘Let’s worry about the budget details later and just do it — I’ll take the responsibility later,’” O’Keefe said. “Then with Monday, [resources] flew in from several local business community leaders like [Baton Rouge businessman] Richard Lipsey, Walmart — there were just enormous contributors and truckloads of stuff.”
Prior to Monday’s involvement, however, most of the funding for the campus’ emergency medical center came from university funds. Donations through the Hurricane Katrina Student Relief Fund established by the LSU Foundation did not arrive until later.
“To my knowledge, [LSU was] never fully reimbursed for what took place because FEMA said we didn’t have these agreements,” Morris said.
Like Morris, Brant Mitchell, director of research and operations at the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute, works closely today with running LSU’s EOC and improving disaster management, both on campus and across the state.
The SDMI was established in 2007 after LSU received a $25 million donation from Toni and Emmet Stephenson, two business school alumni who believed much of Katrina’s devastation resulted not from the storm, but from management issues that could have been prevented by using basic business principles.
The SDMI uses data analytics and consequence modeling — a system that allows the institute to predict the effects of storm surges on vulnerable areas — to provide a support system for the state.
Though the SDMI was unable to serve the campus during Katrina and Rita, the institute operated fully for the first time during Hurricane Isaac in 2012.