Trouble the Water

Please go see the documentary titled, “Trouble the Water”, a film which tells the story of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of its survivors. We attended a New York City premiere on Friday, where Producer Danny Glover made an appearance and described breaking into tears when he first saw the footage. A relatively small distributor has released the film, currently being shown only in New York and Los Angeles, but with enough consumer demand let’s hope it goes national. If you don’t live near these two cities, maybe you can make noise in your own hometown about the desire to see the film.

This is a human drama but for those of us who specialize in crisis communications, it’s also the painful display of our industry’s failings. For those who think of crisis PR people being mainly about celebrity divorce and airplanes stuck on the tarmac for eleven hours, reliving Katrina in this film sheds a sobering light on the true consequence of politicizing the high stakes work of risk communications.

The film spends only a few seconds on Michael Brown who headed up FEMA’s disaster response to Katrina and was later driven out of this position for his role in the deadly bungling of the crisis. One of President Bush’s legacies will be his statement in the midst of the crisis, “Brownie, you’re doing a a heck of a job.” If the Tylenol scare of 1982 is symbolic of good crisis PR, “Brownie’s” role in FEMA is its antithesis. I hadn’t kept up with Brownie after he left the government payroll, but “Trouble the Water” informed me that he is now a crisis communications consultant.

Even as I remained riveted by the human drama of the movie a small part of my brain got stuck on this fleeting revelation. Who is paying Brownie for advice about crisis communications? As it turns out he moved somewhat seamlessly from the team that was supposed to manage crisis to those who profit from crisis. His clients have been the military and military contractors like Lockheed. He has helped firms like “Cotton Companies”, which specializes in cleaning up after disasters. They claim to have “cut our teeth on water damage from hurricanes and floods of the Gulf Coast and they don’t get any bigger than that.”

When asked about his post-government life, Brown says, “I probably, at any one time, have a half-dozen clients involved in different things having to do with homeland security or government in general.”

It helps to have powerful friends. Joe Allbaugh appointed Brown to his FEMA position, despite Brown’s thin resume. Allbaugh managed Bush’s campaign for Texas governor and vetted Dick Cheney for Vice President. In the immediate aftermath of the Bush-Gore election Allbaugh was dispatched to Florida to head the Republican fight to get Bush into the White House. After leaving government Allbaugh made money by helping firms profit from “business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq.”

There are heroes in “Trouble the Water”. They are also engaged in cleaning up after disaster, only for something closer to minimum wage. They stood on stage with Glover on Friday and beamed at their standing ovation. You can watch this movie as a parallel study in crisis management: the bureaucratic priorities and vision of government (Bush, Nagel, and so on) and the waterlogged maneuvers of the disenfranchised. The two stories are often parallel but it is where they intersect that the revelation of our “two America’s” crystallizes.

John Edwards, a character I am loath to quote these days, popularized the phrase “two America’s” with a particular focus on the Hurricane Katrina experience. Mitt Romney, rumored to be on McCain’s short list for VP candidates, said, “every time I hear someone like John Edwards get on TV and say there are two Americans, I just wanna throw something at the TV.”

You must see this movie, even if you already know and experience every day the disjuncture between our countries veneer and its social infrastructure. For risk communications specialists it is perhaps the most significant awareness we can bring to the seriousness of catastrophe.

For the heroes in the movie there is life after Katrina – literally. They stood on stage with their new baby, her hair dotted with ribbons and smiling whenever the audience clapped.
There is a lucrative life for Brown after Katrina. He lives in a spacious home in Aurora Colorado. He says bitterly, “There is life after government…even after you have been run through the wringer, even after you have been thrown under the bus by the leader of the free world.”

Glover spoke about the movie not just inspiring the people of Louisiana but also as a revelation that massages the hope of disenfranchised everywhere, from Harlem to East Oakland. The same population who were rich before the movie remain rich; the same population who were poor remain poor. But there is something spiritual about the crisis management of the film’s central characters that bends the American dream away from the excesses of profiteers like Brown and Allbaugh and toward the grace of those who build, and re-build, community.