By Mickey Noah, Baptist Press
ALPHARETTA, Ga. – It was about 6:10 a.m. CDT on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina, a huge Category 3 hurricane, made its monstrous landfall in southeast Louisiana. Packing 125 mph winds with intense central pressure, Katrina would be the third most powerful storm to ever hit the United States – and one of the deadliest.
More than 1,800 would perish directly in the hurricane itself or from the unprecedented flooding to follow. Eighty percent of New Orleans and surrounding parishes were inundated with 15-20 feet of water when levees broke, and the putrid floodwaters – contaminated with sewage, gasoline, oil and chemicals – lingered for weeks.
With some 300,000 homes and businesses damaged or destroyed, Katrina left $81 billion in damages in its wake, the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Mississippi beach towns like Gulfport and Biloxi – where the surge flooded inland as far as 12 miles – were devastated.
One-third of New Orleans’ population moved away and never returned.
Today, the North American Mission Board’s Mickey Caison will tell you that just as things in the U.S. were never the same after Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination or 9/11, the Gulf Coast and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) have not been the same since Katrina.
“We knew it was coming,” recalls Caison, at the time NAMB’s disaster relief coordinator and now NAMB’s adult volunteer mobilization team leader in Alpharetta, Ga. “As early as Aug. 26, we had pulled in a skeleton crew and opened the disaster operations center (DOC) in NAMB’s auditorium. We had also called the state conventions and mobilized an incident command team.”
But Caison today admits he and the SBDR team thought Katrina would be only a “wind event” – albeit a serious one – with destructive wind damage predicted as far north as Jackson, Miss.
Caison and his team had local disaster relief teams hunkered down in Mississippi and Louisiana, and used Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center near Talladega, Ala., Camp Garraway in Clinton, Miss., and Marshall, Texas, as staging sites for the scores of volunteers en route from 41 state conventions.
“On Tuesday, we saw the levees break and the flooding begin in New Orleans. We saw the thousands of people trapped in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. We realized how bad New Orleans was going to take it.”
Starting on the western side of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain, and moving into southern Jefferson and Plaquemines Parishes, and west of the Mississippi River down to Houma, SBDR was finally able to move in its first feeding and chainsaw units a few days later. “On the initial push, we had 30 feeding units deployed,” Caison said.
For 196 continuous days – from Aug. 29, 2005 until March 12, 2006 – Southern Baptist disaster relief was in full operation, Caison says. The DOC staff in Alpharetta, Ga., initially worked around the clock and later, would work 16-hour days.
While the numbers related to Katrina’s death and destruction were staggering, so, too, were the numbers put up by the 21,000 Southern Baptist volunteers, who came to the Gulf Coast from 41 of the 42 state conventions:
196,310 volunteer days.
500 SBDR units responded from across the United States.
14,613,798 hot meals were prepared and served to victims, volunteers and first responders.
21,610 gallons of water were purified.
7,817 children were cared for.
17,033 chainsaw and mud-out jobs were completed.
132,019 showers were provided to victims and workers.
27,845 laundry loads were washed and dried.
In addition to all the SBDR work under way in Louisiana and Mississippi, 13 other conventions were also responding in their own states – ministering to the 1.2 million homeless evacuees forced to leave the flooded Gulf Coast areas for places like San Antonio, Atlanta, Minneapolis and even New York.
After the actual Katrina response period ended in March 2006, Southern Baptist relief did not stop, but transitioned into a long-term response called Project NOAH (New Orleans Area Homes) Rebuild.
“By November and December of 2005, it was clear to us we needed a long-term rebuild program,” said Caison. Project NOAH would be funded by the balance of some $25 million Southern Baptists and others had generously contributed to NAMB and to their state convention offices for Hurricane Katrina relief.
Kicking off in May 2006, Project NOAH Rebuild would draw another 26,500 volunteers from across America to New Orleans, usually staying a week at a time – sleeping on cots or in sleeping bags – in New Orleans’ World Trade Center or at a SBC church in St. Bernard Parish.
These NOAH Rebuild volunteers assisted with the building or re-building of some 500 homes in New Orleans, many located in the flood-ravaged “Lower Ninth Ward” area, where the ruptured levees allowed floodwaters to spill over into neighborhood after neighborhood.
Another 26 water-damaged churches, schools and ministry centers were also repaired under Project NOAH Rebuild.
Today, five years later – with current responses under way in Haiti, American Samoa and in recently flooded Iowa, Texas and Kentucky – Caison says the real-life lessons and inspiring examples learned from Katrina have paved the way to the improvements evident in Southern Baptist disaster relief in 2010.
“From Katrina, we learned that the state conventions really do want to serve and stepped up – after all, 41 out of 42 did,” said Caison. “And they responded not only in the early emergency phase, but also in the Project NOAH Rebuild and the rebuild in Mississippi.
“We saw church-to-church partnerships spring up, and churches adopting churches that had been damaged or destroyed by the hurricane or floods.”
Caison said Hurricane Katrina also pointed out and solidified the need for more disaster relief chaplains, to the point that there are now 4,000-5,000 more chaplains than before Katrina hit.
“We’ve seen more and stronger partnerships between NAMB, the state conventions, associations and churches in disaster-affected areas because of Katrina,” he said.
“The way we conducted our ministry during Katrina also caused the federal and state governments to stand up and take notice. Our relationships with FEMA and state governments changed because they finally began to understand what Southern Baptist disaster relief is about. Washington folks finally realized that we bring more to the table than our relationships with the Red Cross or The Salvation Army. They began to understand who we are and now recognize us as one of the top three disaster relief organizations in the United States,” Caison said.
Caison said Southern Baptist relationships with other evangelical organizations also blossomed after Hurricane Katrina – with groups like Samaritan’s Purse, Operation Blessing, Convoy of Hope and other para-church organizations. He said this has led to the creation of the Christian Relief Cooperative, a group of evangelical organizations involved in disaster relief.
The number of trained Southern Baptist disaster relief volunteers has climbed to an all-time high of 95,000, a 46 percent increase over the 51,300 trained volunteers just prior to Katrina. In fact, just in the few months following Katrina in 2005, Caison said 25,000 new volunteers were trained.
Southern Baptist DR’s fleet – which numbered about 800 vehicles in 2005 – has grown to 1,550 units.
The number of recovery units is now 780, according to Caison. These include chainsaw, mud-out and repair units, and don’t include another 124 units used just for feeding. A number of state Baptist conventions have feeding units that can deliver more than 20,000 meals a day and did so after Hurricane Ike in Texas in 2008.
Although SBDR is sometimes spread thin – especially in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and the American Samoa tsunami – Caison says his disaster relief folks are ready to go if a new disaster strikes. The 2010 hurricane season – predicted to be one of the most active in years – is in its third month.
“While we have plenty of volunteers, we do have a shortage of leadership in disaster relief,” says Caison. “It’s not the quality of leadership but the quantity of leadership. Our guys out in the states wear multiple hats and disaster relief is just one of them. We need more unit directors – ‘blue caps’ – who can operate the units day to day.
“Disaster relief continues to evolve. The number of state conventions that have come on line have increased over the last 10 years. Some are still emerging. Usually, it boils down to funding. Most state conventions operate on the donations made during a response. If funding does not come, they cannot respond.”
Caison said Southern Baptist disaster relief’s mantra is “serving Christ in the crisis.”
“Disaster relief will continue to be used to kick down the doors of opportunity,” said Caison. “After a disaster response, there are people who come up to us and say, ‘please start a Southern Baptist church in our community.’ We’re working harder to follow-up and do just that – to use disaster relief as a means to plant new churches.”
Caison said disaster relief’s physical and spiritual ministries are two sides of the same coin.
“Jesus said to the 12: ‘go preach, share the story and heal the sick.’ He said to the 70: go heal the sick, share the story and preach.’ We have to do both the physical and the spiritual ministries. If we don’t, we’re just a social organization.
“As people in a disaster ask us who we are, where we came from, etc., we can transition to sharing the Gospel. And while we’re harvesting during disaster relief, we’re also planting seeds and watering as well. That’s who we are. That’s our DNA.”