Nation must be better prepared for disaster

By Mike Pellicio

WASHINGTON

National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield says we should expect both hurricane intensity and quantity to increase. He says this is part of a natural cycle and warns that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could just be the beginning.

In short, this means the United States needs to be better prepared for natural disasters.

Mayfield has labeled several areas as "especially vulnerable," among them Houston; Tampa; southern Florida and the Florida Keys; New York City; and even New England. To prepare for devastation of Katrina's magnitude and ensure that we minimize destruction, we must first understand what went wrong.

On Aug. 27, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency, as President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco had done one day earlier, and issued a voluntary evacuation. Nagin made the evacuation mandatory one day later.

On Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had medical teams and rescue squads poised in a semi-circle around New Orleans; however, FEMA urged first responders to coordinate with state and local officials. On this day Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. At 11 a.m., the 17th Street levee broke and slowly began to flood the city. Bush declared Louisiana and Mississippi disaster areas, freeing federal funds. Looting began.

It appeared that nobody was listening to Max Mayfield, who was saying that this wasn't any ordinary hurricane. The levees were starting to overflow and those who couldn't evacuate were gathered at the Superdome with little or no food and water.

Nobody really knows why the levees were in such poor shape, but two things stand out: the first is that Louisiana, in the last five years, has received $1.9 billion for Army Corps of Engineers civil works projects, much more than second-placed California ($1.4 billion).

A lot of this money, the The Washington Post reported, went to levee maintenance. But hundreds of millions had also gone to unrelated projects, which were demanded by the state's congressional delegation and were often based on faulty analysis. Secondly, two Louisiana state officials were indicted in Nov. 2004 with conspiracy charges, and a third connected official was accused of obstructing a federal audit over the use of funds for flood mitigation.

That nothing was done to buttress the levees despite the astronomical funding from the Army Corps of Engineers helps one understand why so many said New Orleans was one of the most corrupt cities in America.

Furthermore, it has been revealed that the evacuation plan was not followed, but abandoned altogether. The picture of over 220 buses in a flooded parking lot 1.2 miles away from the Superdome comes to mind. Why weren't these buses filled with people and shipped to Houston?

Nagin directed those who couldn't evacuate to go to the Superdome, but told them to bring their own food and water because the Superdome had none. However, almost immediately after Katrina hit, the American Red Cross, which had vowed to coordinate the best relief effort in history, sought to bring food and water to the Superdome.

Blanco didn't want people flocking to the Superdome, but wanted to get them out of New Orleans as soon as possible. But why wouldn't it have been a good idea to let the Red Cross serve evacuees who were hungry, thirsty and frustrated?

It seems that denying the Red Cross, whose mission is to provide emergency needs for disaster survivors, entry to the Superdome cut their legs out from under them. Thankfully, in a scattered effort, they were still able to provide shelter for 93,000 people in 149 locations.

Also noteworthy was Nagin and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter's inaccurate estimate of the body count. This hardly strikes me as dependable leadership; rather than quelling potentially hysterical emotions, he floated phantom numbers that were exponentially irresponsible.

The federal government's response has taken a lot of criticism. In an effort to evaluate its response, I phoned Jason Vansteenwyk, a captain in the Florida National Guard who worked on the relief efforts for hurricanes Charley, Francis, Jean, Denis, and who was mobilized for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

He says that it's common knowledge that "it takes 72-96 hours for a federal response." Expecting anything less would be ridiculous. He also says that the federal government's mobilization of its resources was the fastest it's ever been.

The Heritage Foundation's James Carafano advocates a national plan to respond to disasters that overwhelm state and local capabilities. This is not to say that it should be the government's responsibility to take over the relief effort, but he does think it's the federal government's responsibility to create a national response system and free up federal funding to maintain it.

Many aspects of the Katrina response were and still are pathetic. It's regrettable that over 200 school buses sat idle in a parking lot 1.2 miles from the Superdome, that Amtrak's offer to transport the needy was ignored; that FEMA's inadequacies were exposed on such a devastating scale; that 20 percent of the New Orleans police force went unaccounted for.

But it's phenomenally regrettable that many residents of Louisiana and New Orleans were let down by their elected officials when those in Mississippi were served admirably.

Mike Pellicio is a junior political science major.