Hurricane Florence

Flooding in the Carolinas after Hurricane Florence in 2018
Introduction
Since the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the poor response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the aftermath of the flooding in 2005, adequate and effective management of natural disasters has become a central concern for leading emergency management agencies at both local and federal levels. A need for greater interagency collaboration has been established and by the time Hurricane Florence struck the Carolinas in 2018 there had been plenty of discussion about safety. Still, not enough was done to prepare the community for the devastation that occurred. In Horry County, South Carolina, where I live, major flooding occurred as a result of Hurricane Florence. The storm was responsible for approximately 40 deaths across three states and the total estimate of damage caused by flooding was approximately $20 billion. Described by the Weather Service as “one of the most significant rainfall events on record in the Carolinas, producing widespread, catastrophic flooding,”that lasted for several days resulting in more than 340,000 people to be without power supply (Siegel et al., 2018), Florence was deemed the cause of one of the deadliest floods in the history of the U.S. It was estimated that more than 10,000 people had to take refuge in the state’s shelters while several others stayed with family and friends, or in hotels. In addition, the rainfall led to the closure of over 1,100 roads including major and interstates roads. In the course of the deadly flooding, many people were stranded and hungry in their homes before foods could reach them. This paper will describe the organizational and situational concerns associated with the flooding in the Carolinas, the challenges and problems, an analysis of the problem of flooding in the area, and recommendations for addressing the concerns associated with flooding like that seen from Hurricane Florence.
Organizational and Situational Concerns
Organizational theory according to Weber’s bureaucratic approach as long been a staple of American emergency agencies’ planning when it comes to natural disasters like the flooding following Hurricane Florence. The purpose of this approach is to keep all stakeholders interconnected to ensure a unified, cohesive and coordinated response. Following Katrina, extensive investigations showed exactly what was needed and what should have been done to ensure a better response: FEMA had inadequately trained staff while the local incident command system was woefully underprepared. Organization had been lacking in the response and there had been no substantial “spirit of mission” among leaders of the various agencies working to stabilize the situation (Samaan & Verneuil, 2009). The same problems existed to some degree locally in Horry County.
Indeed, some believed the effects of the destructive flooding could have been reduced if necessary preventions were in place. For instance, in May 2018, three months before Hurricane Florence, Governor Cooper’s office released extensive studies that raised concerns over the 2016 Hurricane Mathew (Campbell, 2018). The publication detailed prevention projects on the three flooded rivers during the 2016 disaster. Unfortunately, little attention was paid by the legislators to the hundreds of pages of studies that were prepared by N.C. Emergency Management in collaboration with other state agencies and experts from N.C. State and East Carolina universities, which contain necessary approaches to reduce the effects of flooding from Lumber, Tar and Neuse Rivers (Campbell, 2018). This was a major problem in hindsight because it shows that, according to the systems approach model of management (see Appendix A for A Systems Approach to Managing Disasters), Horry County was simply not receiving the attention it required because preparedness was not following mitigation—the community’s leaders (particularly its legislators) had stalled on their end and failed to provide funds to address the issues identified in the vulnerability assessment. Had the local legislatures adopted the recommendations of the vulnerability assessments, actions could have been taken in advance to reduce the risk of flooding. This would have been an example of classical organizational theory in action: structure, specialization, predictability, stability, rationality and democracy would have been its hallmarks (FAO, 2018). A modern management example is, of course, the systems approach, which links communication among agencies and departments with organizational balance and decision analysis. In Appendix A, the systems approach is based on a continuous loop of four phases: 1) mitigation, 2) preparedness, 3) response, and 4) recovery. The recovery process feeds back into the mitigation phase—and this was true for the Carolinas following Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The local government, however, failed to proceed onward with preparation—and that played a part in the extent of devastation following Hurricane Florence two years later.
Ultimately, non-linear relationships among systems instead of simple cause/effect understanding of events is an important part of the systems approach and managers and leaders needed to understand that. Leaders should view their interaction with systems as dynamic and always subject to change; therefore, they should especially give special attention to the process rather than simply the moment of transaction and transformation. That was not the case in the two years between Matthew and Florence.
Challenges and Problems
One of the big challenges of the flooding that followed Florence was the rapidity of it all: no one was expecting such devastation. Hurricane Florence was viewed as a 1,000-year occurrence. And even though the quick succession following the year 2016 Hurricane Mathew has led to predictions of the possibility of another of its kind, the fact of the matter was that no one had anticipated a disaster quite like it. The challenge of preparing for flooding of the kind seen following Florence was and remains the number one problem in Horry County. It is evident that more plans and actions are still needed to prevent a reoccurrence in the future.
The community itself was devastated by the flooding, not just in terms of homes and businesses destroyed, but also in terms of lives lost. Some of the most devastated were the elderly, and people with disabilities, who did not have access to their medications, while the flooding lasted. One of the most heartbreaking experiences of the disaster was a mother, Dazia Lee, who lost her son to the flooding. Her one-year-old son, Kaiden, who was later found dead 15 feet underwater, was pulled from her arms by the force of the flood waters while she was trying to escape with him from her submerged car (McCoy, 2018). However, her story also brought controversy as Lee ended up being charged in the child’s death because it was found she had driven past barriers in the road placed there to block access. The community became divided, with one half suspecting racism (Lee was black) and that she was being unfairly charged, and the other half agreeing with the charges, suspecting Lee had deliberately ridden into danger and then deliberately put her child at risk (Bahrampour, 2018). This kind of problem is such that only a disaster like the flooding following Florence can reveal it: tensions in society that surface when stability is peeled away.
Still, in spite of the community issues faced in the wake of the flooding, managing the situation was less of a problem than actually preparing ahead of time. In managing the situation, the collaborative efforts between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations were helpful in providing reliefs to the affected persons. For instance, the American Red Cross, contributed an estimated 1,500 disaster workers to help alleviate the effect of the flooding. The organization also served thousands of meals and snacks to the affected persons and provided shelter for around 14,000 people across its 200 community shelters in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Likewise, the Salvation Army, another NGO, was on the ground to provide relief, which includes, creating over 60 mobile feeding centers for survivals throughout Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Other agencies that teamed up with FEMA in easing the flood experience for the affected persons include Corporation for National and Community Service, U.S. Department of Defense, National Guard Bureau, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Fish,and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Small Business Administration. Apart from these, individuals from the neighboring communities supported the affected persons with relief materials and food items (“FEMA and Partners,” 2018).
Analysis and Evaluation
In terms of responding to the flooding that wreaked havoc in Horry County, the collaboration of agencies was exactly in line with what local and federal leaders stated it should be following the disaster that was Katrina. Waiting on information to arrive, when it can be well approximated what response will be needed ahead of time, is completely wasteful and unnecessary. For that reason, E-PARCC (2008) points out, “this model works least well in a catastrophe…where time is limited, the needs are extraordinary, and the capacity of a central coordinator to communicate all of its needs in detail can quickly become overwhelmed” (p. 3). To get teams acting quickly, preparation is critical: the Carolinas had not bothered a great deal with preparation in terms of addressing infrastructural needs—but in terms of preparing response, the local leaders were a bit better. They had learned from the national catastrophe that was Katrina. Response was positive. Preparation in terms of prevention was the problem.
As Campbell (2018) shows, Horry County simply was not ready to absorb so much water. The studies produced for the local government indicated as much. Dry dams needed to be built upstream from Lumberton that could hold back and store excess water during storms, and buying out properties in flood-prone areas (Campbell, 2018).

Information sharing, coordination of effort, and managing personnel directed by various leaders are the three significant issues for leaders to address when leading an interagency collaboration in response to a natural disaster like the flooding seen in the Carolinas. Information sharing is not something that has to be done after the disaster strikes—and when it comes to prevention, it should be shared and acted upon, not set aside. Information has to be shared beforehand based on prior experiences, which is why experienced leaders are so important. It is also why action aimed at prevention is of the essence.
Coordination of effort depends upon leaders of various agencies working together to establish a chain of command, a duty-sphere, and a communication channel. Working together with other leaders to collaborate is something that should be done face-to-face as the two generals outside the Superdome showed: that is the most effective means of communications and leaders should be able to meet person to person to ensure that there is no doubt about what is going on and who is in charge of what. Planning is so critical because it maps out ahead of time how personnel are to be used and who they are to report to. Without a plan in place, practiced, studied and understood by personnel, managing them effectively in a prevention situation will be impossible. Horry County could have benefitted substantially from preventive measures.
Recommendations
The studies provided to local legislators following Hurricane Matthew showed that what the community needed to do was engage in dam and debris cleanups; they needed to build several dry dams upstream to assist with overflow in the event of major flooding following a major storm. This would have helped the water to be diverted away from the community. Homes, businesses, schools, lives—all of it would have been saved had community planners simply acted on the information they had received. Instead, they focused on response planning. This is understandable. After all, following Katrina the sole focus for much of the nation was on the necessity of response preparedness.
Following Katrina, FEMA and other agencies learned the necessity of pre-planning the paperwork to get over the hump of bureaucratic red tape as quickly as possible. The lessons they learned should be applied in Horry County: FEMA helped speed up the process of getting military services to the local area by getting pre-written authorizations approved ahead of time so that the next time a hurricane strikes, everyone can be ready: all it will take is a simple phone call to have supplies and resources at leaders’ disposal instead of having to write to the designated bureaucrats and await a response while people are in need. This type of planning worked well for FEMA and local organizers when Hurricane Harvey struck, and it worked well when Hurricane Florence hit. The main thing that local organizers failed to do was to take infrastructural precautions as part of the systems approach.
Indeed, this is one of the ways in which the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to natural disasters has improved since Katrina. FEMA directors are now required to actually have experience in handling disasters—which was not the case in 2005 (Philipps, 2017). Another federal agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, now requires all hospitals receiving federal money through Medicare and Medicaid to have emergency plans and preparations in place as a condition for receiving that money. This ensures that local area hospitals are ready to face the consequences of natural disasters like Florence.
However, instead of relying on response—whether governmental or local as Smith and Sutter (2013) showed—communities like Horry County have to be prepared ahead of time with prevention in mind. Prevention matters too. Storms like Florence could come again, but if the local region focuses on prevention as much as it focuses on response, more lives could be saved and fewer businesses and homes lost. Disaster management should not just be about planning responses to natural disasters: it should also be about preventing them insofar as a community is able to do so. Horry County and the Carolinas had all the information needed to take action following Hurricane Matthew: the studies showed what needed to be done, yet legislators failed to give the go-ahead to preparation and prevention. For that reason, the systems approach to management was disrupted and the community was kept at risk of suffering from substantial flooding. In the future, Horry County should focus on prevention, first and foremost—and response second.
Conclusion
In conclusion, government at all levels needs to review the studies that were provided to local legislators prior to Florence’s landfall. They need to act to prevent a reoccurrence of the extensive damage from this storm to be better prepared for another event in the future. Recommendations should include: debris clean-up, building several dry dams upstream from Lumberton so that the communities downstream could have been saved from the overflow. The cost for the recommended preventive measures is nothing compared to the potential loss of lives and properties that might arise from another reoccurrence.
References
Bahrampour, T. (2018). North Carolina mother charged in death of son who drowned in
hurricane, prompting accusation of racism from NAACP. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/north-carolina-mother-charged-in-death-of-son-who-drowned-in-hurricane/2018/10/31/824cd5c8-dc8a-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html?utm_term=.bfe3e163eba8
Campbell, C. (2018). You can’t go back and build over and over.’ But buying out homes won’t be cheap. Retrieved from http://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/-You-Cant-go-Back-and-Build-Over-and-Over-But-Buying-out-Homes-Wont-be-Cheap.html
E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative. (2008). Collaboration Amid Crisis: The
Department of Defense During Hurricane Katrina Teaching Note. Retrieved from https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/parcc/eparcc/cases/Moynihan-%20Teaching%20Notes.pdf
FAO. (2018). Organizational theories. Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7503e/w7503e03.htm
“FEMA and Partners” (2018) Respond to Hurricane Florence.
McCoy, T. (2018). In a Florence flood, she tried to hold on to her baby. But the water
ripped him away. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-florence-flood-she-tried-to-hold-onto-her-baby-but-the-water-ripped-him-away/2018/09/17/fbfb0c02-bab9-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html?utm_term=.f6223cd46dac
Philipps, D. (2017). Seven hard lessons responders to Harvey learned from Katrina.
Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/hurricane-harvey-katrina-federal-responders.html
Samaan, J. L., & Verneuil, L. (2009). Civil–Military Relations in Hurricane Katrina: a
case study on crisis management in natural disaster response. Humanitarian Assistance: Improving US-European Cooperation, Center for Transatlantic Relations/Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD/Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin, 413-432.
Siegel, R., Phillips, K., & Berman, M. (2018). After Florence, North Carolina grapples with floods, outages,and endless water. The Washington Post, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
Smith, D. & Sutter, D. (2013). Response and Recovery after the Joplin Tornado:
Lessons Applied and Lessons Learned. Independent Review, 18(2), 165-188.



Appendix

Appendix A. A Systems Approach to Managing Disasters: Phases of Management.

Relevant FEMA EMI Course: IS-102.C: Preparing for Federal Disaster Operations: FEMA Response Partners