Lessons in readiness
By Paul C. Light
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Even as the Gulf Coast states battle to recover from Hurricane Katrina, Washington should take heed of the chaos surrounding the early relief effort. If this is what happens when the nation has two days of advance warning, imagine the aftermath of a surprise attack using a chemical, biological or nuclear device.
There will be plenty of stories of heroism in coming months as thousands of volunteers descend on the disaster zone. But the hubris is already showing. Thousands of residents ignored the evacuation warnings; many relief agencies waited until the hurricane had passed to start sending supplies and volunteers to jumping-off points in surrounding states; and the president was heading to California as the hurricane moved in. Although the Department of Homeland Security and its Federal Emergency Management Agency are moving at near-light speed to coordinate an unprecedented relief effort built around Homeland Security's National Response Plan, the nation must get even faster in the future.
Ironically, a Category 5 hurricane was already on the Homeland Security list of 15 planning scenarios for emergency response. In an effort to give organizations more specific guidance about how to plan for catastrophic events, the department issued the scenarios last winter in the hopes that governments, businesses and charitable organizations would start rehearsing their response.
Unfortunately, a yet-to-be-released survey by New York University suggests that most Americans expect disaster to hit just about anywhere but home. Most have enough canned goods and bottled water in the closet to last a few days, but they want their local police and fire agencies, the Red Cross and charities to tell them what to do in the event of a catastrophe. The problem with Katrina is that many citizens did not listen before the hurricane, and communications were cut off after. Plenty of emergency planners had nightmares about a Category 5 hurricane hitting somewhere, but few woke up and started preparing.
Katrina underscores the urgent need to build a robust national preparedness and response system that can bend and flex to the unique circumstances of natural or human-caused catastrophes. Based on my analysis of hundreds of high-performing organizations identified by the nonpartisan Rand Corp., such a system must be alert to impending catastrophe, agile in implementing well-designed plans for response and recovery, adaptive to surprise events such as the collapse of the New Orleans levees, and aligned so that everyone can pull together, from Washington on down to the initial first-responder who shows up at the site of a disaster.
Here are the four pillars of a robust response system:
Agility also involves making sure first-responders can talk to each other on equipment that can survive a major catastrophe.
It is one thing to have a plan in place, quite another to execute it. Doing so requires an agile network of signals that can tell first- responders where to go and what to do, especially after the cell towers blow over.
Creating this kind of robust response system requires time, money, constant rehearsal and concentration. And it requires individual organizations that are robust, too. This is why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's recently proposed reorganization is so important to implement. By eliminating needless layers of management and focusing on the most likely scenarios, Chertoff is taking an essential step toward creating a more robust department, which in turn will help create a more robust response system.
If Congress really wants to prepare for future disasters like Katrina, it will attach Chertoff's reforms to whatever relief legislation it is sure to pass in coming weeks.
Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, is the author of "The Four Pillars of High Performance." He wrote this commentary for the Washington Post.
