Failure in responding to Katrina
So soon after the embarrassing failure of emergency response it’s a little risky to venture an explanation. The appearance is that government planning for emergency response to “the big one” failed to include providing food and shelter for those stranded by it. My opinion is that the problem was mainly that FEMA kept following the plan they had on file even when it was apparently not working. I think both key failures, the bad plan and bad leadership in response, come from the scale of the problem. The disaster caused by Katrina was different in kind and was treated as only being different in degree.
I really don’t want to minimize the direct fault of the personnel in charge of the state and federal response, even if exemplary ability to change plans in the midst of a crisis may not be in their job description. It should be. The plans that would have worked fine for smaller disasters were incompetent for the bigger one. The “big one” did surprising things. For one, the evacuation plan seemed to selectively evacuate the people who ran everything in response to unexpectedly heavy storm damage and the loss of all communication. The effect was to tear the institutions of community, city and state apart. Blinded and crippled it’s no wonder that the emergency responders could only seem to stagger around. Judging from results, that was the plan.
Looking at it from the other side it’s possible that had the planners noticed that the “big one” would be different in kind they’d also see that the state and federal response would be necessarily inadequate. Maybe the needed difference in response would have been good local civil defense plans and supplies.
If nothing else the people stuck behind have clearly acted helpless and apparently had no civil defense training whatever. That they acted helpless was partly their own fault of course, but if there were only stores of critical supplies left for the purpose, it might have made a huge difference in both fact and appearance. It might take leadership, like federal mandates, to persuade neighborhoods to do adequate civil defense, but the professional planners probably need to do a better job of telling the feds horror stories like that of New Orleans to persuade them to do it.
There’s lots of other blame to go around, for the breach of the levy on
My other concern is with the plans for recovery. I won’t say much for the moment but this. A vibrant community, urban spirit and way of life such as
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