by Jose Andres
I was happy that she enjoyed my restaurant. But I couldn’t understand what all these other disasters had to do with Puerto Rico. Las Vegas was terrible, but that tragedy didn’t involve a population of more than 3 million Americans without food, water and power for a month. The Red Cross had annual revenues of $3 billion and seemed helpless here, while my tiny nonprofit was feeding 100,000 people a day.
The Red Cross had said nothing after FEMA withdrew its support the week before. Today was the day I needed to talk to Brad Kieserman to find out if we could work together at all, ahead of signing any new deal with FEMA. We finally connected.
“First of all, you and your team are doing amazing work,” he said. “My team has kept me up to date. I’ve paid attention to the work you’re doing and it’s amazing. I really do believe that what you are doing is incredibly generous of spirit. I would love to be part of your team and love for you to be part of ours.
“We haven’t had a traditional food mission in Puerto Rico,” he admitted, because of logistical problems of working on an island. Instead, the Red Cross was focusing on what he called “the distribution of emergency supplies,” such as portable generators and hand-cranked chargers for cell phones. They were also driving satellite trucks around the island to help families connect. He said they had thirty trucks delivering these limited supplies.
“We’re not able to deliver hot meals,” he said. “We never have been. That isn’t even in our mission. We don’t have that equipment. But I will tell you that you are doing sandwiches that we could help deliver. We could be a partner for you. We could help.”
That didn’t sound like much help to me. We already had Homeland Security and hundreds of volunteers delivering our sandwiches, as well as our food trucks and satellite kitchens. Again I was surprised at how little the Red Cross was doing in Puerto Rico. And I was disappointed that there was no mention of them supporting us financially for the sandwiches they wanted to deliver. Still, I wanted to stay positive.
“Probably, Brad, this is a conversation we should have had twenty-one days ago,” I said.
“Probably,” he said, chuckling. “Probably.”
“I’ve seen your people at work and I have learned a lot from your people,” I said. “I saw them in Houston looking after five hundred people in a church. I saw your work delivering Southern Baptist church meals through your delivery trucks. Obviously I understand this is an island and you don’t prepare food. The sandwiches, I think, are a great idea and it will be lovely that the Red Cross and World Central Kitchen bring them to the people of Puerto Rico. But the most important thing is the hot food operation. I wish we had here the Cambros that the Southern Baptists had. But I came up with menus that could be delivered one hour’s distance and the caloric total is good to feed people.
“The question I always ask everybody is: From the federal government, the NGOs, the private sector, who is actually in charge of feeding the people? Because the people are hungry. There is real hunger out there. There are different reasons for that, to do with the economy, the lack of water and the lack of gas. But this is a conversation we need to have later, because we can’t allow this to happen again on American soil.
“Maybe because of what I saw of the Red Cross after Sandy and in Houston, I was expecting maybe the same here. You were always part of feeding people, even if you weren’t cooking the food. But part of me thinks the Red Cross has let me down, and let the Puerto Rican people down. I have seen all the news about what the Red Cross is doing. But my perception of who has to feed Americans in an emergency always was that the Red Cross was the leader. Not necessarily in cooking the food, but in making it happen. I am having a hard time believing that now.”
Brad sounded apologetic. “I understand that, I really do,” he said. “And you raised a great issue. I’m connected to what is happening on the island. We ought to have a conversation on how we feed people in a disaster. But I will be the first to tell you that when people are on an island, this is a very different operating environment. Not because we want anyone to be treated differently, but because of the supply lines.”
My experience had been different, of course. The supply lines were working, even if they weren’t up to normal capacity. We were buying plenty of food. And the U.S. military could build supply lines to any part of the world in four weeks, never mind what it could do on its own territory.
“But I don’t disagree with you,” he continued. “Feeding Americans wherever they are in a disaster is a conversation—with your expertise and your network and your experience—it’s a conversation you and I ought to have.”
I pressed again for the Cambros, which would help us enormously in transporting the food. I must have been the largest consumer of aluminum trays in the whole Caribbean, but they weren’t good enough. Sometimes they leaked, as they had in Vieques, and were not reusable. I had asked FEMA for some, and ordered more on my own, but they hadn’t arrived. The least the Red Cross could do would be to ship over some of their famous red boxes. But Kieserman did not respond and seemed to care most about getting some sandwiches to deliver.
“I do believe there’s synergy between the Red Cross and World Central Kitchen in the future,” I said, “so we can feed people on Day One after a disaster, not twenty-eight days after a disaster.”
We had prepared and delivered hundreds of thousands of meals, and now they wanted to deliver our sandwiches. I pushed him again for some financial support. “Is there a way for the Red Cross to help us financially?”
“I did check on the financial piece of this before I gave you a call,” Kieserman said. “I’m being candid on this. We are not fund-raising particularly well off this. I have probably overspent my operating budget. I probably spent more money than we have raised, just to put satellite trucks on the ground. Like you, I don’t get anything from FEMA. There was no free shipping in containers, and I used to work for FEMA. I was former chief counsel. We spent every donor dollar we got to purchase supplies. I hope that doesn’t stop us starting this partnership.”
I was shocked. I had no idea the Red Cross, with more than $3 billion of revenue, would only spend in Puerto Rico what it raised off the crisis in Puerto Rico. I thought they were the primary provider of humanitarian aid in any given American disaster. But their relief aid was defined by their fund-raising, not by the humanitarian concerns for the number of Americans struggling to survive.
“I was only checking my luck,” I said. “Maybe if we went together as a unit two or three weeks ago, we could have been feeding the people of Puerto Rico faster.”
I offered him some of our recent shipment of fruit and four thousand sandwiches.
“I can’t thank you enough for the call,” Kieserman said. “I know you said you are David and we are Goliath but honestly, where this operation is concerned, we are the David and you are the Goliath.”
We ended the call and I threw my bottle of water at the wall.
McGovern quickly emailed to follow up. She assured me that Kieserman was fully authorized to make decisions for the Red Cross. But she also gave me no details of what a partnership might look like, and seemed much more concerned that I keep my mouth shut.
“I’m happy we were able to find a way to work together on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico,” she wrote. “Now that we are partners, if you have any concerns, please bring them forward to us so we can work together internally to resolve them.”
But we weren’t partners and we had no deal or anything close to one.
“I don’t think partners is the word yet, but I’m happy that we are finally collaborating on feeding the people of Puerto Rico,” I replied. “In the weeks and months to come I will be open and frank of what I saw in Puerto Rico. It will be from a pragmatic side, trying to improve everyone’s readiness and clear lines of responsibility. In my humble opinion specifically about the Red Cross, I always saw the Red Cross delivering hot meals to people in need in America. Even though you were not the producer but the delive
ry arm, it was an important role . . . So still no one has answered me this simple question. Who was in charge of feeding 2 million people?”
I assured her I was only speaking up for the sake of the American people who needed our help. “The federal government and the big NGO’s, we let the people of Puerto Rico down and we need to make sure that the story never happens again,” I wrote.
I didn’t receive a reply.
There was a good reason why they didn’t tell me more details about their operations. The claim that the Red Cross didn’t have money for Maria was simply not true. According to the Red Cross itself, they raised $65.5 million for the victims of Maria. Of that money $18.1 million was budgeted for “food and relief items.” They said they paid for 8.5 million meals and snacks “served with partners,” but that stretches the definition of meals to a point that most people could not understand. Even then, the Red Cross couldn’t spend all the money it raised: its total spending came to $30 million, leaving $35.5 million unspent. The Red Cross generously gave themselves 9 percent of that leftover cash—or $3.2 millon—for their own general management costs.
During the six months after Maria, according to Kieserman, the Red Cross distributed 634,000 “bulk meals” such as rice or beans, fruit and vegetables. They distributed another 492,000 “prepared meals,” including some of the sandwiches my volunteers made. The vast majority of what they distributed were what they called “shelf-stable” food boxes of MREs, candy, cereals, crackers and dried goods. The Red Cross claims the total number of those shelf-stable supplies came to 11.5 million “meals.” Much of that food was provided by FEMA, the Salvation Army and others. In reality, the Red Cross was a distribution service running through a single food supply company, Caribbean Produce, which is a similar supplier to José Santiago. They had at one point fifty trucks on the road, delivering fruit and vegetables, as well as FEMA’s stockpile of MREs and water bottles. We bought all of our fruit from Caribbean Produce but I never claimed their trucks—or José Santiago’s trucks—were ours. I cannot understand this way of thinking.
Instead of feeding people, the Red Cross decided early on that its priorities were communications for families, some “portable power” for cell phones, water purification kits, and home repair supplies such as cleanup kits and roof tarps. After one month, they had two trucks that drove around the island allowing people to make satellite calls to their families and to charge their cell phones. It’s not clear how charging your phone—either on a truck or with a hand-cranked charger—could make up for the lack of cell phone towers outside San Juan.
The water bottles were the heaviest items to transport, and even the Red Cross realized a month after the hurricane that the distribution of those bottles was not sustainable. “We did some calculations a few weeks in, and said if we keep distributing bottled water at this rate, and our partners continue to distribute bottled water at this rate, we’ll have more bottles to dispose of than there is any room on the island to dispose of them,” Kieserman said later, in what sounded like an echo of the environmental disaster in Haiti. “So we moved very quickly to buy water purification kits and water purification tablets.”
The Red Cross spent $3.6 million on deploying and housing staff and volunteers in just one month, on top of $900,000 in salaries in three months.5 At its peak, the Red Cross said they had five hundred volunteers on the island, having pre-positioned fifty before the hurricane made landfall. Many of those volunteers formed “assessment teams,” gathering information from communities about what supplies they had or whether power was functioning. They even spent a colossal $3.4 million on freight and warehousing, a figure that includes the cost of moving supplies from their warehouses on the mainland—but not for the cost of the food delivered by Caribbean Produce.
It is curious that an organization like the Red Cross—normally so highly visible at times of a disaster—was so hidden from view. Its deliveries of millions of meals were invisible on the roads, and were not reported in FEMA meetings and emails, or relayed to the mayors we worked with. We had a $1.4 million FEMA contract while they had raised $65.5 million, which made them a very big David and made us a very small Goliath.
Did they ever consider supporting hot meals in Puerto Rico, as they do normally on the mainland with the Southern Baptists? “We considered our options every single day,” Kieserman said later. “Each day, as we went forward, it was not my judgment that the Red Cross attempting to replicate a hot meal model was going to meet the needs of the communities that we were trying to serve, who weren’t otherwise having their needs met.”
Some nonprofits were delivering relief to Puerto Ricans the right way. Mercy Corps (with annual revenues one-twelfth the size of the Red Cross’s) focused on the people in greatest need—single-parents, mothers with young babies, the elderly and the disabled—in the hardest-hit areas They delivered our food and handed out thousands of debit cards with as much as $200 in funds to help the islanders through. But they knew the cash wasn’t enough. “If we would give the cards alone, they would spend all the money on water,” said Javier Alvarez, their director of strategic response. “So we complement the card distribution with water filters.”
Mercy Corps normally responds to global emergencies, but this season was different. “We responded to Harvey and this one because of the scale,” Javier said. “We found people pretty down and angry that the aid wasn’t coming in as quickly as they wanted. In most of the communities we visited, federal help wasn’t there.” Key to their work was the intelligence they picked up about people in need. For that, they worked with the University of Puerto Rico, which had developed a vast reporting system called Rescates, or Rescues, for volunteers to relay problems.
Compared to an international disaster, Puerto Rico was an outlier for the worst reasons. Javier was struck by the contrast between the sheer number of people at FEMA headquarters at the convention center, and the little amount of aid that was getting distributed across the island. “In an international response, there’s a whole system of coordination and getting things out,” he explained. “Usually we have a cluster system: we have a water cluster and a food cluster. It’s very well organized. It’s headed by the UN, and humanitarian organizations like us coordinate and help. Any emergency response is always messy. But it’s a very strange situation where you see there are the resources, but they don’t meet the needs of the people.”
I WAS CONCERNED THAT FEMA WOULD NEGOTIATE THEIR POSSIBLE CONTRACT directly with my airport caterer, Sky Caterers, rather than us. It’s not easy to manage large-scale food relief: you need to be on top of the quality of the food, as we were every day, and you need to know how and where to make your deliveries. We had made many mistakes in the four weeks since Maria, but we’d also learned a lot about how to do this the right way in Puerto Rico.
“We’re not here to get a medal,” I told Erin. “We’re here to push everybody to feed the island. If we lost the contract because the Red Cross or FEMA took our idea and signed with them, I would be glad for them to steal the idea. We’re not proud. It’s their role. It’s their job. We’re not here to feed people. Actually we’re here to make sure people are fed.”
Kimberly Grant, CEO of my ThinkFoodGroup, asked if the new contract wasn’t a trap. Were they setting us up to fail by insisting we deliver water bottles that nobody could source? The military was tightly controlling water shipments as they arrived on the island. What if they audited us; did we have the paper trail to track every meal? And what if our intermediaries or partners were doing something unethical or unacceptable? These contracts were so big they could sink World Central Kitchen and put me at legal risk.
“I don’t give a damn,” I said. “They can trash my name and send me to jail. We’re talking about liabilities when the people are going hungry and drinking water with animal pee in it.”
“It’s not just about us. It’s the suppliers,” she said. “It’s the small guys. It’s about them.”
Kimberly is my CEO bu
t she’s a good friend too. She was protecting me, my family and my company. And she had previous experience with federal contracts. I made the decision to feed the people. But I couldn’t leave others to suffer the consequences of my unilateral decision.
“Let’s make sure everyone is protected,” I replied. “But they already promised they are going to be providing hot food. If we have to leave tomorrow, we’ll tell everyone we ran out of money and ran out of support. We’ll say it on Univision and Anderson Cooper and Fox News.”
The next day marked a huge milestone: we were on the verge of hitting our one millionth meal, an impossible dream when we’d started cooking four weeks earlier, managing just a couple of thousand meals in a day. Now, we were arguing about the second million meals.
We weren’t worried about audits. We had stacks of paper tracking every meal delivered, every request noted. We asked to see proof of identity from people picking up meals, along with a letter on official paper from the organization that wanted the food. From our first days, José Ortiz of Dame Un Bite had organized our paperwork, spreadsheets and forms. We tracked everything. But we were worried about how much money we were burning, producing so much food every day, and when we might get paid—if ever. On top of that, we were coming to the end of our short deal to operate out of the arena, as we neared the twenty-one-day mark of our operations there.
“We were never supposed to be here,” I reminded my team. “We are here because the need is here. So we need to stop when we need to stop feeding the people of Puerto Rico.”
If FEMA and the Red Cross didn’t need us or want us, because they were feeding the island without us, that was fine with me. We could pack up and go home. But if they weren’t doing that essential job, then we needed to stay. It was a simple thing, even in a world where we needed to embrace complexity to get things done.