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 Nearly three years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, America and the Midwest remain inadequately prepared for a similar disaster, the nation’s top Red Cross official said Wednesday.
“We’ve been making very slow progress,” said Marsha J. Evans, president and chief executive officer of the American Red Cross. “We had fallen into a routine of responding to hurricanes, fires, floods, tornadoes and earthquakes. And we had that down pretty well.
“But we weren’t talking about weapons of mass destruction; we weren’t talking about other kinds of man-made disasters. Suddenly, the magnitude of the task grew before our eyes.”
Evans, a Springfield, IL native who took the reins of the $3 billion-a-year agency in August, is in St. Louis for the 79th annual national convention of the Red Cross set for this weekend at America’s Center.
Friday night’s keynote speaker for the event is Tom Ridge, U.S. secretary of homeland security. The event is not open to the public.
In an interview Wednesday, Evans said that despite ongoing pleas, the U.S. blood supply remains in alarmingly short supply. The two-to three-day supply needs to grow to five to seven days, near the levels it reached immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, she said.
Across the country, she said, more people should be trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques and emergency first aid. Joseph C. White, head of the St. Louis Area Chapter of the Red Cross, said the agency here has trained about 80,000 people, far short of its goal of 120,000 to 125,000.
Evans noted that a recent survey showed only about one-third of the families in the country’s north central region, where St. Louis sits, had taken “any steps at all” to prepare for a disaster.
And while Evans said the east and west coasts are better prepared for disasters than the Midwest, they are “only marginally better.”
Evans took over the head job at the American Red Cross at the height of controversy over the agency’s handling of blood donations and some $988 million donated to the Red Cross Liberty Fund. That fund was set up to help families and survivors of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
She said “95 percent” of the post-Sept. 11 blood donations were used and “the vast majority was used for the purpose it was intended.”
As for concerns over the Red Cross handling of monetary contributions, Evans said recent surveys have shown that public trust in the Red Cross has returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels.
Also, she said, while monetary contributions are still behind pre-Sept. 11 contributions, “we are seeing a bounce-back in giving.” As the economy and stock market improve, she says, she feels confident that contributions will increase.
The American Red Cross operates 896 chapters and has about 1.2 million volunteers.
Link to more information about Red Cross disaster preparedness online at www.STLtoday.com/links.
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