Communication lifeline in Louisiana: a newly formed clearinghouse helped legislators respond after the hurricanes--and is a model for the future.

Without communication there is confusion and consternation. That wasn't a fortune cookie saying for Louisiana legislators in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. That was reality.

National television was showing images of people sitting on their rooftops across New Orleans and refugees pleading for help inside the Superdome. But communication inside New Orleans was almost non-existent. Land line phones and switching stations were under as much as 10 feet of water. Cell phone reception was sporadic at best. The city's media were evacuated to Baton Rouge, 80 miles northwest, and the audience was scattered to the four winds.

Upwards of a million people had been uprooted, families split apart, and governmental resources shut down. Volunteers and donations were piling up in Baton Rouge and other nearby cities, but no one knew where to send the people and the supplies.

That's why state legislative leaders decided, three clays after the levees gave way in New Orleans, to invent the Legislative Resource Center. Its mother was necessity. Its father was frustration. And its arrival was attended by a medical doctor.

A WAY TO COORDINATE

Eric Baumgartner never thought that early morning cup of coffee would turn into weeks of work. It was a Friday morning, four days after Katrina blew through Louisiana and Mississippi and three days after the levees that protected New Orleans were breached, and he was having breakfast with Representative Ken Odinet.

Odinet was frustrated. His district in St. Bernard Parish, just south of New Orleans, was flooded. His people were dying. And he wasn't getting any answers when he asked questions. Katrina's 145 mile-per-hour winds had blown through Mississippi and Louisiana on Monday, Aug. 29. The levee breaches occurred on Tuesday. Now it was Sept. 2 and things weren't looking any better. Television was showing people trapped on rooftops and reporting that evacuation of hospitals was hampered by snipers and rioting. The refugee-filled Superdome looked like a dam aged feudal castle surrounded by a massive moat, and reported conditions were certainly medieval.

Odinet was heading to an emergency meeting called by the legislative leadership. He asked Baumgartner to go with him.

Baumgartner, a medical doctor, was no newcomer to disasters or to government. He had helped during a disaster in Hawaii and had extensive background in public health issues in Louisiana, Mississippi, Hawaii and Texas. He also had been director of policy and program development for the Louisiana Public Health Institute, a nonprofit public/private partnership.

From that meeting came what House Speaker Joe R. Salter calls a "clearinghouse" for legislative requests and constituent questions. "The legislators couldn't seem to get answers," Salter says. "This was a way we could coordinate. The resource center staff eventually built up a database of information and answers to frequently asked questions so that when a legislator called in, they often could answer the question from what they had already learned."

Senate President Don Hines says legislators were "frustrated and anxious. They were getting calls like 'eight people were trapped on a rooftop', 'somebody's got an 18-wheeler loaded with goods and where should it go?', and '1,200 people were in a shelter with no food or water.'

"Who do you call? Where do you go? You could spend all day trying to find answers to just those three problems," Hines says.

The biggest complaint at the organizational meeting was the lack of information.

"Representatives and senators, urban core districts, metro, suburban and even rural districts--they all had the same complaints," Baumgartner says. "'We're not getting any information. The executive branch up here is doing things we don't know anything about. The executive branch down in these municipalities is doing things that we don't know about. There's got to be a better way.'"

A RESOURCE CENTER IS BORN

When the meeting ended, Baumgartner had a new temporary job and the Louisiana Legislature had a new resource center. Its goal? Get reliable information for legislators, coordinate communication between them, help them get help for their constituents.

"Katrina went beyond what all of us had come to expect from a hurricane," Baumgartner says. "Everything was a mess. One of the things needed was communication. People just needed information."

The Legislative Resource Center office is a narrow staff room next to a hearing room on the House side of the capitol building. People--four from the House staff and four from the Senate were assigned to the resource center at a time--sat intently in front of computer screens, some on the phone, others monitoring a press conference feed from the Office of Emergency Preparedness.

Baumgartner didn't realize when he proposed the creation of what he calls a "war room" that the House and Senate staffs weren't accustomed to working together. It didn't matter. While Baumgartner was at lunch, House Clerk Alfred Speer and his counterpart, Senate Secretary Glenn Koepp, had been busy. By the time Baumgartner returned from lunch, phone lines had been dropped, computer connections installed, Internet service was up and running, a television set was mounted and monitored, and staffers were placed in the resource center and across town as liaison at the Office of Emergency Preparedness. In addition, a new computer program had been written that automatically dumped the collected information into a database so entries could be cross-checked and duplicates identified.

"At first we had six or seven stations that took any calls," Baumgartner says. "We were all generalists." That quickly changed as patterns began to develop. Callers seeking permission to re-enter New Orleans, for example, were shunted to one desk, while callers trying to find missing people went to another.

Calls were handled through the normal House and Senate switchboards so that operators could route calls to the open phone line. But Speaker Salter says the center was never intended to be a public resource. "The idea was to funnel questions through legislators," he says. Speer, clerk of the House, says available resources dictated that decision. "We decided if anybody could call us, we couldn't handle it," he says.

Nevertheless, staffers quickly began to receive calls from the general public. Some people were so desperate they "shotgunned"--in Baumgartner's words--their phone calls, calling every governmental office they could find. Some legislators told constituents to call the resource center directly.

A BUSY PLACE

The center logged 716 requests, creating files on each one, in its first 18 days of existence. Some calls--requests for a legislator to call someone, for example--were handled on the spot but most were referred to a state or federal agency.

"We rarely take action ourselves," Baumgartner explains. "We're the handoff to people who do. The goal of the center, he says, was to "value-add" the requests by eliminating duplicates and collecting enough precise details to solve the problem.

A computer analysis of the first 18 days showed 105 calls came from people wanting to donate clothing, goods and services; 336 dealt with people who needed food, housing and clothing. The rest fell into categories ranging from requests for information (102), permits for re-entry into the damaged areas (67), and legislators trying to find other legislators or staff people (73).

Nine of the calls involved needed rescue operations for people trapped in their homes or on their roofs. Another 52 calls involved missing family members. Twenty calls requested medical assistance and five others came from out-of-state medical volunteers enmeshed in red tape and frustrated because they were not being allowed to help.

Some calls were easy. A gentleman who had hundreds of pounds of meat in Jefferson Parish kept cool by generators got fuel for his generators. A caller who needed a birth certificate was referred to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Some calls needed quick action--eight elderly people trapped in an apartment building in New Orleans. Some did not--the offer of jobs for school teachers in California, the donation of hearing aids.

The center handled 18 calls on Sept. 2, its first day of operation. It handled 82 calls on Sept. 3, peaked at 98 calls on Sept. 6, and averaged just under 40 calls a day for the first 18 days of operation. It was staffed 14 hours a day during that time.

QUIETING DOWN

It's been five weeks since Hurricane Katrina roared through southeastern Louisiana and things are pretty quiet around the Legislative Resource Center. The buzz is down to a quiet drone now and the on-duty staff down to a scarce few. The television is showing not another briefing but a golf tournament.

People are beginning to return to New Orleans, finally, and the legislature is focusing on a disaster recovery operation unprecedented in U.S. history. The office soon will be phased out, its duties taken over by the normal legislative process. The cost of the operation will be split between the House and Senate budget.

But the idea won't go away. The database of requests made and files created remain a blueprint for future disasters. That database proved helpful almost immediately when Hurricane Rita devastated southwestern Louisiana three weeks after Katrina hit southeast Louisiana. The Legislative Resource Center "is probably one of the better things we did," says Senate President Hines. "We'd have it going instantaneously if we had another disaster," he says.

The lessons of Katrina will help future responses. Katrina and Rita showed that major disasters can quickly overwhelm the normal processes used by state and federal officials. Baumgartner notes that Katrina exposed bottlenecks in distribution of supplies and volunteers that need to be addressed by state and federal government before a major disaster strikes another state.

"The donation of food, water, clothing, medical supplies, is bottlenecked," he says. "The offer of services--doctors, nurses, mental health professionals--is bottlenecked. I can understand where we need to know something about these people. But could we have created more bandwidth, a more straightforward protocol by which they could get vetted and matched with a need? I think that clearly is something that needs to be worked on."

The Legislative Resource Center found out one other thing for future use. "We found we were in a position to make a referral," Baumgartner says. "The other branches of government will take our referral. We think we have absolutely been the ones to get something done that might not have happened or to get it done quicker, better, more assuredly."

Jay Perkins, a former reporter and editor for the Associated Press, is an associate professor in the communications department at Louisiana State University.