Beyond Katrina (Crisis Management) - 3204 Words

TAUBMAN CENTER POLICY BRIEFS P B - 2 0 0 6 - 2 | M a y 17, 2 0 0 6 Beyond Katrina: Improving Disaster Response Capabilities By Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. â€Å"Dutch† Leonard, Kennedy School of Government As Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma successively lashed the gulf coast starting in late August 2005, nature’s fury exposed serious weaknesses in the United States’ emergency response capabilities. Not all emergencies pose this magnitude of challenge. In the United States, the initial—and usually major—responsibility for disaster response rests with local authorities. This â€Å"bottom-up† system of emergency management has a long history and continues to make sense in most circumstances. Core Challenges for Large-Scale Disaster†¦show more content†¦Katrina was a crisis primarily because of its scale and the mixture of challenges that it posed, not least the failure of the levees in New Orleans. Because of the novelty of a crisis, predetermined emergency plans and response behavior that may function quite well in dealing with routine emergencies are frequently grossly inadequate or even counterproductive. That proved true in New Orleans, for example, in terms of evacuation planning, law enforcement, rescue activities, sheltering, and provisions for the elderly and inï ¬ rm. evacuation, making emergency repairs to the levees, and providing food and law and order in an unprepared shelter). These measures, born of necessity, may be quite different from or exceed in scale anything responders have done before. They must be creative and extremely adaptable to execute improvised tactics. Equipping organizations to recognize the novelty in a crisis and improvise skillfully is thus a far different (and far more difï ¬ cult) matter from preparing mainly to implement preset emergency plans. Scalability and Surge Capacity In many disasters, as Katrina well illustrated, responders must cope with far greater numbers of endangered people or more extensive damage than usual. 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