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Walmart steps up with integrated state planning

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Wal-Mart takes the reins in emergency planning

With Florida in the path of the season's first tropical storm, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ramped up its emergency operations center yesterday for the kind of disaster relief effort that won it praise for responding faster than the government last year after Hurricane Katrina.

Wal-Mart's emergency management director, Jason Jackson, said that last year's successes raised expectations from the private sector in times of disaster. Because of that, he said, the world's largest retailer would coordinate more closely with government agencies, the American Red Cross, and even business rivals.

Wal-Mart has about 80 stores and one distribution center in the Florida Gulf Coast area that is under a hurricane warning, but there were no plans yesterday afternoon to close any of those facilities, Jackson said. Wal-Mart and other retailers have managers in Florida's state emergency operations center to speed communications. That is part of improved coordination for this year's hurricane season. "The dynamics have shifted," Jackson said in a conference call with reporters.

"In the past, the private sector wasn't really the one tapped or expected to respond, like it did during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. "Going into this year, we realized that this would be more maybe of an expectation," he said. "So we wanted to help manage that expectation."

To do that, Wal-Mart has spent recent months talking with federal, state and local government agencies and cooperating with retailers, including Home Depot Inc. and Target Corp., making plans with state emergency managers and retail federations for who can provide what supplies after a storm. Jackson said the issues included "how do we as retailers work together with a state to best leverage the merchandise that's available, sending supplies to locations that need them most?"

Wal-Mart won praise after Katrina for rushing in truckloads of supplies and reopening stores at least partially to provide food, water and supplies. It also led other corporate donors with $15 million in cash and $3 million in supplies to help victims.

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