Communicating Katrina

Plan A was to load up the red Ford F150 with water and granola bars and head for Texas, where thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees had gathered in the squalid convention center in desperate need of help.

“Then I started thinking about it from a different viewpoint,” says Constance Chatfield-Taylor (Anthropology ’76). “What do the evacuees need most after food and water?”

The answer, she decided, was information.

She was the right woman for the job. Chatfield-Taylor is the president of Flying Colors Broadcasts, a small independent television production studio in Washington, D.C., and was in the business of connecting people from all over the world. Thus began a harrowing and sleepless stretch of days that culminated in the launch of the Katrina Information Network.

The goal was to get live feeds into the shelters with information vital to refugees: the locations of missing family and pets, as well as instructions on how to begin to repair their shattered lives. But Flying Colors, which Chatfield-Taylor founded in 1989 and currently employs under a dozen people, was far from equipped to do the job alone. And then there was the small matter of gathering together the content.

Chatfield-Taylor took on that task while the co-owner of her company, Lynn Hanford, took on the equally momentous task of organizing the production end of the project, which required the pro bono cooperation of many different companies along the way.

Chatfield-Taylor started with the Red Cross. “What we really wanted was the shelter information,” she says. In other words, who was stranded where, so that families could begin to reconnect. She wrote a one-page proposal and walked into the Red Cross building in Washington on that rainy Sunday after the hurricane hit, without so much as a name of the person she needed to speak to.

The receptionist was reluctant to let her in at first. Then came the first of many strokes of luck: a pizza was delivered, and Chatfield-Taylor convinced the employee who came to pay for it to take her into the offices.

“I came in with the pizza,” she says.

But after walking into the offices of five high-ups at the Red Cross, she wasn’t much closer to getting the information she needed.

“Basically, I was turned down flat,” she says. “I kept getting told about privacy.”

The next best thing was the CNN “Safe List,” information on who was stranded where, so Chatfield-Taylor drew on her contacts from decades in the television production business and called a friend from CNN. He put her on hold.

When he came back on the line, he said, “You can have it.”

Flying Colors operates out of a small suite of an M Street office building in downtown Washington and was not equipped to operate a 24-hour network — and on top of that, they did not suspend other projects while ushering the Katrina Information Network into existence.

Their neighbors in the building rallied to the cause. Flying Colors shares the third floor with the North American headquarters of the European Broadcast Union, and the many foreign companies next door were quick to offer up equipment: cables, monitors, whatever they needed. On top of that, broadcast companies provided free access every step of the way in the circuitous process that beamed the information from M Street to the country.

The Katrina Information Network made its home on a table directly inside the front doors to their offices, directly over the triangular Flying Colors logo woven into the carpet. For all the luck and generosity they encountered, however, there was one major setback. As they were stabilizing the signal — which was necessary before the channel could go live — the laptop and camera they were using were stolen from their offices while Chatfield-Taylor was in the next room, music playing and her big black Labrador sleeping on the floor.

“The timing of that was just unbelievable,” she says. “I just sat down on the floor and cried.”

That set them back six or seven hours. But finally, with replacement equipment and a stabilized signal, they went live.

It started out simple, with the CNN safe list on the “crawl,” the scrolling marquee on the bottom third of the screen, with general disaster relief information on slides over top. The information was sent to the DISH Network, which had donated a 24-hour-channel, and sent from there to small portable dishes at shelters.

Still, they wanted more direct information for the top two-thirds of the screen. Here Chatfield-Taylor drew on another old contact from FEMA, with whom she had worked a decade earlier. She didn’t have contact info for him — this was in the prehistoric days before e-mail — but after a few tries she guessed his e-mail address.

Another unbelievable stroke of luck: He was in Baton Rouge, and he had a truck capable of beaming out information from the heart of the disaster zone.

Soon the Katrina Information Network was broadcasting daily feeds from Baton Rouge. After that, more and more pieces fell into place.

“Somewhere along the line someone got all the agencies together and said, ‘send info to Flying Colors,’” Chatfield-Taylor says.

The list of government agencies that would eventually contribute content to the network — renamed the Emergency Response and Information Network after Hurricane Rita hit — goes on for several pages.

“The magical part was watching it work,” she says now, several months later.

The network went off-line in mid-November after the worst days of the disasters were finally over. But chapter two of the project is already in the works.

“Now that there’s a model, people can see what it can do,” she says. There is talk of possibly turning ERIN into a permanent information network, with content from government agencies and possibly short segments produced by journalism schools, or working with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Whichever it is, Chatfield-Taylor is confident that her small company will be up to the task: “If someone comes to us with something they want us to do, we figure out a way to do it.”