A joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR has revealed an inability by the American Red Cross to meet the basic needs of the people and communities in the first weeks after superstorm Sandy slammed the east coast two years ago.
Despite the millions of dollars Americans donated to the Red Cross in the wake of Sandy in the north-east and hurricane Isaac in Louisiana a month earlier, internal documents obtained by ProPublica and NPR and interviews with top officials and employees paint a different picture of the venerable charity, one consumed more by its public image than its mission.
“It was just clear to me that they weren’t interested in doing mass care; they were interested in the illusion of mass care,” says Richard Rieckenberg, a former head of mass care for the American Red Cross who oversaw aspects of the charity’s response to Sandy and Isaac.
According to an internal powerpoint titled “Lessons Learned”, the charity’s national headquarters in Washington “diverted assets for public relations purposes”. At one point during Sandy, as many as 40% of the organization’s available emergency vehicles were being used as backdrops for news conferences, Rieckenberg said. The Red Cross denied this claim.
Rieckenberg said the charity’s response was ill-prepared and sluggish, and described how the charity lacked basic necessities such as food, blankets and batteries in the immediate wake of the storms.
When there were surpluses of food, it too often went to waste. One day, relief organizers were reportedly ordered by Red Cross supervisors to produce 200,000 extra meals, even though there was no one to deliver the food. In another instance, tens of thousands of meals were discarded because deliverers couldn’t find the people who needed them. And in another incident, the Red Cross sent pork lunches to a Jewish retirement high-rise.
“We didn’t have the kind of sophistication needed for this size job,” a Red Cross vice-president said, according to a copy of the minutes from a closed-door meeting in December 2012, obtained by the reporters.
“Our experience with the Red Cross is they’re a little late to the game,” emergency management coordinator for Bergen County, New Jersey, police lieutenant Matthew Tiedemann, told NPR and ProPublica. “The reality set in that I was in the sheltering business. It was pretty time-consuming, considering I was putting together cots when I should have been managing an emergency,” he says.
Despite the findings, the organization defended itself in a statement to NPR and ProPublica. “While it’s impossible to meet every need in the first chaotic hours and days of a disaster, we are proud that we were able to provide millions of people with hot meals, shelter, relief supplies and financial support during the 2012 hurricanes.”
