Reply #7: Washington Post article about the debit cards [View All]

[bushisanidiot]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301483_pf.html

Unfamiliar Tasks For an Organization Used to Disaster

Sunday, September 4, 2005; A28

The government is calling on the American Red Cross to take on a technological challenge the dimensions of which it has never before confronted.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency told the organization famous for blood drives and providing blankets to set up Internet kiosks in nearly 200 shelters scattered across the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast, many of them still without power. It must put in a phone system so that people displaced by the storm can report that they're alive. And it is expected to create a digital mortuary to gather the names of the dead.

Along with volunteers to organize soup kitchens, the Red Cross is dispatching engineers to set up wireless networks and trucks outfitted with satellite equipment that will allow isolated shelters to communicate with the rest of the world.

The challenge in the devastated region is like that faced by an army creating a communications system in a war zone. For the Red Cross, it is a new role, and one for which it is not wholly prepared.

The Red Cross has no choice but to learn on the fly and do as it's asked, said Steven I. Cooper, who joined the Red Cross as chief information officer just three months ago, after 2 1/2 years in a similar position at the Homeland Security Department.

"We're being tasked with things that even I'm scratching my head at and saying, 'How are we going to do this?' " Cooper said. But he has been through crises before and somehow, he said, it will come together.

Communications are just part of the technological task ahead. Cooper has to figure out how to get money to hundreds of thousands of penniless, homeless people.

<snip>

Thursday's work started at 7:30 a.m. and an hour later Cooper was summoned to his first emergency meeting. Other Red Cross officials had news for him. FEMA, which is leading the relief effort, had still more assignments -- and thus new, complicated and undoubtedly expensive issues for Cooper's department. The Red Cross is hoping it will be reimbursed by the government for much of the work, but no one has worked out the details yet.

Contact mortuaries, FEMA told the Red Cross, and start to compile a secure database with names of the dead. The Red Cross had never handled such a job before, but software developers were quickly assigned to create a system to organize information collected by volunteers.

<snip>

Cooper does not know how much this will cost. He promised to pay for the expenses of employees who were brought to Washington, but didn't discuss money beyond that. Much of the equipment and services are likely to be in-kind donations, he said.