Saturday September 03, 2005

Random thoughts on Katrina, Darts, and Emergency Management

Along came a hurricane and drowned a city. In the process, many Americans learned just how prepared their government is to handle a disaster of such proportions.

In fairness to the folks who's job it is to respond to these events, it wasn't your typical hurricane response. In Florida when a hurricane hits, there are generally not many people who just aren't reachable. Trees block streets, but they can be moved. The main difference, I think is that Florida is above sea level. The water flooding New Orleans is the big differentiator in this hurricane response, and it necessitated a new way of thinking about the response. And in Florida, armed thugs aren't shooting at the Search and Rescue teams, or the police, or the civil engineers.

I am completely in awe of people who put their own lives on hold to go down and pull people out of NO by helicopter, and going down to distribute food and water. You are all truly inspiring.

In the wake of 9/11, FEMA has joined the evergrowing Department of Homeland Security. In the wake of this, I bet that you go look at the upper echelons within FEMA, you'll find a lot of folks who've been there less than 5 years, who have little to no disaster assistance/management experience, who are political appointees. Many of the real experts have gone to DHS or to state agencies, after all DHS is supposed to take over this type of response soon. I guess this disaster happened at the least possible convenient time for FEMA/DHS/White House.

Hopefully we'll learn some good lessons from all this, and we'll be able to make sure that while one organization is transitioning to take over a function from another agency, let's not gut the existing agency until the new agency has a handle on it's functions.

Here's a good selection of articles for more info:

• Destroying FEMA
• Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top
• White House punts as the Wackenhuts blitz!
• The Gulf Between Rhetoric and Reality
• A Day of Contradictions

Also, I know that USAID has a Disaster Assitance Response Team which is a group of highly trained and experienced professionals that have responded with humanitarian assistance to the Tsunami of last winter, and to countries like Iran and Albania, and Japan, and all sorts of places where humanitarian assistance is required. I know that some of the SAR teams associated with DART have deployed to the Gulf region, like Virginia Task Force 1, but why not deploy some of the stashed resouces they had set aside like generators and water and food rations?
I guess maybe USAID is only authorized to deploy overseas for that type of humanitarian assistance.

The only guy I can think of who was happy to see Hurricane Katrina come along was Joran Van Der Sloot, as for the first time in 3 months it took him right out of the news.