Katrina preparation could have been better
Two days' warning gave officials ample time to mobilize before the hurricane made landfall, experts say.
WASHINGTON –
As President Bush cut short his vacation to return to Washington on Wednesday, the wheels of government and charity worked on multiple fronts to mitigate the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina. The Pentagon deployed an array of assets - from four Navy ships based in Virginia to "swift water" rescue boats to the hospital ship Comfort - to the Gulf Coast. In all, 14 government agencies formed a task force to coordinate their operations. In the private realm, the American Red Cross is mobilizing the largest relief effort in its 124-year history.
Setting priorities remains a daunting task, as people continue to be rescued from their flood-ravaged homes, drinking water is rushed to the region, and increasingly uninhabitable shelters - including the Superdome in New Orleans - are evacuated or about to be.
"Considering the fact that [the disaster] has taken over a large sector of our country, they've done about as well as could be expected," says Julius Becton Jr., who was director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration from 1985 to 1989.
But Mr. Becton, now a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, also raises a theme that other experts on disaster mitigation are beginning to sound: that, given the advance warning that a hurricane of the highest magnitude was heading right for the Gulf Coast, advance preparation could have been better.
"We have known for a very, very long time that New Orleans was a site waiting for a disaster to occur," the general adds. "I would hope now that it has [occurred to] other places like New Orleans, whether in California or in the East, would take steps ... to be better prepared."
A lot of the mobilizing that is happening could have been put in place two days before the hurricane, suggests Paul Light, a professor of organizational preparedness at New York University.
"You're seeing two days after [the event] this mobilization, which is terrific," he says. "But we had two days of warning. There is a message here and it is that we've got to be better prepared. You can preposition supplies and you can get things moving."
The hurricane holds lessons for other "high consequence events," such as a biological-chemical incident, nuclear event, or some other kind of terrorist incident, Professor Light adds. In those events, there will not be advance warning. But, for both man-made and natural disasters, there are many similarities, he says, including how casualties are handled, a subject people don't like to talk about.
One of the most noteworthy elements of federal involvement in Katrina's aftermath has been the role of the military, raising questions about whether the heavy troop deployments overseas - particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan - have left the home front understaffed for disasters like this.
That debate will remain alive in the days and weeks to come, but of one thing there is little doubt: Military involvement will be crucial for dealing with the tasks at hand.
"The military is the best equipped to do operations in difficult terrain, and what you have here is terrain not unlike a war zone. These guys are great at that," says Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "There's nothing you would need in a situation like this that isn't somewhere in the military and often in large quantities - engineers, military police, even things like water purification."
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Other experts note that, in emergencies like Katrina, local authorities always handle the first response, but as time passes, the federal government's role becomes greater.
"The sending of the four warships from Norfolk is a good example," says Richard Sylves, a political scientist at the University of Delaware in Newark, who studies emergency management."
They'll bring important resources to bear, but they won't arrive for four days.
Mr. Sylves also notes that people sometimes have an inflated opinion of what the federal government can do: "The basket of assistance made available by the federal government is limited - it doesn't make you whole."
He suggests that some people could be living in federal temporary housing for the next two to three years, for example.
On the plus side, the 9/11 terror attacks have had a positive effect on emergency preparedness. Sylves calls it "a professionalization of state emergency management."
The administration has pushed states to sign mutual-aid agreements to help each other in times of disaster, and these are already coming into play as other states mobilize to help Louisiana and Mississippi. Moreover, Washington has provided more grants for emergency-response training since 9/11. "In the past [emergency preparedness] was mostly a tabletop exercise with pencil and paper," Syles says.
Most of the money is labeled for counterterror exercises, but some of the new training is for natural disasters - and even training for counterterror has a trickle-down effect of making responders more skilled.
"They're doing things much more seriously now," Syles add.
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