On The Front Lines

Bud Barrow has dealt with hurricanes before, probably five or six in the last twenty years. But none of those prepared him for 2020, when his community took a direct hit from Hurricane Laura and, just six weeks later, another hit from Hurricane Delta. Laura generated 120-mile-per-hour winds that left the area looking like a war zone. Delta pounded it with fifteen inches of rain. “The first storm took the roofs off the houses, and the second storm filled them with water,” says Barrow. “It was pretty awful.”

As CEO of Beauregard Health System in DeRidder, Louisiana, Barrow (MPA 1980) spearheaded efforts to prepare for and recover from the disasters. Before the hurricanes hit, he and his team sourced fuel and water; stockpiled food, medical supplies, and drugs; UNDERSTANDING THE SURVIVORS parcels of land and removing trees that pose danger and prepared to house their workforce at the hospital or in accommodations nearby for as long as necessary. Afterward, they kept the hospital up and running with the help of dedicated personnel, daily deliveries from fuel and water tankers, and heroic efforts by the local f ire department.

Barrow and his staff also focused on aid for hospital employees, many of whom “lost way too much,” he says. “Using money raised through our hospital foundation, we helped pay for everything from generators to childcare to getting roofs put back on houses. We also initiated food and clothing drives and assigned groups of employees to go and help their colleagues in need.”

What made recovery efforts particularly hard, recalls Barrow, was the added challenge of dealing with feelings of discouragement. “So many people were asking, ‘Why us? Why now? How much is enough?’ But we saw tender mercies as communities, governments, and volunteers from all over the country reached out to help. We saw reaffirmation of the goodness of mankind on so many levels. At the end of the day, most of us felt inspired and able to go on because of the love others showed to us.”

An Unprecedented Year

While most of the world was focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was also a year marked by unprecedented natural disasters across the globe. In the United States alone, there were twenty-two separate billion-dollar disasters, including wildfires, floods, hurricanes, drought, and tornadoes.

Like Barrow, alumni of BYU Marriott’s MPA program were on the front lines during many of those disasters. Their roles varied, but their mission was the same: to provide help and healing when their fellow citizens needed it most, and the knowledge they gained at the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics helped prepare them to take on this important work.

“I am so appreciative of the basic training I received in so many areas,” reflects Bob Kindred (MPA 1980). “It helped me have a strong grasp of what city government is and what it does in a broad array of situations. Learning from faculty and alumni who had been out applying their knowledge in difficult, real-world circumstances sparked my enthusiasm for responding to disasters and my ability to be effective when I was involved with them.”

Understanding the Survivors

As deputy county administrator of Butte County, California, since 2004, Sang Kim (MPA 1995) has dealt with more disasters than he wants to remember. Those include 2017’s Oroville Dam spillway crisis and 2018’s Camp Fire—the deadliest, most destructive fire in California history. When the North Complex Fire broke out in September 2020, Kim once again stepped into his role as director of the county’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC), which provides resources and information to the public in times of crisis.

The immediate challenge was finding places for thousands of evacuated residents to go, complicated by the fact that COVID-19 restrictions took traditional shelters, such as the county fairgrounds, out of the equation. Later, the focus turned to recovering from a f ire that burned roughly 500 square miles, destroyed more than 2,000 structures, and claimed 16 lives.

The critical need after such a disaster, says Kim, is making sure communities are free from environmental hazards. Working together with the state and FEMA, his team of twenty specialists has overseen the process of removing debris and scraping away several inches of contaminated soil from more than 1,000 parcels of land and removing trees that pose danger to public rights-of-way.

“This is hard, complex, emotionally difficult work involving traumatized people,” says Kim. “Once a disaster hits, everything changes. It’s important that we try to understand what the survivors are going through and do our best to help people individually and help the community collectively.”

Calling Out the Guard

Though their primary mission is to be prepared to go to war, the National Guard also has equipment that can be used to help citizens in the event of a disaster, explains Tyler Smith (EMPA 2006), brigadier general for the Utah National Guard. The guard also supports the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement between states to aid each other in the event of an emergency.

Personnel in Smith’s line of command responded to a number of natural disasters last year. In early September, two Black Hawk helicopters, along with pilots, crew, and maintenance personnel, were deployed to Northern California on an eight-day firefighting mission. Closer to home, helicopter crews dropped water on Utah wildfires and delivered supplies and equipment to ground crews battling blazes in remote areas. Later in the month, two hundred soldiers and airmen helped clean up after extreme winds hit northern Utah.

When the National Guard is mobilized, says Smith, “what we bring to the table is something nobody else can bring. We have a ready force that can be called up at a moment’s notice. If there’s a disaster that’s creating great hardship or people’s lives are in danger, we’re equipped to handle those responses.”

From Macro to Micro

When Bob Kindred and his wife, Sheila, heard storm sirens on the morning of 10 August 2020, they hunkered down and watched as “things got pretty wicked outside.” It wasn’t until five days later, when power and communications networks were restored, that Kindred learned they had experienced a derecho— a violent, fast-moving windstorm that traveled from South Dakota to Ohio and caused an estimated $11 billion of damage to homes, vehicles, businesses, and crops.

Kindred had retired from his job as assistant city manager of Ames, Iowa, a year earlier, so during the derecho his thoughts naturally went to his former work colleagues and the EOC. He wished he were there.

But after winds subsided, “people throughout our neighborhood immediately went out into the streets to survey the damage,” Kindred remembers. “Folks began checking up on each other, and crews formed spontaneously to pull trees off of streets, driveways, houses, and cars.”

Kindred enthusiastically joined in. In the following days, he volunteered on the city’s derecho hotline and worked with Helping Hands to clean up a neighboring city. “During the previous thirty-nine years, I’d spent my time in the EOC helping respond to emergencies at a macro level. This time I got to help others right where they live.”

A Spectrum of Relief

Del Brady (MPA 2010), executive director of the Greater Salt Lake Area Chapter of the American Red Cross, doesn’t necessarily wait to be called after a disaster. He proactively reaches out to communities so they know “what services are available and that we stand ready,” he says.

What most people don’t know is that the Red Cross offers a wide spectrum of relief. In addition to addressing immediate needs, the organization also looks at long-term recovery. “We work with people one-on-one to make sure that they don’t just get a drink of water, a hot meal, or a place to sleep, but they are actually on the road to getting back on their feet,” says Brady.

On a larger scale, Brady directs fundraising and blood collection efforts that support American Red Cross responses to large-scale disasters throughout the United States. “Our organization is an incredible mobilizer of human goodness,” he says. “When you see people in Red Cross vests, 90 percent of them are volunteers helping their neighbors and doing good within their communities."

Salvage Mission

As the Beachie Creek Fire raged just twelve miles from where John Nichols (MPA 1998) lives in Salem, Oregon, “the sky looked like Mars,” he says. “Ash fell like snow, and air quality was so bad it was unsafe to go outside.” For more than a week, Nichols’s family was on edge, wondering if this was the day they would be evacuated. In the end, the fire didn’t reach their home, but it was a scary time—one that helped his family recognize what was truly irreplaceable.

A realty supervisor for the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Northwest Oregon District, Nichols had a front-row seat as his work colleagues managed firefighting efforts on the inferno that eventually claimed five lives, destroyed thousands of structures, and scorched nearly 200,000 acres. At its height, the fire was the largest in the country, and 2020 ended up as the worst fire season in Oregon’s history.

Nichols’s role in responding to the disaster came later, as he and his team dove into the task of removing thousands of acres of burned timber from public lands. In normal times, they oversee regular timber harvests from BLM lands, with plans laid out years in advance. Since the fires, Nichols’s group has been racing against the clock to get burned trees removed before they become fuel for another fire. The team is also working overtime to sell as much salvaged timber as possible to assist Oregon counties that rely on profits from BLM timber sales.

A Master Plan

Never underestimate the value of a solid plan and employees who give their all to carry it out. Shane Pace (MPA 1991), city manager for Farmington, Utah, saw this principle in action after hurricane-force winds wreaked havoc in northern Utah early in September 2020, causing significant damage to structures and vehicles, toppling thousands of trees, and leaving almost 200,000 homes without power.

Because most members of Pace’s EOC team have extensive training in emergency management operations and many had been through a similar storm in 2011, they had good ideas about next steps. Their recovery plan included designating a central drop-off point where residents could bring storm debris, then securing trucks to get debris from the staging site to nearby landfills.

City employees stepped up, working sixteen-hour days six days a week; everyone from Pace to administrative staff and off-duty firefighters and police officers helped direct traffic and unload residents’ trucks and trailers. The city also sent equipment through the community to pick up debris that residents could bring to the street but not to the drop-off site. By the time the operation wound down, trucks from the city, UDOT, and the Utah National Guard had hauled more than 1,500 loads of debris. Because of the EOC’s solid planning and quick action, Pace reports, “we were essentially cleaned up in three weeks.”

At the Ready

Emergency management is just one of the areas Paul Dean (MPA 2010) oversees as the public works customer and technical services director in Pinellas County, Florida. But it becomes his number-one priority during disasters because “public works accounts for probably 50 percent of the county effort,” Dean says.

When Hurricane Eta passed north of Pinellas County in November 2020, it produced nine inches of rain and a storm surge that flooded homes and roads and washed 500,000 cubic feet of sand away from beaches. Coordinating with the county’s emergency management department, Dean and his EOC team assigned employees on the ground to make sure main roads were clear, to close roads that were underwater, to clear debris, and to deploy pumps.

Responding to disasters gives Dean’s team members occasion to perform at their peak, he says, but even more important, it provides the chance to “serve citizens by keeping them safe and helping them get back to normal life.”

As MPA alumni reflect on their experiences with 2020’s natural disasters, the common thread is a cognizance of their unique opportunity to serve others in times of crisis. They hope future graduates of BYU Marriott’s MPA program will also feel drawn to help. “Aspire to be in positions where you can answer the call to serve,” counsels Barrow. “Work hard to be where your professional judgment and, more importantly, your Christian caring can put you in a position to make a difference to those most in need. It is both the mind and the heart together that will make the difference.”

The Next Generation

Second-year MPA students Holmesi Finau and Mark Eyo hail from communities that were battered by 2020’s disasters. In April, Cyclone Harold destroyed homes and crops and left people in Finau’s hometown of Nuku‘alofa, Tonga, without electricity or clean drinking water. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints played an important role in helping, Finau reports. “It is a blessing and miracle that out of all the places people could go when there is a natural disaster, they go to the Church’s halls and chapels. It is a safe place for people regardless of their religion.”

Eyo, from Gapan City, Philippines, says winds and flooding from Typhoon Rolly and Typhoon Ulysses not only damaged property but also caused residents to lose their livelihoods. “I see how government is criticized for lack of collaboration and capabilities to handle such a disaster, even if it is expected,” says Eyo. “These events have inspired me to seek more knowledge about decision-making and intergovernmental relations.” They also prompted Eyo to intern with the Utah Community Development Office so he could gain experience in helping rural areas plan and develop better communities. “I hope to go home to the Philippines and use my knowledge to help build a stronger country and community,” he says.

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This article was originally published in the MPA 2020–21 annual report, pages 4–9.