Chaos doesn’t keep business hours.
It doesn’t care about your contract either, or your org chart, or the plan sitting in a binder on somebody’s shelf. It shows up when it wants. Then somebody’s phone rings.
For a decade, that phone was mine.
In Braithwaite, Louisiana, the chemicals in the floodwater dissolved the stitching in my people’s boots. The consultant certifying the site as safe worked for the company that spilled them. At 1700 hours, my trucks and my people were gone, and I walked away from millions.
In Houston, we built a 1,000-bed base camp inside an abandoned Walmart. We worked around the clock and had it ready the night before it opened. At six the next morning, I walked in to find forklifts hauling it all back out.
In Homestead, Florida, 22,301 children came off the buses and into our enrollment room. Some had walked from Guatemala carrying a folder with a relative’s phone number. Every one of them was photographed and enrolled, with their allergies printed right on their ID card. Then we tracked all of them, 50,000 scans a day, for three and a half years. The system never went down.
In San Juan, a cancer center’s chemo pumps had gone dark. We provided them with a solar generator.
At Fort Bragg, the soldiers didn’t drive to their COVID quarantine. They parachuted into the landing zone next door and hiked over.
None of it was in the plan. It rarely is.
After Disaster: An Insider’s Perspective from the Heart of Chaos ended in 2012 with a warning: build the boat before the water rises.
The Heart of Chaos: Still Responding is what happened next.
Hurricanes, a super typhoon, the southern border, a pandemic. Some of it went right for the wrong reasons, and some went wrong for the right ones.
The water kept rising. We kept answering the phone.
We’re still responding.
Title: The Heart of Chaos: Still Responding
Series: Volume II of After Disaster: An Insider’s Perspective from the Heart of Chaos
Author: Edward Minyard, with Bob Hull
About the Book
After Disaster: An Insider’s Perspective from the Heart of Chaos ended with a simple instruction: build the boat before the water rises. The Heart of Chaos: Still Responding picks up in 2012 and follows ResponseForce1 through the decade that put that advice to the test.
The book opens in a Louisiana parish after Hurricane Isaac. There, a chemical spill made the team sick, and Minyard walked away from a multimillion-dollar client rather than let it question his people’s integrity. Next come two 4,000-person tent cities in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. There, a Red Cross wristband system lost track of people, and ResponseForce1’s TripWire system found twelve the official walkthrough missed.
From there the story moves to shelters for unaccompanied children, starting at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. It continues to Homestead, Florida, where more than 22,000 children came through ResponseForce1’s enrollment between 2016 and 2019.
In 2017, three hurricanes hit in four weeks. The team ran base camps in Texas, air bridge manifesting in the Virgin Islands, and work in Puerto Rico that ranged from FEMA inspector camps to water filters carried into the mountains.
Hurricane Michael, Super Typhoon Yutu in the Northern Mariana Islands, and the southern border come after that.
The book ends with the first months of COVID, the sale of the company, and a call back to Dallas in 2021.
This book doesn’t only tell the success stories. It covers the plans that were never used, the contracts that disappeared, and the camp torn down the morning it was supposed to open. It also covers the clients Minyard fired and the politics that turned the same work from heroic to controversial when the administration changed. It’s written for emergency managers, first responders, and anyone who has wondered what really happens after the news cameras leave.
A Prologue catches up readers who haven’t read the first book.