John Davies, President, Baton Rouge Area Foundation: Responding to Katrina
Residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were first alerted to the storm that would change their lives on August 24, when the National Hurricane Center issued a bulletin upgrading Tropical Depression Twelve to a tropical storm. A day later, Katrina, as the storm had been named, strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane and made landfall in south Florida near the Dade-Broward county line. After tracking south and then southwest through Everglades National Park, causing limited damage, a weakened Katrina moved into the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning hours of Friday, August 26.
Any sense of relief on the part of Gulf Coast officials was short-lived. By the morning of the 26th, Katrina was again a Category 1 storm and, according to a bulletin from the National Hurricane Center, moving on a track that would bring it ashore just east of New Orleans — the worst-case scenario that public officials and regional planners had long feared. Exercising her authority, Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco responded by declaring a state of emergency in Louisiana, and in Washington, D.C., the process of deploying federal troops to the region was initiated.
By the afternoon of August 27, with Katrina now a Category 3 hurricane, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin began calling for a voluntary evacuation of the city. Meanwhile, in the Gulf, Katrina grew stronger, becoming a Category 4 hurricane shortly after midnight and a deadly Category 5 storm by daybreak on the 28th. Saying he was "very concerned about the storm's impact," President Bush urged Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, which they did before noon.
Katrina made its second landfall, having weakened slightly, near Buras, Louisiana, on the morning of August 29. A few hours later, state officials in New Orleans were reporting six to eight feet of water in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, and by 11:00 a.m. most of St. Bernard Parish was under ten feet of water. In the afternoon, New Orleans officials confirmed a two-block wide breach of the 17th Street Canal, and by evening President Bush had declared Louisiana a federal disaster area.
For residents of the city unable, or unwilling, to leave before the storm hit, it was too late. Over the next three days, as city, state, and local officials responded fitfully to the unfolding disaster, New Orleans descended into chaos. In the process, racial and economic divides that had been mostly hidden from those who loved the city for its food, music, and joie de vivre were exposed for all the world to see.
Meanwhile, Baton Rouge, just up the interstate from the Crescent City, was dealing with a different kind of flood, as evacuees from coastal parishes to the south poured into town. By the evening of August 29, the city's population was double what it had been a few days earlier, and, with the power out and phone lines down, the city's beleaguered public- and private-sector leaders did what they could to piece together a plan to accommodate the influx.
Recently, Philanthropy News Digest spoke with John Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the largest community foundation in Louisiana, about the chaotic aftermath of Katrina, the challenges of responding to a disaster of Katrina's magnitude, the role played by his foundation in coordinating that response, and the difficult days that lie ahead for New Orleans and the state of Louisiana.
Davies has served as president and chief executive officer of the foundation since June 1988, during which time it has grown from $5 million to more than $375 million in assets and has awarded over $132.5 million in grants. [Ed note: Davies retired after thirty-three years as president and CEO of BRAF at the end of 2021.]
Philanthropy News Digest: Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm on Monday morning, August 29. By that evening, did you and your colleagues in Baton Rouge, which is about seventy-five miles northwest of New Orleans, feel that south Louisiana had dodged a bullet?
John Davies: No, because we'd been through Hurricane Ivan a year earlier, and before that storm came ashore the state ordered a counter-flow event — that's when the authorities redirect traffic on the interstates so that it's all flowing away from the coast — to evacuate New Orleans. Well, it took twelve hours for folks to get out of New Orleans, and most of them ended up in Baton Rouge, totally overwhelming the city. With Katrina, because of its size and intensity, we knew it was going to be just as bad, if not worse. We knew there was going to be trouble along the coast, and we also knew that Baton Rouge was going to end up hosting a huge number of folks from out of town, for a few days at least. But we thought they'd be evacuees, not displaced people — in other words, we thought it was going to be a short-term issue, and that in a couple of days folks would be able to return home and everything would go back to normal. But, of course, it didn't turn out that way.
PND: When and how did you first learn that the levee system in New Orleans had been breached? And did you have any inkling of what a failure of the levees might mean for Baton Rouge?
Davies: We knew that if the levees failed in New Orleans, we would be in deep, deep trouble. We hadn't put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but we knew that a failure of the levees would be devastating to New Orleans, and if New Orleans was devastated it would be devastating to us, if for no other reason than New Orleans' economic importance to the rest of the state. You know, it's kind of ironic, because our power was out for days, which made it hard to get good information. The only TV that worked in my house was a little black-and-white thing that got exactly two local stations, and although local news affiliates did their best to cover the story, they didn't do as good a job as the national news operations. So, by the time we finally got our phone service back and were able to call out-of-state relatives, they had a much better idea of what was going on than I did.
But I had heard by the morning of the 30th about the big break in the 17th Street levee, and I knew that we were looking at the nightmare scenario we had all talked about on many occasions. In fact, just a few days before the storm hit, my wife and I had had dinner with Dr. Paul Farmer — he's the guy who founded Partners in Health, which does magnificent community-based work in Haiti and Africa — and I told him how worried we were about this particular storm. We talked about the levee system and how fragile it was and what would happen to New Orleans if the system was breached, and, believe me, it was a sobering conversation.
PND: Did the City of Baton Rouge and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation have contingency plans in place for the worst-case scenario?
Davies: You know, we really didn't. We had talked about it. We knew it was something we needed to do. But I don't think we really understood how bad the worst-case scenario would turn out to be. So, those were interesting conversations, but they never resulted in a call to action; we never took the next step and said, "If such-and-such happens, this is what we'll do." And, frankly, we were not prepared for the massive influx of people to our community after the levees broke. We just weren't.
PND: Let's put that into perspective. Baton Rouge is a community of about six hundred thousand? And by Friday, September 2, four days after Katrina made landfall, it was a community of more than a million?
Davies: Right, if you count the entire metro area. Actually, the city and the parish, which belong to a single political subdivision, are home to roughly four hundred thousand people. And by Friday we were housing a million people.
PND: Let's back up a day or two. The storm hits early Monday, and the levees are breached sometime during the day. By Tuesday, it's clear to everyone in New Orleans and probably the rest of the state that the worst-case has happened. How would you characterize the situation in Baton Rouge by Wednesday?
Davies: Chaos. It was just chaotic. The story was playing itself out in real time on national TV, and Baton Rouge became the first convenient stopping place for most of the folks who were able to get out of New Orleans on their own. As I said, the population of the city basically doubled overnight. You can imagine the impact. The freeways turned into parking lots. The phone system was down, so you couldn't call in or out. The electricity was out — in some parts of the city until Friday. Shelters began to pop up everywhere, a lot of Red Cross shelters, a lot of church shelters — the faith-based community responded incredibly well.
PND: As the chief executive of the largest community foundation in the state, what was your first response to the influx of evacuees?
Davies: Well, I sat down with my staff on Tuesday morning to discuss our response, and almost immediately we decided that the impact of a storm like Katrina would be more like what we saw in Indonesia and South Asia with the tsunami than what had happened in New York with 9/11. That's a metaphor that proved to be immensely helpful to us. Coincidentally, one of my directors' husbands was a roommate of the number-two guy at the International Rescue Committee, George Biddell, and so he called George and said, on behalf of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, "If there was ever a time for you guys to deploy nationally, this is it. Please come to Baton Rouge and help us." And you know what? The IRC had a team of eleven people in Baton Rouge by Tuesday afternoon. As you probably know, the IRC was the lead NGO on the ground in Banda Aceh after the tsunami, and so they knew what the critical issues were likely to be and were really able to help us to think through our response to those issues. We were lucky to have their help.
PND: The IRC had never responded to a disaster in the United States, right?
Davies: That's what they told us. The other thing we did right away — in fact, I think it happened the same day the IRC team arrived — was to set up two emergency funds — a Displaced Residents Fund to help the people who were displaced by the storm and the Hurricane Katrina New Orleans Recovery Fund to help rebuild civic institutions in New Orleans.
PND: What were the issues that the IRC warned you about?
Davies: The first had to do with coordination, and, frankly, we didn't do a very good job of that initially. We actually talked to folks at the New York Community Trust and the Oklahoma City Community Foundation to find out how they had responded to the terrorist attacks in their communities and what lessons they had learned, so we thought we understood what the challenges were going to be. But what we didn't foresee was how chaotic the response to Katrina would be. There were so many different organizations on the ground in Baton Rouge — and the population of the city had swelled so much — that it was hard to get a handle on things at first. You know, cities are fairly efficient organisms. By that I mean, they develop support structures and services appropriate for their population and grow organically as the population grows. But when you basically double your population overnight, things pretty much break down. You can't get gas. Streets are clogged. People become short-tempered because they're scared or tired or traumatized. Everybody's doubling up. We had the Greater New Orleans Foundation, the IRC, and Greater New Orleans, Inc. in our building, and everybody on our staff had people staying with them as guests, in some cases as many as five or six people. Every hotel room in Baton Rouge was taken. Plus you had all these international organizations in town, all of them wanting to help and trying to plug in to the relief infrastructure, which just added to the chaos. I now understand that chaos, initially, is pretty typical of the response to most disasters. That's something the IRC helped us understand; it's just the way it is, and you have to try to move as quickly as you can to get the coordination piece and a master communications system in place.
PND: So the folks from the IRC weren't surprised that a single agency or organization — whether FEMA or some other city, state, or federal agency — hadn't emerged to coordinate the response by the first weekend?
Davies: That's right. The fact that no agency emerged in that first week as the central coordinating point was totally consistent with the IRC's experience in other disasters. In fact, the day the head of their team arrived in Baton Rouge, he called us into a room and said, "You know, the two most critical issues you're going have to get on top of are, one, designating a central point of coordination and a central coordinator — that's key, because this is going to be chaotic. And, two, you have to have a central point of communication, because rumors are going to start spreading like wildfire." And he was right.
PND: When, from your perspective, were those two issues — the need to designate a single point of coordination and the need to establish a master communications plan — finally resolved?
Davies: Last Friday.
PND: Friday, September 16? Almost three weeks after Katrina made landfall?
Davies: That's right. There was a major meeting at the Baton Rouge Area Foundation attended by about seventy people representing dozens of organizations that we called with the support of the governor [Kathleen Babineaux Blanco] and our mayor [Melvin Holden]. I was in New York that day, but our executive vice president was there, and at the meeting the governor announced her point person for the recovery efforts, and the rest of us finally got things organized. They had been improving, of course, in part because we had been holding meetings — at first on a daily basis, then, after the first week, on a weekly basis — at our offices with representatives of various relief organizations, service providers, and government agencies — you know, we'd invite people from FEMA and from the Red Cross and Salvation Army and so on to sit down and talk with each other. The city's Office of Emergency Preparedness also had a meeting every day, as did the state and the folks at LSU, and we would send people to all of those meetings. It may not have been very efficient, but by having folks in various meetings we were able to stay abreast of what was going on.
PND: Still, almost three weeks for the coordination issues to sort themselves out?
Davies: Yes.
PND: Again, from your perspective, what does that say about the effectiveness of state and city government in Louisiana, as well as the federal response? Or is it more of a comment on the scope of this particular disaster?
Davies: I think it's more of a comment on the scope of this particular disaster. I really do. If you think about it, there has never, in the history of this country, been a major metropolitan area that has come as close to being obliterated as New Orleans was by Katrina, except for maybe San Francisco in 1906. And I'm not just talking about the flooding; you had more than half a million people who were displaced from their homes and businesses. It was unprecedented.
We promised ourselves that we would not look over our shoulders and assign blame it's too debilitating. As for the other issues, I really don't want to get into them. Was there a lack of responsiveness in the days after the hurricane struck and the levees broke? Sure. Could certain officials have played a greater leadership role? Sure. But that doesn't change the basic fact, which is that this was a huge, huge disaster.
Let me give you an example. We have a state-appointed healthcare authority in the Greater Baton Rouge area that's responsible not only for the physical health of our citizens but also for their mental health. After Katrina hit and a significant portion of south Louisiana — Blackman's Parish, St. Bernard Parish, Orleans Parish, Jefferson Parish — kind of just disappeared, this healthcare authority was given responsibility for the people in those parishes. Well, as you might expect, the head of that authority went to the folks at the Department of Health and Hospitals and said, "Guys, I need more resources. I've got a lot of people I'm responsible for here in Baton Rouge who are from New Orleans and south Louisiana. I need more resources, more social workers, more psychologists to deal with all the issues I'm facing." And the folks at the Department of Health and Hospitals said, "That's easy. Just use all the displaced social workers, doctors, and psychologists from New Orleans and south Louisiana who have temporarily relocated to Baton Rouge." To which the head of the authority said, "Hold on a minute. Those are the people I'm talking about! Those are my patients. They're not resources."That's the kind of thing we were faced with. People were trying to deal with this huge disaster and simultaneously coordinate their work with other people and agencies without having enough resources to do the job. And the situation was exacerbated by all of the well-intentioned people who came down to help but needed to hook in to the emergency systems, which just added to the stress on a system that was already strained beyond its capacity.
PND: Obviously, you and your colleagues at the Baton Rouge Area Foundation found yourselves in the same kind of situation. Did you ever wonder whether you had the capacity to handle everything you'd been asked to do?
Davies: We were and are very bullish about getting stuff done. But the challenges are daunting. And I'll tell you, looking ahead, the biggest challenge may be the fact that the state of Louisiana is virtually bankrupt. Even before Katrina hit, the state was considering huge cuts, as much as 35 percent, in its budget, which means it's going to have to a lay off a bunch of people, many of them living and working in Baton Rouge, which is the state capital. We're also home to two major state universities — LSU and Southern University, the largest historically African American school in the country — and both of them are facing dramatic payroll cuts. So we're likely to be in a world of hurt once the state announces its new budget.
Those are the sorts of things I don't know how to respond to right now, because we're still dealing with displaced people who are traumatized, we're still trying to transition people from shelters to transitional to permanent housing, we're still trying to deal with overcrowding in our public schools and helping New Orleans get its public school system up and running. I mean, these are tough issues, they're difficult-to-resolve issues, but we're trying to get a handle on them, and I think we're doing a pretty good job. The whole macroeconomic situation, which is overwhelming, we haven't really dealt with yet. Obviously, we will at some point, but we're not quite there yet.
PND: Many Americans were surprised, if not shocked, by the racial and economic disparities revealed by media coverage of the storm and its aftermath. Do you think the outrage generated by that coverage will be channeled into initiatives that make a long-term difference in the lives of the poor and disadvantaged in the Gulf Coast region?
Davies: That's a huge challenge we all face, and we simply have to respond to it. Unfortunately, a lot of what needs to be done is out of our control. I know that we at the Baton Rouge Area Foundation will be very aggressive about the whole issue of building more equitable communities. We're very good when it comes to things like master planning, which is something we've been involved with in our community since 1998. We've got a whole department here devoted to something called Plan Baton Rouge, which addresses a range of questions related to building a diverse, vibrant, equitable community here in Baton Rouge.
The thing that most folks don't understand is that New Orleans was desperately poor before Katrina hit and has always struggled with the disparity between its haves and have-nots. And the terrible reality that Katrina revealed to the nation is that poor people are the most vulnerable segment of the population in this country; when something bad happens, it's usually poor folks who get hammered. In that sense, what happened in New Orleans after the levees broke was more of a class issue than a race issue. Obviously, race is involved, not least because the overwhelming majority of people in the areas that ended up under water were black. But poor people throughout the region, people without resources to fall back on, were hit hard by Katrina.
PND: What are you and your colleagues doing, or talking about doing, to address the racial and socioeconomic disparities in your community and the region as a whole?
Davies: I think the best way to address those kinds of disparities is to create viable mixed-income communities. I mean, these mono-cultures of wealth or poverty — gated communities are the perfect example — are anathema to what I think most of us would consider the American dream. The real genius of America is that you have people from all walks of life and economic strata living and working in proximity to each other. When it works, as it usually does, it forces people to understand each other, to have sympathy for each other. And that's what we need to do as we rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. It won't be easy, but we hope to take an active role in the Greater Baton Rouge area, working with the mayor and various authorities in adjoining parishes, in helping to ensure that we rebuild in a way that results in communities that are more diverse, both racially and economically, and, therefore, healthier.
PND: If you had to guess, which of the many long-term needs the region faces is most likely to be overlooked or ignored by post-Katrina reconstruction efforts?
Davies: Well, the thing we're most worried about at the moment is the mental health impact of all this. You saw what people lived through. That's a serious long-term problem for us, and it's not going to be resolved in the next six months.The other thing I worry about is the economy of Louisiana and what happens to New Orleans. I mean, what does happen to New Orleans? I suspect that the next year is going to be tough for everyone who loves New Orleans or calls it home, because the whole issue of how the city is redeveloped is going to become politicized. And I worry that if civic and business leaders in New Orleans don't develop a much more collaborative approach to the question of what happens next, it's going to turn into a pretty ugly conversation that puts us all in a terrible light. But, you know, we're in Baton Rouge, and it's hard for us to say to our neighbors and friends, "We know what New Orleans needs to do; we have the answers you're looking for." They tend to resent that kind of attitude, as they should.
PND: The western Gulf Coast region dodged a bullet when Hurricane Rita, which forty-eight hours earlier had been a Category 5 storm, came ashore as a Category 3. Should the fact that the Gulf Coast was struck by two major hurricanes in less than a month influence the conversation about how New Orleans is rebuilt?
Davies: Absolutely. I talked to a bunch of engineers the other day who had just come back from New Orleans, and they made it clear that there are some realities that cannot be ignored as the city is rebuilt. The reality is that the Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by the flooding, is probably going to have to be bulldozed. Most of the structures in that part of the city are not salvageable, and I say that just based on the number of days they were in water and the fact that most of them are wooden structures. That's the first reality.
The second reality is that there are probably going to be environmental issues to deal with in the Lower Ninth Ward. The EPA may not even allow rebuilding to begin without some sort of remediation, and that becomes a tough political issue because the folks in that part of town, most of them poor and black, have been there a long time and have a strong sense of community. It will not be easy, politically, to tell those people that they have to leave so that their houses can be razed.But this whole idea that we shouldn't rebuild New Orleans because it's below sea level is anathema to me. If the Dutch can keep the North Sea from flooding the Netherlands, there's no reason why, with a good levee system, folks can't live in the Lower Ninth Ward and have it be a much safer, viable, vibrant community than it was before Katrina hit; that should be the goal for everyone.
PND: Tell us about FoundationsforRecovery.org, the Web site created by BRAF a day or two after Katrina hit.
Davies: Basically, we created the Foundations for Recovery site as a way to promote the two emergency funds I mentioned earlier: the Hurricane Katrina Displaced Residents Fund and the New Orleans Recovery Fund. We established the New Orleans Recovery Fund in partnership with the folks from the Greater New Orleans Foundation, who set up shop in our building after their offices were flooded. I don't want to make this sound like a bigger deal than it was, but as we began to talk with the folks from GNOF about setting up a recovery fund for New Orleans, we all agreed it shouldn't be part of the BRAF site, that it should have its own identity. That's how the Foundations for Recovery site came about. In the weeks since then, as you probably know, the folks from GNOF have relocated back to New Orleans, and we've established a contractual relationship with them that will enable GNOF to distribute all the assets in the New Orleans Recovery Fund through a new fund, the Rebuild New Orleans Fund.
But the Foundations for Recovery site is still up, and we're still accepting donations through the Hurricane Katrina Displaced Residents Fund to help the tens of thousands of people in the Greater Baton Rouge area who were displaced by Katrina and have not returned to their homes; in many cases, of course, they no longer have homes to return to.
PND: On a more personal note, how are you and your staff holding up?
Davies: We've had some problems. We hired a psychologist to come work with us, and we've had some folks who just had to get away for a few days. I got to tell you, the phone calls we've been getting are unbelievable. I mean, you talk to people day after day — these are real people; this isn't a movie — who are in a world of hurt and whose sense of helplessness is overwhelming. We've been doing our best to try to get them connected to services, but, you know, it's hard and it's very stressful. But, by and large, we've held up well, and I'm very pleased with the way our people have responded.
MFN spoke with John Davies in September 2005.