(Newswire.net — October 31, 2014) — New York – In the months after the disaster, the American Red Cross presented success in delivering food, clothes and shelter to tens of thousands of people left homeless by the storm.
“I think that we are near flawless so far in this operation,” the Red Cross president and CEO, Gail McGovern, told NBC News two weeks after the storm.
Internal documents obtained by NPR and ProPublica, however, along with interviews with Red Cross employees, revealed that Red Cross struggled to meet the basic needs of victims in the first weeks after the storm.
The documents and interviews also revealed that the organization was more focused on PR than on providing necessary help to Sandy and Isaac victims.
In an interview, the Red Cross officials stood behind their work overall, especially during Sandy.
Trevor Riggen, a vice president at the Red Cross, says that the Red Cross served 17 million meals, provided millions of supplies and housed tens of thousands of people in its shelters.
“I don’t believe that’s the way our leadership has used resources on the ground or that it was a driving factor in their decisions,” Riggen says.
The report says, however, that 40 percent of available trucks were assigned to serve as background for news conferences, and that distribution of relief was “politically driven instead of [Red Cross] planned.”
The Food waste was excessive, the report says. It was not only due to factors including inexperienced stuff and poor communication, but also due to a political pressure. Some 200.000 meals were ordered to produce only to drive up numbers. Since there was not real demand for it, expensive meals went to waste.
“It was just clear to me that they weren’t interested in doing mass care; they were interested in the illusion of mass care,” says Richard Rieckenberg, who helped lead the Red Cross’ response to Sandy and Hurricane Isaac.
It wasn’t just Sandy. When Isaac hit Mississippi and Louisiana earlier in 2012 Red Cross didn’t have food and blankets in the shelters, but they had 80 trucks to drive around empty or largely empty “just to be seen,” as one of the drivers recalls.