Cedar Rapids responder questions charges against Red Cross

CEDAR RAPIDS - Though a news report cast has doubt on how the Red Cross responded to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and suggested the disaster relief organization was more 'consumed” with bolstering its own image, one Cedar Rapids man with long ties to the agency cautioned that dealing with such a major disaster is a 'balancing act.”

NPR and ProPublica reported Wednesday that the Red Cross did not provide an adequate response to storm victims. The report said that the Red Cross headquarters used 40 percent of its available trucks as backdrops for news conferences, created excessive food waste and, in one instance, allowed sex offenders placed in a dorm to play in a children's area.

'Multiple systems failed,” the report cited one official as saying.

The storm was blamed for the deaths of at least 286 people and more $68 billion in damages.

But Peter Teahen said the Red Cross - a trusted organization, he said - is on the scene to provide assistance and give care to victims.

'Do we throw out vehicles willy-nilly, just to do it? I've never seen that happen,” Teahen said Thursday.

Teahen, director of Teahen Funeral Home in Cedar Rapids and a disaster responder, has served as a government liaison or national spokesman for the American Red Cross for events such as 9/11, the Oklahoma tornadoes in 1999 and more than a dozen hurricanes, among other events.

The Red Cross responded to the NPR-ProPublica report, stating it was 'regrettable” that on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy the news outlets painted a 'distorted and inaccurate picture of a Red Cross response that helped tens of thousands of people who urgently needed our services with hot meals, shelter, relief supplies and financial support.”

On Thursday, Red Cross released a second statement that noted what the organization described as inaccuracies in the news report.

Responding to some specific points in the NPR-ProPublica report, Teahen said officials often don't know where a hurricane will make landfall, that they must stage their personnel and equipment hundreds of miles out of the storm's path to avoid becoming victims themselves, and cannot always predict who and who will not need food and supplies.

'I haven't seen a lot of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that just waste food, waste money or supplies,” he said. 'They try to respond to meet the needs of the people and do the best they can in a very chaotic situation ...

'If you're the person whose house is being affected by the hurricane or disaster, you see it from your response and you sometimes don't understand what's being done or why it's being done,” Teahen added. 'You just want help. (Responders) respect the comments people are making. You know that, emotionally, this is overwhelming.”

Teahen said approximately 24 percent of people have disaster plans.

'When a disaster hits, (people without a plan are) lost, they don't know what to do,” he said.

Furthermore, evacuation orders frequently are ignored and people don't realize that they may have to fend for themselves for up to the first 90 hours of a disaster.

Those factors - no plans or supplies and ignored evacuation orders - combined with the stress of going through a disaster, can make the response to those catastrophes such as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods seem slow, chaotic or ineffective, Teahen said.

'The more people are prepared, the less panic there is,” he said.