Texas Official After Harvey: The ‘Red Cross Was Not There’

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-official-after-harvey-the-red-cross-was-not-there

47 28 9 years ago

Nor was FEMA, or at least its "FEMA Tech Corps".

And the incredible civic hackers who started w/ Harvey and are STILL at work now as Nate makes landfall? The big tech companies couldn't make time or money to give them a hand. See http://www.xconomy.com/texas/2017/10/05/as-relief-moves-to-r...

(Also see http://www.xconomy.com/texas/2017/09/08/harvey-techies-pass-... and https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/09/06/houston-t... for context).

transverse• 9 years ago

The difference is that Red Cross was collecting donations left and right. Now where did my donation money to Red Cross for Harvey really go?

scarface74• 9 years ago

I’m torn on the one hand, even at its most effective, how could a private organization do as much as a government that effectively has unlimited resources? On the other hand, this government with its current leadership has been anything but effective and we are better off depending on private organizations.

freedomben• 9 years ago

I agree with you. Thinking further tho, governments don't really have "unlimited resources," they really have the ability to simply take the resources they want from their citizens.

If we build up a government under great leadership that is highly effective, laying all the structure in place for taxation, then we have quite a task in front of us if we later want to dismantle it and switch to private orgs as a result of new leadership that has come in and is wasteful and/or ineffective.

Sadly, this makes me think the least risky strategy over the long-term is to avoid the fire of government in the first place.

forapurpose3• 9 years ago

Why would we trust private orgs more? At least government is democratically controlled and despite the small-government rhetoric, I don't see it as inherently more corrupt or less reliable than private orgs - just look at the news about them, even recently (Red Cross, Weinstein, Equifax, etc etc.).

Government does many great things: Air travel and automobile deaths are way down (per mile). Research funding has provided endless improvements in quality of life and amazing advances to the frontiers of knowledge (the Higgs Boson comes to mind). Public education, from pre-K through college, has transformed and educated the world. And let's not forget those government engineering projects that orbit distant planets, send us pictures, and sometimes land on them and drive around.

Private orgs and government are two tools in the toolbox that do different things, with some overlap. For things that require equity, such as disaster relief, I think we need government. It's not nearly perfect, but I'm not holding my breath until the nearly perfect institution, public or private, appears.

forapurpose3• 9 years ago

this government with its current leadership has been anything but effective and we are better off depending on private organizations

To a degree this is an intentional, by-the-book strategy: Paralyze and weaken government to strengthen the powerful and wealthy.

post_break• 9 years ago

This is why everyone in Houston was begging people not to donate to red cross but local charities.

pvaldes3• 9 years ago

Local charities are great. But the problem with local charities is that they do not have the same formation or experience than red cross volunteers have. And they do not have the same stuff.

Disposable medical material is expensive for example. And after the emergency ends, none of this material remains in the area to remember the money spent. Formation is expensive also and red cross provide it for free to their volunteers. If you are a new volunteer you are tutored by people with more experience also.

Local charities based in churchs etc, have often valuable information about the social fabric in the area. But is very easy to fall in traps and to commit not obvious errors in emergencies when you start, like giving priority first to the wrong people in a triage. Is hard not to avoid spending valuable minutes in a friend with a minor wound, because is your friend, but in the meanwhile some people could be dying silently at a few meters. It is never easy.

js2• 9 years ago

Red Cross response:

http://www.redcross.org/news/press-release/Red-Cross-ProPubl...

hawkice2• 9 years ago

Red Cross says they served a lot of meals, and the official in Texas says all the meals came from them. Not opposing statements, and Red Cross seems full of it. Walking the meal across a building isn't the same as really helping -- trying to conflate the two makes me extremely suspicious of them.

wahern• 9 years ago

Reading e-mails from the comfort of your living room isn't strong journalism, either. As the Red Cross points out,

  Finally, we would invite Justin Elliott to visit our Houston
  shelters with us—or any of our shelters in future disasters
  so that he can speak to shelter residents and to Red Cross
  volunteers to obtain a more complete context of the
  challenges and realities of disaster response. Writing a
  piece such as this one without broader context is, at the
  very least, dial-it-in "journalism."

This isn't the kind of journalism you should put too much stock into without significantly more corroborating evidence from diverse sources. Sometimes it's the best that can be accomplished, but that doesn't change its credibility.

Without knowing much about disaster response, it doesn't seem surprising to me that relief agencies might perform inconsistently in the immediate aftermath. The Red Cross is huge (as is their purview, geographically and functionally), and not everybody they send will be veterans. I've always seen the value of a large organization such as the Red Cross in it's ability to get enough people there in the beginning to at least prevent a spiral into chaos, even when execution is inconsistent; and in sticking around long after attention has moved elsewhere.

evolve2k• 9 years ago

This press release is a pretty valuable read, gives a very different picture.

DrScump• 9 years ago

They are already under scrutiny for where their Haiti relief funds went.

From 2 weeks ago, 170+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326335

pvaldes3• 9 years ago

Would be unfair to compare both situations.

Haity has an endemic level of corruption and lack of civil organization. And there are frontiers to cross also.

I don't think that red cross had to face the same level of corruption in Texas or would need to bribe texan autorities just to allow moving material from point A to point B.

ChuckMcM2• 9 years ago

Propublica does seem to have an axe to grind with them, it would have been more effective if Propublica compared the Red Cross response with the response of any other charitable relief agency. Except if they had done so they would have exposed that no other agency. So far I have been unable to find any agency other than FEMA that did more than the Red Cross did for the people of Texas in this emergency.

falcolas• 9 years ago

Like local food banks, and charity organizations who helped fund them? I imagine if you looked, you would find a dozen, a hundred smaller groups who did a lot more work with a lot less visibility.

borne0• 9 years ago

I donate to local charities because I can see the results and I can trust the administration to give the majority of the funds to the people/purpose who need it.

Usually it's run by volunteers or a religious organization (provided their mandate is to provide help regardless of the receivers religion).

Are there any charity organizations with totally transparent accounting? I don't need nor expect charity organizations to be run by volunteers, and I'd prefer them to pay their administrators/employees a reasonable wage. But I have no idea which organizations user their donations efficiently.

moonka• 9 years ago

Check out Charity Navigator. They are a good resource to get a little more transparency. They tend to toss up pages for large events like this as well: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...

I ended up donating to All Hands after getting some requests from people I know close to the area, but it was nice to take a look at them on Charity Nav and see them with high marks: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

pvaldes3• 9 years ago

I'm totally pro-transparency; but to me this is just trying to push the NGOs for doing the job and giving the money that the government do not wants to spend on USA people. At the same time that all the money goes for the design of the new "vietnam 2.0, lets try it again"

"Do my job, because I don't care, or I will start a publicity campaign against you". Very sad.

c3534l• 9 years ago

The Red Cross is a charity. You're not entitled to them swooping in and making everything okay again. It's your local governments job to ensure there's public emergency relief.

srge• 9 years ago

I agree. The actual people paid to protect the populations are complaining to a charity that the job they are supposed to do is not done?

This as to be an Onion article!

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

>The Red Cross is a charity. You're not entitled to them swooping in and making everything okay again.

Sure, but people ARE entitled to seeing some tangible results after donating money. Especially considering the massive amount of money Red Cross receives.

freehunter• 9 years ago

Exactly this. If I donate to the Red Cross for their Harvey relief fund and they sit on my cash instead of helping, yes I'm entitled to complain.

Feniks• 9 years ago

Not sure why the IRC is even needed in the, at least on paper, wealthiest country in the world.

I thought NGOs like that were reserved for 3rd world countries.

When there's an earthquake in Japan does the Red Cross fly in? In my opinion disaster relief is something the government should deal with. I'd consider it a point of pride as a nation. It would be shameful if my country had to beg for outside help.

Texas Official After Harvey: The ‘Red Cross Was Not There’

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