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Sept. 10, 2005 Bobby Jindal, representative from Louisiana, claims that government failed us in the Katrina disaster. The problem, according to Jindal, was red tape. Bureaucracies tripped over one another. We needed someone to trample over bureaucracy and red tape. Throw out the rulebook, Jindal says, and get things done! To be fair, others say the same thing. Many argue that the federal government should have simply taken over. Pundits claim that President Bush should have federalized everything, as soon as the local and state authorities were overwhelmed. Disasters produce disastrous advice. After a deep breath, think about it. What will happen if we implement this advice? No one will do anything. Why not? Because throwing away the rulebook is throwing away your own legal protection. If you freelance and things go wrong, the same critics who wanted a hero will condemn you for not following the rules. The rules immunize a commander from prosecution, which in turn, frees him to act. Take away his immunity, and no commander will risk a move. So what should we do before the next disaster? We need the best possible plans, but we must learn how to abandon assumptions before they kill us. Katrina shows why. Disasters are unpredictable. Things happen that you didn’t expect. Even if you see the hurricane coming, you won’t see everything it will affect. Katrina showed that. All disasters are like that. You can’t plan for the unexpected, by definition, and disasters always carry huge effects that were largely unforeseen. You can only plan so far. The classic example is 9/11. The architects of the Twin Towers anticipated that a plane might hit the building. Indeed, the buildings withstood the planes’ impact. What no one foresaw was the intense heat from the fire. They anticipated the impact, but the heat weakened the skeleton. Who could have foreseen that? When chaos starts, rescuers work in uncertainty. Dealing with that uncertainty is what makes all the difference. After all, that’s what military training is all about. Anyone can shoot a gun; military training and discipline, however, are all about how individual soldiers can overcome the chaos of the battlefield. What do you do when the bullets start flying and everyone is scattering? Soldiers deal with the chaos by sticking together. Military experts know how important cohesion is, but civilians don’t. That’s why throwing around unfounded racial assumptions does tremendous damage. That’s why journalists screaming that the rescuers must be inept or prejudiced do tremendous damage. That’s why celebrities who casually toss off political assumptions do tremendous damage. Katrina revealed what happens to assumptions. Almost every state and city has disaster plans. The standard disaster plans call for evacuations, and having supplies positioned nearby so that as soon as the monster hurricane/earthquake/disease passes, rescuers can move in quickly. The rescuers will keep the disaster victims alive until the situation returns to normal. That formula is standard enough, but with Katrina, the formula wasn't enough. The city called for evacuations, but New Orleans is disproportionately poor, so it’s disproportionately immobile. Many couldn’t leave. As of this writing, we still don’t know why the mayor didn’t exploit the fleet of buses to reach the poor left behind. We first assume that the mayor simply didn’t know how to manage an emergency, but that’s no answer. Busing immobile people isn’t so easy. You can’t just say, hey bus drivers, go around the city to find poor people. What are they going to do, pull up at the front door and beep the horn? Were the school buses equipped with wheelchair facilities? (Remember, the whole point was to reach immobile people.) If the school buses weren’t wheel chair accessible, they weren’t of any use anyway. Assumptions cut both ways. No one expected a solid chunk of the police force to walk away from their jobs. Then again, it’s hard to blame cops who walked off their job to protect their own families. Authorities advised the poorest residents to go to the Superdome, and to bring three days of food and water (let's have a cookout!). Not surprisingly, the poor didn't bring their own supplies, and authorities sent none to the Superdome. Why not? Because the plan assumed people would return to their homes after the crisis passed. No one expected that there would be no homes to return to. Now we hear reports that the local authorities blocked supplies to the Convention Center and the Superdome because they didn’t want them to become magnets for victims. Even if that made sense to someone (who, at that point, was ignoring procedures and getting things done!), it failed to account for the people already in the Superdome. That order had the same effect as a mass starvation order. Those assumptions got people killed. We now have assumptions galore, many of them unfounded. FEMA is widely thought to have dropped the ball, and was slow getting things moving. Why the slow response, the critics wonder? Critics now casually “wonder” if the relief effort would have gone smoother if the disaster had hit Nantucket or some other lily-white conclave. Brian Williams, the NBC anchor, aired this racially charged assumption on TV last night. This turned out to be exactly wrong. FEMA is a coordinating agency. FEMA coordinates the work of other agencies, like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. It turns out that both the Red Cross and Salvation Army, along with other agencies, were exactly where they were supposed to be, exactly when they were supposed to be. They couldn’t get into New Orleans, neither to the Convention Center nor the Superdome, because the Louisiana DHS refused them entry. Would those agencies have gone any faster had they been in Nantucket? No, because they got there fast enough. FEMA didn’t drop that ball. They may have screwed up elsewhere, but everyone is angry at FEMA because they didn’t arrive at the Convention Center and the Superdome. The assumption is that FEMA was slow getting there, but the reality is that they weren’t slow. The food and supplies got there in proper time, all things considered (there was a hurricane and flood, you know). The now-conventional wisdom has done nothing but stir racial suspicion and hamper coordination. At last we come to the greatest purveyor of assumptions: the news media. The whole purpose of emergency management is to bring order to chaos. The most important skill, then, is communications. You’d assume that the news media are perfect vehicles for mass communication, but Katrina has once again defied that assumption. The news media has done more damage, and caused more ill will, than the hurricane itself. You can’t walk fifteen feet in New Orleans without tripping over some haggard, self-heroic journalist. It was journalists who broadcast the first images of looting; soon they followed this with charges of utter lawlessness. If you listened to journalists, you’d think that the whole city was a shooting gallery. Yet when the National Guard came in, they found that the reports of lawlessness weren’t nearly so widespread. Anguished journalists screamed at the camera to the national audience for help. When the federal help didn’t come (cut off at chokepoints by state and local authorities), the journalists screamed that the federal government was either inept or racially insensitive. Naturally, it left the victims with a deep distrust of the federal government, and surely poisoned race relations for years to come. The embedded, anguished journalists didn’t know what was going on, but instead of finding out, they just screamed louder. Now they’re congratulating themselves for their heroic intervention, prodding the federal government to finally act. They have an assumption that no facts can dislodge. Hurricanes rip homes from their foundations, leaving them in ruins. Katrina has now ripped open our collective assumptions, and I say these are also in ruins. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville holds graduate degrees in philosophy, and is an ex-Jesuit. Now a husband and father of four, he is a programmer for databases and for the web. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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