U.S. Postal Service confident mistakes made during Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans CityBusiness, Jun 19, 2006 by Jaime Guillet

The U.S. Postal Service is confident mistakes made during Hurricane Katrina will never be repeated.

After Katrina's floodwaters subsided and USPS inspectors surveyed the damage, they quickly found inherent mistakes in the evacuation policy. Nearly 200 trucks were lost, immeasurable pounds of first-class mail, including letters, checks and bills, were destroyed, and employees were hard to find.

This season, USPS District Manager James Taylor believes the plan in place has covered all those bases.

We have plans in place with alternate backup locations to move our operations to for those areas, said Taylor.

During a mandatory evacuation in New Orleans, mail will be received at one of two locations outside the metropolitan area depending on the storm's path. The primary alternate site is the processing and distribution center at 8101 Bluebonnet Road in Baton Rouge. If heavy storm impact is expected in Baton Rouge, the mail will be transported to the secondary alternate processing and distribution center in Shreveport. If the main processing center at 701 Loyola Ave. is damaged, processing and distribution will be moved to a facility in St. Rose in St. Charles Parish.

The evacuation of trucks and mail will begin approximately 90 hours before a hurricane is expected to make landfall.

All of the low-lying areas, Plaquemines (Parish), Orleans (Parish), those areas will all be under a 50-hour, mandatory evacuation, said Taylor. We will start preparations for moving everything probably with an additional 48 hours prior to that 50 to get everything done and moved.

Our operations will still continue, our windows will still be open for business and we'll just be finalizing our move to those locations, said Taylor. It's not going to have a major effect on the city as far as us not delivering mail or not having retail services.

After Katrina, businesses that rely on the post office such as banks had nowhere to turn. Whitney National Bank, for example, could not receive large quantities of loan payments, nor could it send outgoing mail.

We are very dependent upon the post office and we have kept a very keen interest in the evolution of the post office's current plan for evacuation, said Jim Fleming, Whitney's vice president of bank operations.

Whitney tailored its evacuation plans to match the USPS plan, said Fleming.

We expect to be able to pick up our mail at whatever location is the quickest we can get to in the post office process, said Fleming. If they have a processing site in LaRose, that's where we're going to be. If they end up in Baton Rouge, that's where we're going to be.

The USPS emergency plan includes customer communication efforts.

We are going to have a customer line available for them to call, said Taylor. They will be able to go in and pick up their mail without any disruption whatsoever.

After the storm passes - if the city is not crippled - the post office will begin processing in New Orleans the next day, said Taylor.

The postal service returned to nearly normal operations and delivery June 1. With the exception of Express Mail service, all embargoes for New Orleans, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes were lifted and normal hours have resumed in all stations but the Bywater, Lake Forest and Chef Menteur locations.

Service to Gentilly and Lakeview may be resumed if more people return to the area.

The only issue is mailers returning items to embargoed areas.

Ed Faneca, business mail manager for New Orleans, said mailers must cleanse their address lists against the post office's database to send residents mail such as magazines and catalogues.