Unfamiliar Tasks For an Organization Used to Disaster

The government is calling on the American Red Cross to take on a technological challenge the dimensions of which it has never before confronted.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency told the organization famous for blood drives and providing blankets to set up Internet kiosks in nearly 200 shelters scattered across the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast, many of them still without power. It must put in a phone system so that people displaced by the storm can report that they're alive. And it is expected to create a digital mortuary to gather the names of the dead.

Along with volunteers to organize soup kitchens, the Red Cross is dispatching engineers to set up wireless networks and trucks outfitted with satellite equipment that will allow isolated shelters to communicate with the rest of the world.

The challenge in the devastated region is like that faced by an army creating a communications system in a war zone. For the Red Cross, it is a new role, and one for which it is not wholly prepared.

The Red Cross has no choice but to learn on the fly and do as it's asked, said Steven I. Cooper, who joined the Red Cross as chief information officer just three months ago, after 2 1/2 years in a similar position at the Homeland Security Department.

"We're being tasked with things that even I'm scratching my head at and saying, 'How are we going to do this?' " Cooper said. But he has been through crises before and somehow, he said, it will come together.

Communications are just part of the technological task ahead. Cooper has to figure out how to get money to hundreds of thousands of penniless, homeless people.

After the four hurricanes in Florida last year, Red Cross workers interviewed victims and issued debit cards worth up to $1,200 that could be used to buy food and clothing. That is not practical this time, when there may be as many as a million cases to process. The four hurricanes combined meant 73,000 victims for the organization to help.

During a frenetic Thursday at Red Cross headquarters in the District, Cooper had an idea: a telephone-based registration system and a little help from Western Union. Victims could call the Red Cross, answer questions about themselves, have their identities verified and be issued validation numbers they could use at Western Union to collect $800 to $1,200 each from the Red Cross.

"Can Western Union do that okay?" a Red Cross staffer said.

"I don't know," Cooper responded. "I haven't asked them yet."

He sent his assistant to find a phone number for Western Union.