What went wrong? - just the facts, please

[dreamshark]

I am getting SOOO tired of this. The Culture War Over Katrina, that is. That was Salon's term - really it's more like the Katrina front on the Continuing Culture War. Like everybody else that has been paying any attention at all, I have been deeply moved, disturbed and obsessed about the disaster in New Orleans, but identifying targets for tearful rage and pouring energy into inveighing against them just isn't my style. I'm trying to understand those of my friends who are reacting this way, but it's hard. I have to tell you, if your postings on this topic have been laced with vitriol about Bush, FEMA, the military, the looters, The Bush-haters, The Bush-lovers, etc., I have probably stopped reading.

I'm a very high T on the Myers-Briggs. We respond to crisis by suspending emotional judgements, gathering facts, and making lists. If this reaction is alien to you, you should probably stop reading this now. (Ok, cakmpls are we alone now? )

This was a horrible natural disaster. In the best of all possible worlds, where planning had been prescient, and not a single mistake was made by the agencies and humans responding to the disaster, there still would have been death, despair and destruction. However, with hindsight there are clearly things that could have been done differently to lessen all of those. Here's my list of the biggest and most damaging mistakes, in priority order.

1) The City of New Orleans apparently had an evacuation plan that was entirely based on people getting in their cars and driving out of the city. On the plus side, they executed that part of the plan remarkably well, reversing the highways and getting 400,000 people out of the city in 24-48 hours. On the *HUGE* downside - 27% of the households in New Orleans didn't own a vehicle.

2) All of the city services within New Orleans (police, fire, etc.) relied on a centralized communication infrastructure (wireless?) that was no longer functional after a hurricane. There was no backup system. Police cars couldn't even talk to each other.

3) Although some thought had gone into designating emergency shelters within the city of New Orleans, and there apparently were some supplies of food and water, no provision whatsoever had been made for dealing with human waste. Even a single storeroom in the Superdome filled with 10-gallon plastic buckets with tight-fitting lids would have made a big difference.

4) Having a centralized agency to coordinate disaster response (that would be FEMA) is not a bad idea. However, setting up such an agency so that inaction on its part blocks essential parts of the disaster response from happening is exactly the wrong way to go about it. When the centralized agency is overwhelmed, regional organizations should have the authority to do what needs to be done. Reports are still coming in on this, and some of them appear to be unsubstantiated rumors, but it sounds like in many cases FEMA was not only ineffective, but directly COUNTER-effective.

5) Everybody knew that a sufficiently large storm-surge would overfill Lake Ponchartrain to the point where the storm walls could rupture. More money could have gone into reinforcing the levies and storm walls. I put this at #5 because I don't think there is any clear answer to how much would have been enough. Nobody really knew how big a hurricane it would take to rupture the walls, let alone how much money it would have taken to keep every single wall from rupturing. New Orleans was always asking for more money to shore up its defenses. In hindsight, obviously someone should have listened.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yeah. What you said. Plenty of blame to go around amongst the various government entities, white and black and other, Dem and Rep and other. Now: how do we fix what can be fixed?

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of it can't really be fixed, as I said in my reply to David Wilford above - banks and insurance agencies are going to take a hard look at the terrain and say "Rebuild somewhere else - above sea level." Whether Congress is going to be swayed by emotion into blowing billions of tax dollars on rebuilding the city is another question; they do that kind of stupidity all the time by providing flood insurance to people who build in flood plains. I guess we'll see. Personally, I hope they don't, but after seeing the amount of pork in this year's budget I don't have much hope that they'll act with any sense whatsoever.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

In terms of the immediate damage, I think that's going on. In terms of next time, see http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006707.html#006707 for a very good summary of how the system ought to work. Key point, IMHO: there is one and only one person in command, during the incident. It can, in theory, scale up from something as small as a traffic accident all the way to a national disaster. Authority gets delegated down to where it's needed, but there is a clear chain of authority, so that if, say, Governer Smith and FEMA Director Jones are giving contrary orders to the same people, everybody knows whose decision counts, and who is just talking. (This includes both Smith and Jones, btw.)

It means, in effect, that if Federal troops come in, either the whole disaster is under Federal command, or they're coming in under control of the State or even possibly local authorities.