Ten years ago tonight, the National Weather Service issued a dire warning: a major hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans and "devastating damage" was expected. Hurricane Katrina ended up being the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States in more than 75 years and became the costliest hurricane in history, in terms of monetary damage. The effects — both physical and social — of the storm are still being felt today.
But as deadly as the storm was, many deaths and much suffering occurred in the days after landfall as a near-total breakdown of public safety happened because officials, in various cases, either deferred making decisions about who was in charge or took charge without considering they were the best ones to take such actions.
Summary:
When Hurricane Katrina
devastated New Orleans a decade ago, a significant breakdown in
intergovernmental cooperation contributed to a humanitarian disaster. The
most-vulnerable part of New Orleans’ population suffered a failure of the
most-basic social services or even death because they relied on an unprepared
local government to preserve their well-being. A simple pre-existing
arrangement to defer traditional municipal responsibilities to those best
suited to implement them might have mitigated the City of New Orleans’ 2005
failures and may be key to preventing their recurrence in a similar disaster.
Issues: While the physical failure of the levees
during Katrina was itself a great catastrophe, perhaps a greater
Katrina-related tragedy was the breakdown of responsibility that happened as
the hurricane struck southern Louisiana. Thousands of people —
disproportionally poor and African-American — were left behind, either in practically
lawless conditions at shelters or fending for themselves in a flooded
metropolis while various government agencies tried to determine who exactly was
responsible for planning their rescue and provision. This governmental
paralysis was all the more disappointing because it was foreseen by the City’s
own 1990 Master Plan, which admitted that, “There are turf wars between cities,
between parishes, even between arms of city government … The result is
confusion, fragmented services, or worse, duplication of effort” (City of New Orleans, 2009).
This confusion was profoundly evident as Katrina hit the Gulf
Coast. Examples include: it took three days for the area’s mass transit
agencies to officially be ordered to provide buses for evacuation (Lalwani,
2007); paperwork to deploy federal troops in the disaster area was not issued
until three days after the storm hit New Orleans; and there was a delay in the Federal
Government’s sending aid because local officials had not yet officially
declared a disaster — in fact, FEMA director Michael Brown even stated that it
was “critical” for outside emergency responders to “remain in their
jurisdictions” until requested by local authorities (Wolfe 2009). The City of
New Orleans and the State of Louisiana both proved unable to take adequate
control of the vast relief undertaking while waiting for federal help.
It is not surprising that some confusion
arose as to what level of government had what level of responsibility. Multiple
participants at different governmental levels have made the tasks of public
administration and management more demanding and more difficult (Wright, 1990).
That said, some scholars suggest that an inability for local governments to
recognize the need to expand beyond existing social and political structures
could even be construed as a form of “administrative evil.” Those in the public
service who either declined outside help or did not set up structures necessary
to process it seem to have found themselves with a lack of historical
consciousness because their technical rationality led to a compartmentalization
of knowledge and lack of context (Adams and Balfour, 2009). Indeed, they
demonstrated“ a model of professionalism that drives out ethics and moral
reasoning [and] offers all too fertile soil for administrative evil to emerge”
(p. 38).
Recommendations: Higher storm surges and more-powerful
hurricanes are a virtual certainty with climate change and New Orleans must be
prepared for another storm (Walsh, 2009). While solving the technical issues
that led to levee collapses is best left to the engineering experts, on a human
level the City of New Orleans can take a bold step toward saving lives simply
by conceding it might not be the best entity to protect its own citizens in a
disaster situation and letting a higher-level governmental entity take the
reins. This would not be an admission of incompetence, but rather one of
compassion consistent with good government. Woodrow Wilson, well before he
became president, pointed out that proper distribution of constitutional
authority involved finding the best people to do the job and clearly making
them accountable for doing so: “To be efficient it must discover the simplest
arrangements by which responsibility can be unmistakably fixed upon officials;
the best way of dividing authority without hampering it, and responsibility
without obscuring it” (Wilson, 1886). The City of New Orleans must be prepared
to find this “simplest arrangement.”
Despite its troubles in 2005, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, “the agency with the greatest experience in
managing disasters” (Lalwani, 2007), is probably the only agency with the
wide-ranging experience and resources to coordinate a large-scale local, state
and federal response. It alone has the legislated clout to gather together the
funds, out-of-state manpower and federal resources that a disaster like Katrina
demands. It is recommended that the City of New Orleans in the future cede its
resources to FEMA before the need is
apparent. FEMA, in turn, will need to delegate responsibility to the various
resources at its disposal as a crisis develops. This arrangement will seem
suspicious to some, as such bold steps are unexpected in a government structure
where “muddling through” — changing things incrementally in tiny steps
(Lindblom, 1959) — is seen as de
rigueur. While some affected stakeholder may interpret this step as New
Orleans “passing the buck,” the city has a higher responsibility to provide the
best service to its citizens, and Katrina showed another agency might be better
suited to do so than the City of New Orleans itself.
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