Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe by Rodriguez et al. (2006) - Article

Following the impact of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, people reacted in different ways according to different sources. In New Orleans the mass media presented a dramatic picture that went over the world: anarchy, chaos and no social control. This image was shown by visual and verbal means. For example, a news anchor reported that there were reports of fires, looting and killing of rescue workers. Another reporter stated that people were being raped and murdered. Other news stations mentioned that New Orleans resembled a war zone. The electronic media also spread comments by the major of New Orleans and the police chief. Some of these comments were that snipers were shooting at tourists and the police, that there was a shootout between gangs and that there were hundreds of dead bodies lying everywhere. The print media varied in the tone of the coverage and they were the first to check the validity of earlier reports. They concluded that most reports were incorrect. Unfortunately, the local and print media were not that important in the picture that people received about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Cable television was far more important for the negative picture that was presented. It appears that the initial media imagery showed a predominance of antisocial behaviour going on in Louisiana. Emergent activities in Louisiana showed an opposite pattern that the one in the big media outlets. The writers of this article argue that new, non-traditional behaviour surfaced in the area. The people engaged in new coping behaviours. The writers also state that some anti-social behaviour did occur, but that the majority of behaviours in that area was pro-social in nature.

Work on emergent behaviour

Sociology has focused a lot on emergent behaviour. The field that focuses on collective behaviour looks at riots, crowds, revolutions, origins of cults and changes in public opinion. All these behaviours are non-traditional and they arise because the ‘normal’ way of acting is not appropriate for certain occasions. Social studies that have looked at disasters, have found that there is quit some emergent behaviour that arises. This is the case for the individual and the group level. These emergent behaviours were new behaviours and they were prosocial. For example, they helped one to cope with the extreme demands of the disaster. The University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Centre (DRC) developed a typology of organized behaviours during the crisis period in disasters. According to that model, organized behaviour can be about either regular or non-regular tasks and the structures to carry out these tasks can either pre-exist a disaster or come into being after a disaster. In the 1970s, different scholars from different institutes made modifications in the typology. After 9/11, Wachtendorf used data from studies that focused on the responses to the terrorist attack and she changed the typology.

Sources used for the study

The data for this article comes from two sources. The first source is the DRC. The DRC sent researchers to the impacted area of Hurricane Katrina, three weeks after Katrina hit. The researchers conducted interviews, observations and gathered documents. Field teams visited different locations (response centres, shelters and impacted zones). They also talked to different people: local and federal officials, relief workers and evacuees.

The other sources used were stories by people outside the DFC. Some of these sources were newspapers in paper format or a Website, some were reports by other formal organizations (either printed or on the website) and others were stories from bloggers on the internet. The writers paid special attention to first-hand personal accounts by individuals and they tried to only use stories that seemed reliable and valid.

The general framework

The writers think that what happened in New Orleans wasn’t a disaster, but a catastrophe. According to them, it’s important to see these things as different from each other. There are some differences between these two:

• In a catastrophe there is a huge physical impact, while a disaster causes localized impact

• In catastrophes, most everyday community functions are interrupted, while in disasters this usually doesn’t happen

• In catastrophes, national level government agencies become involved, while in disasters, only sympathy is given at most by government agencies

• In catastrophes, local officials are not able to do their usual work roles

• In disasters, help will come from nearby areas, whereas in catastrophes, help will come from distant areas

• In disasters, the local media covers the situations, whereas in catastrophes cable TV and other non-local mass media covers the story

According to the writers, these six dimensions are the conditions that set the stage for emergence. For example, most of New Orleans was under water, so help could only arrive from more distant areas. Because of this, people were put under pressure and groups improvised their actions to help cope with the urgent needs of everyone involved.

Different levels of description

Because of Hurricane Katrina, there was a disruption across all social levels of society. The writers thus predicted that there would be internal and external emergence across all social levels. This article will focus on five groupings, namely hotels, hospitals, neighbourhood groups, rescue teams and the JFO (Joint Field Office, the headquarters for the federal response to Katrina).

Hotels

This part looks at what happened in the hotels in New Orleans. There are about 265 hotels in the area. The hotel improvisations were mostly pro-social in nature and they dealt rather successfully with the crisis at hand. According to the data of the writers, there were three stages in the emergent behaviour of the hotels. Before Hurricane Katrina, high-rise hotels provided a temporary stay for the local citizens. When hurricanes threatened New Orleans, some of the locals could stay temporarily in the hotels. During the threat of a hurricane, approximately 75% of hotel guests were local residents. In 2005 that changed.

New Orleans was discouraged that year to take local residents and so the major hotels decided that they wouldn’t take hurricane-related reservations. The hotel managers encouraged the guests to try to leave the endangered areas. The organizational behaviour had shifted its norms. However, hotels did end up with more guests than they had foreseen, because non-local guests who wanted to leave, couldn’t, because their plane reservations were cancelled at the last moment. Families of hotel employees and their pets also sought shelter in the hotels. This was the first part of improvising. It became clear that the flood water imposed problems, because guests couldn’t drive their cars or catch buses and leave the city. The floodwater generated a new crisis, and a lot of hotels had scarcity of food and water. This lead some guests to loot basic necessities from fending machines within the hotels and nearby stores. Hotels also provided their guests with non-traditional necessities, like trash bags. The guests did hear rumours about anti-social behaviour, but most of them helped each other out and they were also positive about the hotel staff. Convoys of food were brought to the hotels from nearby cities and the same chains. Safety engineers, security guards and high-level hotel executives arrived at the hotels. The guests were evacuated through arrangements made by the hotels. This was the second stage of improvising. After the guests had left, the hotels had to rent rooms out to federal employees and aid-workers. The hotels had to provide semi-permanent housing, which is not their normal function. Hotels shifted their operations. That was the third stage of improvising.

Hospitals

All hospitals have disaster plans in case something happens. The hospitals in Louisiana had prior experience with hurricanes and so their initial response to Hurricane Katrina was to react as they had done in the past. Their disaster teams were activated, which contained physicians, nurses and other staff members. The patients who were not critically ill were discharged and extra water, food, blood and medical supplies were stores. The hospitals also had extra fuel for emergency generators. Everyone expected that the hospitals would return to their normal operations after four days.

When Katrina hit, the hospitals didn’t have much physical damage. Electric power did fail, but they were already expecting that. A few hours after Katrina had hit, everyone at the hospital expected that the hospital would return to its normal operation within a couple of days. However, the floodwaters from the levee breaks caused new problems. Basements were covered with water and so the stored food, water and fuel were as well. Some activities on the first floor had to be moved to other floors. There was no good telephone connection and the water, air-conditioning and sewage systems failed (because emergency generators had no fuel anymore). Morgues were also at the lower level of the hospital and so some patients who died at the hospital had to be stored in stairwells. The higher temperature caused the diagnostic equipment to become unworkable. Normal hospital procedures stopped, but the hospital personnel tried to provide health care. They had to improvise and so some nurses fanned patients to keep them cool.

Other problems that had arisen were crowded areas and personal safety. More people kept arriving at the hospital. Some really came to get medical treatment, while others were just seeking a safe place of refuge. The staff at the hospitals heard rumours about anti-social behaviour and some staff members were concerned for their safety. They were given weapons for protection. Hospitals tried to evacuate people. They first wanted the patients to be evacuated, then the other people. Helicopters were used (some from the hospital, other times the helicopters appeared randomly). Medical personnel couldn’t use medical records and so they had to make decisions about whether the evacuated patient should be sent to a special needs centre, another hospital or a regular centre.

People knocked down light poles and created a pad for helicopters to land on the roof of the parking garage. Pharmacists helped people in the dark to climb stairs to wait for helicopters. The staff was doing things they normally didn’t do. Eventually, all hospitals were evacuated. However, the hospitals did differ in the way they coped with the situation. There was a difference between private hospitals and public hospitals. Private hospitals had more resources and they could make arrangements for helicopter and security early on. Some private hospitals were completely evacuated, while some public hospitals were still waiting for their patients to be evacuated. Overall, the unforeseen problems initiated improvisations which resulted in a low level of operation, but a high level of pro-social behaviour.

Local neighbourhoods

In informal groupings, like in neighbourhoods, there were also improvisations. The DRC found emergence in at least four different neighbourhoods, but the writers think there were much more. The media hasn’t given much attention to the neighbourhoods and there were also not so many reports or records about the situation in the neighbourhoods as there were for more formal settings, like the hospitals and hotels. One example of groups in the neighbourhood were the Robin Hood Looters. That group consisted out a couple of friends who got their family to safety, but who decided to stay and rescue their neighbours with boats. They got their name because they searched for food and other necessities in abandoned houses. They also developed group norms and some of them were that they would only retrieve survivors, no bodies and that the members would not carry a weapon. The Looters also developed an understanding with the police and National Guard. They passed on survivors who wanted to leave that area to them, and they received ready meals from them. Everything they did was new to them and their behaviour was emergent. Another example is about a group that gathered their neighbours in a local school. At first, everyone was welcome, but then thugs started to vandalize the school and so they were expelled and weren’t allowed to enter the school anymore. Before the flooding started, members gathered canned food, a radio, batteries and cleaning supply and brought it to the school. Men slept on one floor and the women on another. All used blankets and cots that they had brought from their homes. The people in the school also brought food and liquids for older people and they also helped the elderly to the rooftop, to be evacuated by helicopter. The people in the school heard rumours on the radio about the bad things that were going on (shoot-out, looting), but they all decided to stay strong and show pro-social behaviour.

Search and rescue teams

Hurricane Katrina and the flooding had a massive impact on the area. Search and rescue teams responded in a way they had never planned for. Local firefighters indicated that they conducted certain operations without federal assistance. Most of it consisted on door-to-door search and rescue activities. Although they were trained for many things, they stated that they had to improvise in many cases. One example is that they came together with the police and they created plans to separate the community in grids. Then, scouts were send to spray paint a coded symbol on a roadway that crossed a grid line. This was done to make sure that everyone in the force knew which grid they were in. They also used symbols to mark every structure on dry land. They also held water rescue parties. They used personal boats or the boats of local residents to search inside houses that were underwater. These were all non-traditional rescue and search actions. They all had to improvise.

The JFO

Katrina generated the largest mobilization of federal resources that had ever occurred in the history of the United States. The impact of Katrina was direct on three states and there were also indirect effects on nearby states. There was a National Response Plan (NRP), but it turned out that what happened went beyond anyone could have envisioned. Before Katrina, organizations discussed who would be directly responsible for the relationship between federal, state and local levels. There was some ambiguity between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The FEMA had the primary responsibility of taking the initial role and it also did take that role. The physical location of the JFO was in a shopping mall. This mall had been closed for five years and this location wasn’t a typical location for an emergency operation centre. The FEMA did not foresee that an abandoned shopping mall would become the major centre for its operations. Because the mall had been abandoned for quite some time, the condition of the mall was deteriorating and the FEMA had to make many physical improvisations. The full capacity of the mall was used for JFO operations. They had rooms for communication technology, storage and security. Because the facility had to deal with so much technology and electronic equipment, power outages and fires occurred. The FEMA had to carry out major maintenance work, which they had never had to do before. The JFO had to plan and coordinate of state agencies and volunteer agencies in the recovery efforts. Many non-profit organizations were set up. The FEMA personnel came from all over the US and the employees had to be trained, immunized and credentialed. They also had to undergo security screening. One month after Hurricane Katrina, the JFO was functioning at full capacity. At the JFO, there was a huge amount of equipment, supplies and staff. It seems that the FEMA had to improvise a lot in this abandoned shopping mall. Meetings occurred on a regular basis between different organizations and levels. The JFO requested continuous information and reports. Much what happened was of an emergent nature.

Of course, there were also emergent behaviours in other institutional areas (religious groups, sport teams), but it’s impossible for the writers to discuss everything.

Emergence complexity

It’s difficult to describe and analyse emergent behaviour. For instance, can one see looting as an emergent behaviour? Is looting also anti-social? It appears that emergent behaviour is not always legal, but it still can be prosocial. Looting is the illegal taking of goods. After Hurricane Hugo hit the U.S. Virgin Islands of St. Croix, much looting went on, initiated by delinquent gangs which already existed before the hurricane hit. Other people joined in on that behaviour. Many studies have found that looting is very rare and that it is often done covertly, it’s done by a few people, it’s condemned in the community and the people who do it, take chances of the opportunities that occur. However, in St. Croix, this wasn’t the case: looting was done in an overt way, it was done by many people, it was socially supported and the looters targeted places to loot (so no chance opportunities).

After Katrina, both types of looting occurred in the area. Gangs that already existed before Katrina hit, looted consumer goods. This wasn’t emergent behaviour, because these gangs didn’t do anything new. They showed their traditional behaviours. Another type of looting was stealing of necessities. When talking to people who were present after Katrina hit, the DRC couldn’t really find anyone who had looted something or saw someone else loot something. However, taking necessities wasn’t seen as looting. People reported that they had taken food, water or boats to help others. This is not seen as criminal behaviour. There is also the possibility that more than traditional looting behaviour was involved.

The writers state that the emergent behaviour they saw after Katrina hit, was pro-social. However, emergent behaviour isn’t always a good thing. Some people might make the wrong decisions (like staying in the attics of their houses and dying). Emergent behaviour is usually good, but it doesn’t always have to be. It’s a different way of acting, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a better way of acting.