Wal-Mart to the rescue private enterprise's response to Hurricane Katrina.

• Author: Horwitz, Steven

In the several years that have passed since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005, it has become increasingly clear to many observers that governments at different levels were at fault for almost every stage of the sequence of events that turned the passing of a fairly strong hurricane to the east of New Orleans into a catastrophe. Government has been quite appropriately the target of a great deal of criticism both by local residents and by observers elsewhere with regard to the special interests at work in constructing the elaborate system of pumps, levees, and canals that try to make the city's water go everywhere but where nature wants it to go; the problems with the actual canal and levee construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the botched evacuation plans; the confusion over which levels of government should respond, and how, to the multiple and very visible failures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); and the ongoing inability of various levels of government to rebuild the New Orleans area. Unfortunately, as is often the case when existing government agencies fail to do their assigned task, the response to this government failure has been for many people, especially those in the agencies involved, to argue that those failures were owing to a lack of will, resources, or expertise. As numerous public-choice economists and economic historians have documented, this call for more government power is a typical response to crisis, with the end result being a surge in the size and scope of government from which a full retreat is never made. (1)

Lost in this increasingly common narrative of Katrina, however, is any discussion of the few institutions that did respond effectively in the aftermath of the storm. Not much has been said about the role private enterprise played in providing necessary resources in the immediate aftermath and in helping to reestablish a sense of normalcy in the days and weeks that followed. (2) The best example of a successful private-sector response is that of Wal-Mart and other "big-box" retailers, such as Home Depot. The untold story of Katrina involves the way in which Wal-Mart in particular responded with speed and effectiveness, often in spite of government relief workers' attempts to stymie it, and in the process saved numerous lives and prevented looting and chaos that otherwise would have occurred.

A recent study by the Kennedy School of Government (Rosegrant 2007a) carefully documents Wal-Mart's response from a business-process perspective. A short sequel (Rosegrant 2007b) looks at how Wal-Mart has tried to use that success to change the way disaster response takes place, with mixed results. However, neither these studies nor any other yet published offers a "political economy" of Wal-Mart's success. (3) Wal-Mart's successful response to Katrina, along with the failure of FEMA and other government agencies, seems to confirm the more general conclusion of modern political economy that private institutions better mobilize resources than do public agencies. To those steeped in the literature of modern Austrian economics, the new institutional economics, property-rights economics, and public-choice theory, Wal-Mart's superior performance comes as no surprise. In this article, I deploy these theoretical approaches along with recent work in the economics of organizations to offer a political economy narrative of Wal-Mart's successful response to Katrina. Those successes resulted from Wal-Mart's position in a competitive institutional environment that provides the knowledge and the incentives necessary to generate a successful response to disaster situations and fosters the sorts of organizational learning that promote the development of effective routines that can be deployed in other kinds of situations.

Wal-Mart to the Rescue

Wal-Mart, like other big-box retailers, clearly has every reason to protect its own assets in a natural disaster. Major retailers of all sizes are increasingly creating their own in-house departments to facilitate their response to and recovery from any interruption of their business, whether owing to natural disaster, terrorism, or more localized problems, such as a blackout or a fire. Frequently regarded as related to "business continuity," these offices monitor all sorts of situations at the retailer's stores. Wal-Mart has had such an office for a number of years, and each Wal-Mart store has a tightly scripted protocol for responding to in-store problems, which may be as simple as the injury of a customer or an associate, and for getting related information to the business continuity director's office at the headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. In most cases, these offices were designed to deal with threats to the company's own property. However, during Katrina they found themselves broadening their scope of operations by providing needed resources for the communities in which they operated, especially the hard-hit New Orleans area.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi on August 29, 2005. After forming in the Atlantic and crossing Florida as a relatively weak Category 1 storm, Katrina strengthened quickly in the Gulf of Mexico, at one point becoming an extremely powerful Category 5, then weakened to a Category 3 or 4 storm with winds of about 125 miles per hour by the time it made landfall on the Gulf Coast. The storm's broad wind field subjected much of the Gulf Coast to a long period of hurricane-force winds, causing significant damage. In addition, storm surges were estimated to be between fifteen and twenty-five feet, but reliable data are not available. The surges caused major flooding all over the Gulf Coast.

In the New Orleans area, significant wind damage occurred, but the surges, the more deadly problem, caused multiple failures of the city's levees, which later reports have indicated were improperly built or maintained in the first place (Independent Levee Investigating Team 2006). The resulting floods left approximately 80 percent of the city under water, in some places under as much as eight or ten feet of water. The combination of wind and water damage made many buildings uninhabitable and destroyed supplies and machinery, forcing from their homes those who did not evacuate and causing the death of more than one thousand people. Thousands of residents had to be rescued from their own homes. The flooding also closed almost all of the major roads in and out of the city, making it difficult to get people out or supplies in. Finally, many of those who stayed behind and were flooded out of their homes ended up at the Superdome or at the city's convention center, where supplies were very limited and conditions physically uncomfortable.

Wal-Mart arrived in the New Orleans area long before FEMA and had the supplies the community needed. Both President Aaron Broussard and Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish in suburban New Orleans lauded Wal-Mart's work. In an appearance on Meet the Press, Broussard noted the speed with which Wal-Mart had brought truckloads of water to his area and then quoted Lee as saying, "if [the] American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis." (4) Phillip Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, reported that "the only lifeline in Kenner was the Wal-Mart stores. We didn't have looting on a mass scale because Wal-Mart showed up with food and water so our people could survive." Other community leaders in the New Orleans area and in cities elsewhere along the Gulf Coast also praised Wal-Mart's quick and effective response to the storm (Leonard 2005). Wal-Mart was not alone in providing much-needed resources to the stricken areas; other big-box retailers, such as Home Depot and Lowe's, also responded similarly. However, Wal-Mart's response was the largest and, according to local reports, the most effective.

In the three weeks following the storm's landfall, Wal-Mart shipped almost twenty-five hundred truckloads of merchandise to the affected areas and had drivers and trucks in place to ship relief supplies to community members and organizations wishing to help. (5) Home Depot provided more than eight hundred truckloads of supplies to the hard-hit areas and used buses to transport one thousand employees to the region from other areas (Bond 2005). Besides what Wal-Mart sold as a result of quickly reopening its stores, the company also provided a large amount of free merchandise, including prescription drugs, to those in the worst-hit areas. For example, several truckloads of free items went to New Orleans evacuees staying at the Astrodome and at the Brown Convention Center in Houston. Most important, Wal-Mart got this assistance to the devastated areas almost immediately after the storm had passed rather than in the days--in some cases weeks--that it took government agencies to provide relief to residents.

The incentives for private firms to protect their own capital led them to begin preparations for the storm well before its landfall. Three days earlier, Home Depot activated the "war room" at its Atlanta headquarters, negotiating with various vendors to get needed supplies staged to move into the hurricane zone (Ward 2005). Wal-Mart's response began slightly earlier. The company's emergency command center, run by Jason Jackson, the director of business continuity, is normally staffed by six to ten employees, who respond to the variety of routine incidents in stores across the country. Faced with a larger-scale problem, such as a hurricane, "the staff is joined by senior representatives from each of the company's functional areas." In view of the possibility of widespread damage to multiple stores in an urban area, the command center may include as many as sixty employees. The easily expandable structure of Wal-Mart's emergency response protocols...