Playing the Blame Game

The e-mails have been filled with angry messages, excoriating the federal response. A friend wrote this, advising calm:

"There is a lot of blame to go around - the mayor who took a cavalier approach before the storm and did not evacuate his city or have his emergency management crises team (most major cities have this) provide for water and bare essentials to the emergency shelter at the Superdome; the governor who did not have the national guard immediately descend on the city to prevent the looting and lawlessness; FEMA who appears to have taken its sweet time to get into place."

New Orleans has no safe shelter. I remember the news stories last September - if the big one hits, the city is going to be under water and there is no place to go. It's the only city in the country where the Red Cross doesn't expect its people to stay. When we were trying to get to the airport to leave New Orleans as Ivan approached, there were National Guard and emergency vehicles on the road, outbound like us.

So the only alternative in the face of a flooding storm is to evacuate the city. Sadly, going on the TV and ordering everyone to leave doesn't quite get it. You have to quickly mobilize transportation, figure out a way to get people out street by street, make some decisions about how much force to apply to the thousands who won't want to go, clear the roads, and put the plan in motion. Oh, and find some high ground. Can't exactly truck them out and dump them in a field somewhere. You have to essentially build a satellite city - with shelter, food and water, sanitation and medical care, and civil order - and have at least the framework of it in place before you start moving people. And you have to do this in, what, two days?

Add to this the complicating factor of New Orleans. Many poor people with no transportation. And a "we'll get by" attitude born of always having got by.

Without being there, it's difficult to say how much of the city leadership infrastructure was intact. It was apparently left to television camera crews to find lots of the people who were stranded on highways or at the Convention Center. The physical infrastructure was certainly gone. Much of what was not taken out by the storm has been severely damaged by people. Want to make a comparison to 9-11 in New York, where we're told how things were quickly restored to order? Sure. The trains ran, the power was on, the toilets worked and the hospitals were open. Next.

Beyond the city government, there appeared to be no local leadership among the people staying behind. When disaster strikes, the community organizations, churches, fire departments, etc spring into action, setting up temporary food and shelter, taking care of basic needs. The very obvious absence of that type of support leads me to think the community leaders heeded the call and evacuated, leaving behind people least able to deal with their lives day to day, much less cope with the sudden disappearance of all support systems, including the most basic - food, water, medicine, sanitation. So people left their homes, herded together into places like the Convention Center where they expected something to be working, found no one but thousands of other helpless people and TV camera crews, and squatted in despair. Never having had to deal with this kind of deprivation, they clogged the toilets, let the dead lie in place, waited ...

FEMA and the feds certainly failed in numerous ways. Last week I saw first-hand some of the official chaos in Washington, masked by cool pronouncements of competent authority. But we need to be careful of criticizing without understanding the dynamic that exists between different levels of authority. State and local officials often resent and resist federal incursion until their situation is untenable, at which time they make desparate calls for the cavalry, usually on TV.
Louisiana, for example, called for federal aid early, and got it. The governor requested $130 million in assistance from the feds:

• Financial assistance for individuals and businesses affected;
• crisis counseling;
• SBA disaster loans;
• direct federal assistance (i.e., funding without the requirement for a 25% local match);
• hazard mitigation for approved applicants (this is basically federal assistance in preparing for the next flood), and
• debris removal.

It's not exactly a call to arms. Activating this type of support requires a presidential declaration of an "expedited major disaster." I'm pretty sure Louisiana got that designation right away.

The Feds don't take over until there's another presidential declaration, basically saying that state resources are overwhelmed and unable to cope. Even then, FEMA's principal role is managing the federal funding of recovery, and seeing that federal, state, local and private agencies have adequate funding with a minimum of red tape. People should not think of FEMA as some federal Ranger company ready to rappel in to the danger zone. The agency only has 2500 employees, many of whom are probably investigators, trainers and accountants. And spin doctors, of course.

Remember, this disaster affected several states and major cities, and the destruction covers an area the size of Minnesota. FEMA and others would probably look a whole lot better in the press if Michael Brown had flown in and given windblown news briefings on the roof of the Monteleone Hotel, but I seriously question whether that would have made things happen any faster.