When Hurricane Katrina hit, Mark Kraner, director of contracted auxiliary services at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, had to think fast. Kraner speaks about how his staff saved the day as well as the importance of remaining flexible and taking a deep breath before getting things done.
A natural disaster, such as that which befell the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, really tests the emergency preparedness of institutions counted on to be safe havens for the displaced and the injured. Mark Kraner, director of contracted auxiliary services at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, shared with FSD what he learned about himself and his staff during this crisis, and what the university learned it has to do better when the next disaster strikes.
“In a crisis situation, you take a deep breath, relax and just do what you do best. You have to be flexible. One of the things I realized is that you have to listen to people, and not just say, “It’s only my way.” That person you think might have a crazy idea might actually come up with something no one else has thought of to get the job done. You need to get to the end goal, no matter what it takes.
My staff was amazing. They were there no matter what. The day after Katrina hit, there was no public transportation, which a lot of our people rely on to get around, and yet 95% of my staff showed up for work. They worked until there was no more to do. All you had to do was say, “This is what needs to happen,” and they would make it happen. They were courteous and caring; they reached out to the evacuees and took them into their homes, and there was never any expectation of “what’s in it for me.”
There is a tremendous knowledge base on a college campus to make things happen and happen fast. Students actually set up a database to handle all the volunteers, set up on the Web, overnight, a system to send messages to volunteers to their phones to let them know when it was their turn to come into work.
The sense of volunteerism, especially among the students, was amazing. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen was the buses coming on campus with little kids, all with cardboard tags with their first names, separated from their moms and dads. And then to watch these college students come up to them and hug them and play with them or read to them and take their minds off of their problems was just amazing. It’s 16 months later and that image still brings tears.
You don’t realize just how much you depend on electricity until you lose it. In all the years I’ve been here we’ve never lost power to the whole campus in a hurricane. But one week after Katrina, when Rita hit, our co-generation plant got a power surge and went into a fail-safe mode and shut off power to the campus. And the guy who knew the password we needed to restart the system was unavailable. We were down for four hours. We have gas equipment, but the ignition switches are electric, so with no power we couldn’t start the stoves and we couldn’t cook.
We’re undergoing a $20 million renovation of some of our facilities, and as we build and select equipment we are looking for what can be converted from natural gas to propane gas, what can be put outside so we can continue to cook, and how we can get potable water from alternative sources.
We’re a little gun-shy now, but we are ready for the next disaster on a higher level than ever before. We have set up an emergency operations center that will become the one place to go and the one voice for the campus in an emergency. We have built into our policy what we as a foodservice department will and won’t do; for example, no running meals around to departments. We have stepped up and gone to a digital radio system and backed it up so we have continual access to each other.”