Mr. Catastrophe

Sicily was still quaking last week as American relief planes lifted off for Palermo. Air Force and Navy transports carried tents, blankets, food, military trucks and antibiotics, a full 72,000 lbs. of emergency supplies for the victims of the island's worst disaster since 1908 (see THE WORLD). Within hours of the first flights, U.S. television screens recorded glimpses of their handiwork: snug tent villages erected amidst the rubble, field kitchens turning out hot meals, doctors and medics ministering to the shocked and the injured. No one watched with greater concern than Stephen R. Tripp, 56, a dapper, cheerful State Department officer who has earned the ambivalent title of "Mr. Catastrophe."

Since 1964, Disaster Relief Coordinator Steve Tripp has coped coolly and shrewdly with 213 calamities, ranging from Hurricane Beulah's inundation of northeastern Mexico to the petrolific breakup of the tanker Torrey Canyon off Britain last summer. Most of his problems are caused by floods, though pestilence, famine, war and earthquake rank almost as high. Last year Tripp and his three-man staff (working from a minuscule suite near the White House) funneled $41.5 million worth of supplies and services to 39 countries--at a rate of nearly one disaster per week. Duplication is frequent, since some poor countries seem to be "disaster prone": last year, for example, India suffered both drought and smallpox, Nicaragua fire and famine.

Bureaucratic Bog-Down. "It's only going to get worse," predicts Tripp. "As the population increases, people are living closer to danger spots--closer to rivers that flood, the edges of islands on the hurricane path, spreading to places not suitable for building, like the favelas on the mountainsides of Rio de Janeiro." Because of Latin America's predilection for disaster, Tripp has stockpiled supplies in Panama for quick transit to the area. "We try to act within the first 24 to 72 hours," he says, realizing that the major diplomatic impact--not to mention the humanitarian aspects--of his coordinating function depends on speed in time of crisis. At that, some countries (including Algeria and Outer Mongolia) have chosen to reject American disaster aid out of ideological false pride.

Tripp's office was created only four years ago, after the Yugoslav earthquake at Skoplje, which killed 1,011 and revealed an arteriosclerotic lack of coordination in American relief response. Nonetheless, Mr. Catastrophe follows an honorable tradition. In 1812,

President James Madison asked Congress for $50,000 to help Venezuelan earthquake victims, and U.S. aid to allies in distress has been consistent ever since. Tripp's main problem, predictably, is coping with "bureaucratic bog-down": he often negotiates personally with medical-supply stores to rent iron lungs, and last July he turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into an Omar the Tentmaker to provide $1,800,000 worth of "Ted Williams Campers" for 100,000 Jordanians displaced by the Arab-Israeli war. Tripp is an avid outdoorsman and thus an aficionado of tent living by avocation.

Prime Concern. A California-born bureaucrat who spent most of his 35 years in Government employment as a Foreign Service officer (India, Colombia), Tripp is eminently qualified to manipulate the myriad agencies and offices that deal with disaster. In addition to the Pentagon, the Public Health Service, the Weather Bureau, oceanography office, Coast and Geodetic Survey, he also works with the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the International Red Cross and more than 100 other private agencies.

Last week, in his mild but unwavering way, Tripp wheedled the Air Force into computing the cost of its Sicilian airlift at the lowest possible rate; in the midst of a crisis, he often takes over the telephone headset himself for hours at a time to ensure that the job is completed as efficiently as possible. As for his clients, Tripp's prime concern is to keep them together as family units, thus speeding psychological recovery from cataclysm. "We want them to be comfortable," he says, "but not too comfortable. We don't want them to stay permanently in the tents."

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