The key to crisis leadership is âbreak the rules, the rules were written for peacetime,â says Lt. General Russel L. HonorĂ©, who brought calm to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. He remembered pilots telling him he had to create a manifest before they could evacuate people from the flooded areas. âWe got guns, you donât. Fly the damn planes,â HonorĂ© told them.
âRules will stop a recovery in its tracks,â he said, relating another story of people stranded at the airport and the authorities telling him they didnât have the resources to process everybody. âOsama bin Laden was not in New Orleans,â he barked into the phone. âYouâre looking for terrorists in all the wrong places.â
HonorĂ©âs take-charge attitude and his military bearing restored peopleâs confidence in the governmentâs ability to handle the after-effects of Katrina after a very shaky start by the Bush administration. Speaking at The Daily Beastâs Hero Summit Thursday afternoon, HonorĂ© said government today is far more prepared to deal with Katrina-like events, but the American people have not absorbed the lessons they should. He asked how many in the audience have five daysâ worth of food and water at home. A sprinkling of hands went up, maybe 15 to 20 percent of the audienceââand some of them lie,â he exclaimed.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was asked how the government shutdown is affecting his stateâs recovery from Biblical floods that are only seen perhaps once in 250 years. Itâs different from Katrina, he said, noting that FEMA almost immediately had 100 people on the ground, âand theyâre still working.â But the folks in Washington processing the extended paperwork are furloughed, and he canât get the EPA to do testing on suspected e-coli on grass and parklands because theyâre shut down. âItâs just a matter of time before kids get sick,â he said. All the agencies are âdoing everything they can every single day but the shutdown slowed things down and put at risk people going through the most difficult time in their lives.â
The third member of the panel, William McNulty, is the co-founder and vice president of Team Rubicon, which takes veterans and puts them into non-profit disaster relief. They bring valuable skills to the effort, and in return, they get âpurpose, identity, and community,â McNulty said. The slogan of Team Rubicon is âBridge the Gap,â the gap between those who have served their country in uniform and an âAmerican public that has been largely indifferent to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,â he said. The three panelists, each looking at leadership from a different perspective, agreed that decisiveness is key, as is assuring those who carry out your orders not to be afraid of making a mistake, that you will back them.