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When Disaster Hits Home
When project management consultant Marie Danco grabbed the last flight out of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit, she didn’t realize the storm would quickly pull her right back in. It was a crash course in disaster response.
Marie Danco knew she and her fiancé were beyond lucky to have tickets on the last flight out of New Orleans the night before Hurricane Katrina hit, but she never imagined that once safely back home in Northern Virginia, the storm would draw her right back in.
With barely enough time to shake the memory of the crowds they now realized would have to ride out the storm at the airport, Danco and her colleague Bret Platt had to jump in and begin assisting a client, a federal agency with many employees in the hurricane’s path. Danco and Platt, both principal consulting managers and project management professionals at the Alexandria, Va.-based consulting firm Robbins-Gioia LLC, spent the days and weeks after Katrina working 12-hour shifts in Virginia with the agency. They helped locate employees and developed processes to ensure the employees who left New Orleans were OK at their new locations, be it permanent or temporary, and coordinated efforts for employees who wanted reassignments in different states and those who wanted to return to their posts in New Orleans.
For both, it was a crash course in disaster response. “I had just come off a …
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