We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  Chefs understand how to create order out of chaos, just as they know how to control the fire to cook great meals. There were lots of moments when we didn’t know what to do in the early days. The conversation would go like this: What the fuck do we do next? Okay, let’s keep cooking. That’s a good plan!

  Harvard Business Review ran an article recently about embracing complexity, citing the great example of an ant colony.1 Each ant works with local information, and has no big picture of what’s going on. It has no plan, and no obvious leadership, yet together the colony achieves incredible feats of organization and engineering. What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people. We were sending food trucks to those who were fainting in line for food because it was two weeks after the hurricane and not even MREs had reached them. I didn’t call an expert in painting or the history of the ninth century. I called the experts on how you get food to the people in very little time and on very little budget: cooks and kitchens and suppliers.

  If we had a plan, it was to be united to achieve as much as possible. With El Choli, we were the biggest restaurant in the world. Period. And if we put in all the kitchens and the food trucks, we were the biggest restaurant company built in the shortest amount of time. How many restaurant companies go from one restaurant to sixteen in less than two weeks, unfunded? Everyone kept saying we needed to have a plan, but we never organized. How many days are you going to organize when people are going hungry? People were eating roots. American citizens eating inedible roots. This was not a far-away country on another continent. This was American soil. That passion to help our fellow Americans was a big reason why we stayed united against the odds, and why we cooked for so many people.

  HUNGER AND THIRST ARE HARD TO SEE, ESPECIALLY IN A DISASTER RECOVERY situation like Puerto Rico. You don’t even realize what the problems are until you go into the community and talk to people.

  We gave them food that was prepared and cooked earlier the same day. We made it locally to bring economic activity back, paying chefs and hiring food trucks, to create the conditions so people could feed themselves. Along the way, we were restoring pride and creating the conditions so that law and order could return. People behave strangely when they are hungry: they will break into stores to steal food, and risk getting arrested or shot, if there is no other way to feed their families. That’s why my friends in Homeland Security Investigations told me that delivering our food made their job so much easier. It’s far better to approach someone with a sandwich than a gun, no matter if you’re carrying a gun anyway.

  Governments and nonprofits exist to serve the people: What point is disaster relief if you don’t care for the people who need that relief? There can be no greater priority than food and water, even though FEMA officials told me otherwise. That’s why someone needs to be held to account for the delivery of food and water in a crisis: a food tsar who can cut through the bureaucracy to save and rebuild lives. We cannot leave this vital task to the elderly volunteers of the Southern Baptist Convention alone.

  With food as a priority, we should go into any disaster area with a pre-prepared plan of action. We know where the hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes strike. We know there will be more of them as the climate continues to change before our eyes. And we know that the first few days after a catastrophe are critical in terms of food and water. We can stockpile supplies, identify kitchens, and alert relief workers to be on standby ahead of a predictable disaster like a hurricane. We can distribute emergency communications systems like satellite phones, in case the cell phone network goes down. We need emergency feeding teams ready to enter these disaster zones within twenty-four hours, just as we have search-and-rescue teams ready to pull people out of earthquake rubble. You don’t start work after the emergency happens. We need a network of Food First Responders, or FFRs.

  No two areas are alike, and you can never plan for everything. But you need to prepare for some things when food is a priority. You need filters to purify whatever supplies of water you can find, instead of trying to ship giant numbers of plastic bottles. You need generators, especially for the big arenas. In the San Juan convention center, half of the kitchen didn’t work. People said it was a private business, but in an emergency it belongs to the people of Puerto Rico. In emergencies, cities should have the power to take back these giant kitchens temporarily, to serve the people. They should be feeding lots of people because the kitchens are big enough to do so. Education departments should have the power and budget to expand the cooking in their school kitchens, so they can serve their communities. Frankly, I’m amazed these plans are not in place already. With that kind of thinking, we could have taken care of the island with half of the people at FEMA.

  We could also innovate around the delivery of food. Instead of buying and trashing millions of throwaway plates and cutlery, we could hand out reusable plates and cutlery at the start of a disaster. Believe me, people will take care of them if they know the emergency plate and cutlery guarantees them a hot meal the following day.

  WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE DISASTER RELIEF IN PUERTO RICO?

  The simple answer is: most of it. When you see such epic failures, you realize these are systemic problems. The system failed from the top to the bottom, at every level of government, from federal agencies to nonprofit charities. That’s not because there were bad people with malicious intent. I said from the start: there were many good people trying to do good things. But their thinking and their organization was all wrong, and the results were not just inefficient, but deadly.

  This isn’t just my view: the thoughts of a chef who didn’t complete high school. Refugees International made its own assessment of the disaster relief in Puerto Rico two months after the hurricane, in its first mission inside the United States in its thirty-eight-year history. Based on its huge international experience, it wanted to compare best practices overseas with what was going on in America. The conclusions, published at the time we were winding down our cooking, were shockingly bad.

  “Our team encountered a response by federal and Puerto Rican authorities that was still largely uncoordinated and poorly implemented and that was prolonging the humanitarian emergency on the ground,” they said. “While food and bottled water are now widely available and hospitals and clinics back up and running, thousands of people still lack sustainable access to potable water and electricity and dry, safe places to sleep.”

  The group recommended stronger leadership and coordination with local officials and community groups, much better information and communication, targeting the most vulnerable for urgent help, and applying international best practices for future disasters.

  “Unfortunately, the response to the catastrophic disaster in Puerto Rico lacked the requisite leadership from the highest levels of the U.S. government necessary to support a more effective, timely response by FEMA,” they concluded. “The response remains poorly coordinated and lacks transparency. Disaster survivors continue to face horrendous living conditions and lack information on whether or when they will be assisted.”2

  There is no substitute for leadership at the top, starting inside the White House, with the president of the United States.

  But Trump’s obvious failures do not tell the full story. There is a kind of group thinking that leads to these systemic failures. After all, it’s not as if the government and NGO officials didn’t plan for a disaster, didn’t hold endless meetings and didn’t send long emails to giant contact lists. They tried hard, and they failed hard.

  However, their attitudes were modeled on a top-down approach that was divorced from reality, and they were not alone in thinking that was the best way to deal with a disaster. Top-down approaches are favored in disaster zones but they are based on fear, and don’t succeed as a result. As Erik Auf der Heide, the disaster management expert, writes, “The unfounded belief that people in disasters will panic or become unusua
lly dependent on authorities for help may be one reason why disaster planners and emergency authorities often rely on a ‘command-and-control’ model as the basis of their response . . . This model presumes that strong, central, paramilitary-like leadership can overcome the problems posed by a dysfunctional public suffering from the effects of a disaster . . . Authorities may develop elaborate plans outlining how they will direct disaster response, only to find that members of the public, unaware of these plans, have taken actions on their own.”3

  As for the fear and anarchy, Puerto Rico demonstrated that those widespread expectations were entirely misplaced. Jorge Uribarri, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the first HSI team we partnered with, told us that his entire team of agents saw only one potentially dangerous situation during thousands of missions over many months. That was a single supermarket looting on the poor eastern tip of the island on the day the hurricane landed. Even then—in the most impoverished, worst-hit corners of the island—his agents saw no violence.

  What works in a disaster is localized decision-making. That was clear from the contrast between the private and public sector responses to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as Atul Gawande points out. “I talk about Katrina because you saw two kinds of checklists in action,” he told a Harvard audience. “One is the kind of set of protocols that FEMA had in place, which was all about centralizing control. And in that instance where the protocols really dictated what people out at the periphery had to do, right down to their most nitty-gritty decisions, the thinking could not keep up with the scale of this disaster and its complexity. It just wasn’t something FEMA had dealt with before. And the result was total failure. People doing the equivalent of standing at the bridges saying, this water delivery isn’t on my list.

  “By contrast, Walmart handled the situation by first telling their front-line managers in the stores, ‘This is a situation that’s beyond anything we’ve dealt with. You are all going to be working above your pay grade. We have a few key things that we need you to do, though. Number one, do everything you can to save people using your judgment about what is best. But second, communicate whatever you’re doing on a daily basis to us, at the center, in their command center, and also, to one another.’ Because if chaos wasn’t to develop in the ways that different stores were handling things, they needed communication. So they focused on communication. And as a result, really great ideas spread immensely quickly. The stores became the place that opened up three pharmacies to make sure that local residents had access to medications that were critical. They were the quickest in moving emergency equipment to fire and police, whatever they had available in the stores. And they got water into the city two days before FEMA did.

  “It had to do with the idea that under situations of complexity, you want to distribute power out to the periphery as much as possible. But then, encourage those teams at the edges to understand the individuals are fallible. But teams of people are more likely to get the better results.”4

  Even by the standards of top-down management, the government failed. The Pentagon—the epitome of a top-down organization—failed to do its normal job of pre-positioning assets ahead of Maria. After Hurricane Irma passed through, the defense chiefs sent their resources home rather than responding to Maria’s explosive threat. They didn’t even appoint an on-scene commander, Brigadier General Richard Kim, until ten days after the hurricane left Puerto Rico.5 When the military showed up in Puerto Rico, they were simply too little, too late. “We’re replaying a scene from Katrina,” said Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, the man who saved New Orleans in 2005. “We started moving about four days too late.”

  It was no coincidence that Walmart was forced to throw out tons of food in Puerto Rico because the federal government failed to respond to its pleas for emergency fuel supplies to keep its food fresh. Pressure from Puerto Rican officials and members of Congress made no difference. FEMA simply chose to say and do nothing, even when Walmart executives said it would take weeks to replenish their supplies.6

  The island’s government was not much more impactful. Leaders like Julia Keleher struggled to communicate with her own schools. The mayor of San Juan was more present on television than government headquarters. The governor seemed paralyzed by internal politics when it came to solving the water crisis for his own desperate people. They were so overwhelmed, by the disaster and by long-running challenges, that they could not lead effectively.

  As for FEMA itself, the agency remained stuck in a state of denial, unable to see its own disastrous failures. Six months after Maria, Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, testified to members of Congress that the massive $156 million food contract with Tribute that failed was in fact no big deal. “Out of 2,000 contracts, only three were canceled,” he explained. “Tribute being one of them.” Long did not say how many large contracts his agency negotiated for feeding Puerto Rico, but it’s unlikely there were any bigger ones.

  “The bottom line is my agency made a herculean effort to put food and water in every area,” he continued later in the same hearing. “It’s more complex, and it’s not going to move as fast, when you are talking about an island jurisdiction, and the airports are completely blown out and the ports are blown out.”7 FEMA’s “herculean effort” was news to any of us who were in fact putting food and water in all 78 municipalities. It was also plainly wrong to say the airports and ports were destroyed. Either Long was trying to deceive members of Congress or he was incredibly ignorant of the facts on the ground. Six months after the disaster, FEMA owed itself and the American people a better accounting of what went so catastrophically wrong in Puerto Rico.

  The giant nonprofit sector suffered from similar failures. At their worst, they are as bureaucratic and political as the government, with an overriding mission of raising money to support their giant staff. They suffer from a savior complex, believing they know best how to govern the locals, rather than building up the local leaders and the local economy. Oxfam’s sex abuse in Haiti was the very worst example of that mind-set of cultural and personal superiority, combined with an immoral lack of human respect and decency.8

  This is the moment to demand answers from the big NGOs. If we keep giving money to them without results, we are doomed to fail again. We have to challenge their thinking to have a return on our investment. As an American and as a citizen of the world, I felt let down by the lack of readiness and preparedness of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army in Puerto Rico. They could have done better, but instead it was just business as usual. It was disaster boredom. It was just another crisis.

  After Hurricane Sandy, the failures of the top-down approach of the Red Cross were obvious to its own leaders.9 Richard Rieckenberg, one of the Red Cross heads of mass care, explained in a letter to the Red Cross vice president soon after the disaster, “As a matter of political expediency, we became committed to creating the illusion of providing mass care rather than the reality. At the level I was dealing with, this was done in a very deliberate and cynical manner. We became focused on making ‘the numbers look good’ and in ‘showing a presence.’ I was in an interesting position as the Mass Care Planner. I was not asked to plan. Rather, I had plans given to me which I was expected to endorse. Some were absurd.”10

  Some of the smaller nonprofits are leading the way, accepting the need to change. Mercy Corps realized that cash, food and water filters were key in Puerto Rico. They coupled those insights with great intelligence about the facts on the ground of who needed help the most, and in what areas. “We can’t keep doing humanitarian aid the way we did in the 1990s in the Balkans with all the convoys of food,” said Javier Alvarez. “We have to tap into new resources, private business, universities and social media. It’s got to be much, much faster. We can’t be sitting on the problems.”

  Even at the Red Cross, there are signs that change is coming. Brad Kieserman says it is his personal view that the organization needs to plan for disasters in a very different world. “If you are exchangin
g business cards at a time of a disaster, you’re too late,” he says. “You’ve got to be engaged beforehand. Do we as an emergency management community need to open the aperture further? We do. We are seeing a world in which the people are aging, the infrastructure is aging, the threats are becoming more aggressive and relentless. And I don’t think anybody can deny the number of significant weather events has increased in size and scope, but also frequency.” After all the floods, wildfires and hurricanes of the past year, Kieserman says these weather events are no longer outliers: “I don’t think those things are an anomaly. I think they are a bellwether. I also don’t think they are like what we’ve seen before on a regular basis. That’s an important distinction. So we’ve already begun to plan differently. Because the ways that we planned, and the frequency and intensity for which we planned, are no longer the reality we face.”

  YES, WE NEED TO FOCUS ON THE LIBERATION OF THE RECEIVER. YES, WE need to meet the needs where they are. But I saw something profound change among the volunteers who worked so hard to feed an island. It was difficult work, for sure. Yet it was also one of the most fulfilling things they had ever done. Cooking changed them as much it changed the community. Making these meals renewed their values and identity: it reminded them who we are as Americans and what we stand for. In that sense, our country and our leaders would do well to reform disaster relief at home and internationally. We can find ourselves in these crises, as individuals and as a country.

  This was a tough assignment for my team, separated from their families for a long time, sweating through the chaos of a tropical disaster zone. Our food relief operation was a huge challenge for each and every one of them. “It was emotionally and physically draining,” said David Thomas. Still, in the middle of this intense recovery effort, they experienced some of the biggest achievements of their lives in the relationships they built with one another. Thomas will never forget the first time he visited the church in Naguabo. “They are all doing this because they honestly, truly want to help,” he said. “It’s like SEAL Team 6 going into a wartime situation,” he explained. “Only these people can understand what we’re going through. We’re now friends for life.”