TIME Magazine

Here's What You Do

Posted May 10, 2006 •KATE HALE

After Hurricane Andrew tore across South Florida in 1992, the slow federal response exasperated Hale, then Dade County's director of emergency management. She famously said on TV, "Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?"

You are there to protect people's lives and property. That's a very significant burden when it's one person, but when it's thousands of people ... The first thing you want to do is to stabilize the situation and get help to people. You have to set up centers to do that. You have to provide information. You have to be able to provide water--and in the South in the summertime, ice.

A variety of decision makers will come in from the state and federal level who have authority and certainly responsibility. There were people who worked well with us, and there were people who showed great disdain to those at the local level. Some of the local leaders and officials I worked with felt that people came into our community without knowing our plans or what our community was like. It's very important that local authorities be given every opportunity to provide input and that local authorities be regarded as the local experts.

• MAWARDI NURDIN

The mayor of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, returned to his city a day after a tsunami struck on Dec. 26. His first act: to show people how they could help themselves

I have to admit that I was one of the first people to break into grocery stores the day after the tsunami. I did it because help had not arrived and people were hungry. I guess it was natural that people started looting to look for food. But if looting gets out of hand, then it's time to call the army for help.

The first priority is to provide these three things for the people--housing, food and clean water, and health care--while you take care of the infrastructure. One major difference between Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami is that we in Banda Aceh were totally caught off guard. We didn't even know that water could rise that high. The Americans, I believe, are more familiar with hurricanes.

I can't imagine how we could have survived the first few days--before help started arriving--without the solidarity among the people of Banda Aceh. And now I can't imagine how Aceh would be able to get back on its own feet without the solidarity of the world community. We lost 62,000 lives in Banda Aceh alone. It's been eight months since the tsunami struck. Look how slow the rebuilding of people's houses has been.

• PETE WILSON

Governor of California from 1991 to 1999, Wilson led his state's response to the 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 61 people and caused more than $20 billion in damage in greater Los Angeles

Citizens are looking for leadership that will bring immediate solutions: they need potable water, they need shelter, they need food, in many cases they need medical attention. They don't necessarily know what level of government provides these things--and they don't care. They want the response.

In the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, I was permitted to suspend regulations. In a matter of seconds, the earthquake had reduced the bridges of Interstate 10 to rubble. If we had followed all the existing regulations about holding all kinds of hearings, it would have taken two years to rebuild. We took bids on not just the price but also a finish date. We offered incentives: a bonus of $200,000 for every day they were early and a penalty of $200,000 for every day they were late. The low bidder put crews on 24/7, on three shifts, and we were able to reopen I-10 in less than three months.

•JOSEPH RILEY

The Charleston, S.C., mayor led his city's recovery after Hurricane Hugo in 1989

When Hugo was approaching, I had all the city department heads in my office, and I said that what we had coming was an opportunity—though not one we would want in a million years—to serve the citizens in the time of their greatest need. So you ratchet up all your actions and energies to a close-to-superhuman level. You have to commit to keep them up, because you have a huge number of things going on simultaneously. The best analogy I can give is that we're at war and the enemy is just below the horizon. If we don't do each one of these things as quickly as we can, the enemy comes over the horizon and captures us.

In a time of disaster, you're the citizens' leader, more so than any other time. You're their counselor, their coach, their cheerleader, their security giver—you're all those things. There's a grieving process after a disaster, and you have to get the spirit up and keep it up. You're helping people get to the rebuilding stage. Their houses are a shambles—or gone—but they have to get up in the morning and take that step forward. —Compiled by Jeff Chu/New York and Zamira Loebis/Banda Aceh

With reporting by Compiled by Jeff Chu/New York, Zamira Loebis/Banda Aceh