Hurricane Katrina – Five Years Out

Crisis communications comes in many forms.

Five  years ago, I watched in disbelief as my hometown of New Orleans — the city that saw every hurricane as a chance to party and who named a noxious pink tourist drink, “The Hurricane” — got very serious, very fast about a hurricane named “Katrina.”

I remember days of not knowing whether my whole family had survived and watching the television in equal parts dread and fascination as landmark after landmark was washed away. Communications became primal and critical. Throughout the Gulf region, families and friends formed e-mail trees and phone trees. Messages were terse: “Carl sitting out hurricane on boat, we haven’t heard from him;” “Think David is in Mississippi, not sure;” “Our house had some trees down, but your uncle’s is gone completely and his car is under water.”

Hurricane Katrina by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, on Flickr

Messages were a lifeline to those of us helplessly watching from afar. I was lucky. The house where my aunt hosted Christmas every year for my extended family was gone, but no one was killed or even hurt very badly in my family.

Of course, the damage Katrina did to New Orleans went beyond the immediate aftermath, the unbelievable horror we saw on television. What you didn’t see even after most of the blue-tarped roofs were repaired, was the death of a beloved uncle that some still say could have been prevented if his doctors had the hospital records that were washed away in Katrina; the relatives who still haven’t found their job footing; the countless traffic accidents as New Orleanians transplanted to the North Shore inexplicably went through red lights or sat at green, an entire population with sudden attention deficit.

This year, as yet another “tropic event” forms in the waters outside of my hometown, my family has its “crisis communications plan” in place, even if it’s as simple as reactivating the email chain. My family’s crisis communications plan may not have the polish of the plans we put together for clients, but it will hit the basics: it will be timely, informative, use the available channels, and hit a wide variety of “target audiences,” no matter where they are during a hurricane.  While many in my family are ready to board up and evacuate at the first sign of a hurricane, others — in true New Orleans style — plan to lift a drink and spit into the eye of the hurricane.