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Red Cross ‘Diverted Assets’ During Storms’ Aftermath To Focus On Image

VPM | By Laura Sullivan and Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica

Published October 29, 2014 at 9:00 AM EDT

Updated December 11, 2023

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, a former Red Cross official says, as many as 40 percent of the organization's emergency vehicles were assigned for public relations purposes. This photo, which shows one of the trucks in Long Island, N.Y., in January 2013, is one example of the many publicity photos taken by the Red Cross.

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Within hours of Superstorm Sandy slamming the East Coast two years ago, Americans opened their wallets to help — donating millions to the first charity that came to mind: the American Red Cross.

President Obama, like most elected officials and celebrities, vouched for the organization, encouraging people to give.

In the months after the disaster, the Red Cross touted its success in delivering food, clothes and shelter to tens of thousands of people left homeless by the storm. Gail McGovern, the Red Cross president and CEO, told NBC News two weeks after the storm: “I think that we are near flawless so far in this operation.”

The truth, however, is different.

The venerable charity’s track record in dealing with the megastorm is now being challenged by an unusual cadre of critics — its own employees and records.

Multiple internal documents obtained by NPR and ProPublica along with interviews with top Red Cross officials reveal an organization that struggled to meet the basic needs of victims in the first weeks after the storm. The documents and interviews also depict an organization so consumed with public relations that it hindered the charity’s ability to provide disaster services.

In an interview, the Red Cross officials stood behind their work overall, especially during Sandy.

“I’m very proud of the services we provided,” says Trevor Riggen, a vice president at the Red Cross. “I think the volume of services and the speed at which we provided it speaks to the quality of service of the volunteers and staff on the ground. I think there are details both in the documents you have and other documents you haven’t seen that help us learn from our processes.”

Riggen says the Red Cross served 17 million meals, provided millions of supplies and housed tens of thousands of people in its shelters. He says the organization would never put public affairs over the needs of clients in that storm or any other.

“I don’t believe that’s the way our leadership has used resources on the ground or that that was a driving factor in their decisions,” he says.

Among NPR and ProPublica’s findings:

* The Red Cross national headquarters in Washington “diverted assets for public relations purposes.” A former Red Cross official managing the Sandy effort says 40 percent of available trucks were assigned to serve as backdrops for news conferences.

* Distribution of relief was “politically driven instead of [Red Cross] planned.”

* Food waste was “excessive,” due to factors including inexperienced staff, poor communication and “political pressures.”

* In one shelter, “sex offenders were placed in a special area off of dorm, but they weren’t there, they were all over, including playing in children’s area,” according to a confidential “lessons learned” memo from the Red Cross.

* “We didn’t have the kind of sophistication needed for this size job,” concluded one senior Red Cross official, describing the agency’s logistics operations in notes from an after-action report five weeks after the storm. Added another official: “Multiple systems failed.”

* Relief organizers were ordered to produce 200,000 additional meals one day — to drive up numbers. They did it at extraordinary cost, even though there was no one to deliver them to and most went to waste.

* “It was just clear to me that they weren’t interested in doing mass care; they were interested in the illusion of mass care,” says Richard Rieckenberg, who helped lead the Red Cross’ response to Sandy and Hurricane Isaac.

Richard Rieckenberg is a former head of mass care for the American Red Cross and a retired Navy chief engineer for nuclear submarines. "I think that they lost confidence in their ability to do the right thing," he says, "and they did the next best thing: 'What can we do to make people think we're doing the right thing?' " — Richard Rieckenberg is a former head of mass care for the American Red Cross and a retired Navy chief engineer for nuclear submarines. “I think that they lost confidence in their ability to do the right thing,” he says, “and they did the next best thing: ‘What can we do to make people think we’re doing the right thing?’ ” David Gilkey / NPR

* It wasn’t just Sandy. When Isaac hit Mississippi and Louisiana earlier in 2012, Rieckenberg says: “We didn’t have food in the shelters, we didn’t have cots, we didn’t have blankets in the shelters, which to me was incredible because we saw this hurricane coming a long way away.”

* Also during Isaac, one Red Cross official had 80 trucks drive around empty or largely empty “just to be seen,” as one of the drivers recalls.

* “Our experience with the Red Cross is they’re a little late to the game,” says Police Lt. Matthew Tiedemann, the emergency management coordinator for Bergen County, N.J., who says the Red Cross failed to provide volunteers and resources to open shelters after Sandy. “The reality set in that I was in the sheltering business. It was pretty time-consuming, considering I was putting together cots when I should have been managing an emergency,” he says.

Police Lt. Matthew Teidemann of the Bergen County Office of Emergency Management, says he can't count on the Red Cross after it failed to help after Sandy. So he's filling pods with enough blankets, water and supplies for 400 people in case of an emergency evacuation or natural disaster. — Police Lt. Matthew Teidemann of the Bergen County Office of Emergency Management, says he can’t count on the Red Cross after it failed to help after Sandy. So he’s filling pods with enough blankets, water and supplies for 400 people in case of an emergency evacuation or natural disaster. / Michael Rubenstein for NPR

Read more of the investigation at propublica.org/redcross. Can you help? Share a tip or email NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan.

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Laura Sullivan

Laura Sullivan is an NPR News investigative correspondent whose work has cast a light on some of the country's most significant issues.

Sullivan is one of NPR's most decorated journalists, with three Peabody Awards and three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Batons. She joined NPR in 2004 as a correspondent on the National Desk, covering crime and punishment issues. She joined NPR's investigations unit in 2010. Her investigative reports air regularly on All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

She is also an on-air correspondent for the PBS television show FRONTLINE. Her investigations have examined the disparity between wealthy and poor hospitals in 2021, how Big Oil misled the public about recycling in 2020, the U.S. relationship with China in 2019, the Blackout in Puerto Rico in 2018, the crisis in affordable housing in 2017 and the Business of Disaster in May 2016, which examined who profits when disaster strikes. The film and radio pieces grew out of a series of investigations examining the American Red Cross in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and Superstorm Sandy. The pieces were honored with her second award from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press and her third from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Sullivan won her third duPont in 2022 for her Planet Money podcast WASTE LAND, an investigation with Frontline into Big Oil and the myth of recycling plastic. The California's attorney general opened an investigation into the oil companies citing NPR's reporting, saying the companies participated in a "half century of deception" perpetuating a myth that plastic could be recycled in an effort to manipulate the public to buy more of it.

Her unflinching series "Native Foster Care," which aired in three parts on All Things Considered in October 2011, examined how lack of knowledge about Native culture and traditions and federal financial funding all influence the decision to remove so many Native-American children from homes in South Dakota. Through more than 150 interviews with state and federal officials, tribal representatives and families from eight South Dakota tribes, plus a review of thousands of records, Sullivan and NPR producers pieced together a narrative of inequality in the foster care system across the state. In addition to her third Peabody, the series also won Sullivan her second Robert F. Kennedy Award.

"Bonding for Profit" – a three-part investigative series that aired on Morning Edition and All Things Considered in 2010 – earned Sullivan her second duPont and Peabody, as well as awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation, Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and the American Bar Association. Working with editor Steve Drummond, Sullivan's stories in this series revealed deep and costly flaws in one of the most common – and commonly misunderstood – elements of the US criminal justice system.

Also in 2011, Sullivan was honored for the second time by Investigative Reporters and Editors for her two part series examining the origins of Arizona's controversial immigration law SB 1070.

For the three-part series, "36 Years of Solitary: Murder, Death and Justice on Angola," she was honored with a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award, a 2008 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and her first Robert F. Kennedy Award.

In 2007, Sullivan exposed the epidemic of rape on Native American reservations, which are committed largely by non-Native men, and examined how tribal and federal authorities have failed to investigate those crimes. In addition to a duPont, this two-part series earned Sullivan a DART Award for outstanding reporting, an Edward R. Murrow and her second Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.

Her first Gracie was for a three-part series examining of the state of solitary confinement in this country. She was also awarded the 2007 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for this series.

Before coming to NPR, Sullivan was a Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, where she covered the Justice Department, the FBI and terrorism.

As a student at Northwestern University in 1996, Sullivan worked with two fellow students on a project that ultimately freed four men, including two death-row inmates, who had been wrongfully convicted of an 18-year-old murder on the south side of Chicago. The case led to a review of Illinois' death row and a moratorium on capital punishment in the state, and received several awards.

Outside of her career as a reporter, Sullivan once spent a summer gutting fish in Alaska, and another summer cutting trails outside Yosemite National Park. She says these experiences gave her "a sense of adventure" that comes through in her reporting. Sullivan, who was born and raised in San Francisco, loves traveling the country to report radio stories that "come to life in a way that was never possible in print."

See stories by Laura Sullivan