Safety net for our poor citizens

Hurricane Katrina discussion raises more questions than answers on race, class
Why does the United States provide such a small safety net for its poor and needy citizens relative to almost all other industrialized nations?
Why didn't anyone learn the lessons of so many past floods and curb development in marshlands and flood plains before Hurricane Katrina hit?
Should Americans expect their government to take care of them in times of disaster, or are they better off depending on the charity of individuals? Is there even such a thing as genuine charity, or are all acts of altruism inspired by more selfish motives?
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Disaster Preparedness Techniques: Riding out Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina may be old news to most of the world, but it is still very much a reality for residents of New Orleans and others along the Gulf Coast as hundreds of thousands of residents and businesses rebuild their lives and work. Ultimately there were four key technologies.that people wish they had in place before the disaster occurred. 1. Voice communication systems other than cell phones. The storm was so destructive that cellular telephone systems, essentially, were shut down. Cellular towers were destroyed, and those that weren’t destroyed were crippled by extensive power outages. Since most of us had cell phones with the same local area code, we were unable to use our phones immediately after the hurricane, and even today, we continue to have cellular telephone issues seven weeks after the storm! As a result, we now will consider purchasing a few cell phones from an outside area code to be distributed to key staff. As an aside, quite a few of our staff evacuated to Houston and purchased Houston cell phones to alleviate the bottleneck experienced by our 504 area code phones. However, three weeks later, Hurricane Rita hit near the Houston area and those newly purchased cell phones became just as useless as the ones with the New Orleans area code. I think a Wisconsin area code would be wiser! 2. Laptops for everyone. Our staff who normally used desktop computers did not have laptops when they evacuated; as a result, they had difficulties getting firm information that was presented on our external bulletin board system. If everyone had a laptop, acquiring firm information would have been more easily accomplished. 3. Scan historical documents. When we implemented our Digital Office, we decided to not scan historical documents. Although this has not been an issue because we were, and still are, able to retrieve files and paper documents from our Metairie office, it would have made for smoother remote operations if the data were digital rather than on paper. 4. Current listings of personal e-mail addresses. Our e-mail server was not operating, cell phones were essentially useless and staff had evacuated to destinations across several states. The Internet became our primary means of communication, and the most effective way of communicating with members and staff. Having a listing of everyone’s personal e-mails would have expedited that process.
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More Questions...Less Answers

Official questions emergency preparedness of area

Shreveport Councilman Theron Jackson isn't alone when it comes to concerns about emergency preparedness.Both Jackson and Shreveport Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran said during Monday's City Council meeting that they've fielded concerns from residents following the disasters of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Jeannie Klotzbuecher, a member of the North Highland Neighborhood Watch in Shreveport, is just a voice of many."I still don't think we're prepared for a big emergency," said Klotzbuecher, who recently took a volunteer training course -- Community Emergency Response Team -- coordinated through the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.Although the Caddo-Bossier Emergency Operations Plan has been in operation since 1966 and is revised annually, very few people besides the first responders are aware of it.Jackson said one of the big lessons learned from the hurricanes is that residents may be part of the first responders and elected officials will be asked to give answers."People depend on us for knowing what's going on," said Jackson, who then responded to new knowledge of a First Call Telephone Warning System, which will be used in situations where television and radio are not viable warning systems. "It sounds like there is a safety structure in place to give a warning, but education is 75 percent of preparedness. If someone sounds an alarm and no one knows whether it's an alarm, is it really an alarm?"The issue of communication and emergency preparedness is one the whole country is addressing following the problems faced in south Louisiana.

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A FEMA-ized broadband?

Should high-speed Internet access continue to develop in the marketplace, or should government bureaucrats take over?
In this national debate, Americans need to consider how political management of key services often results in disaster, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
While devastated Americans waited for days on end for their government emergency agencies to show up, Wal-Mart arrived far sooner to deliver $3 million in supplies. Home Depot and FedEx also expertly prepared in advance, ready to help with supplies on hand. In contrast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency acted as if it wasn't really expecting a hurricane, and proved excruciatingly slow to arrive with even basic supplies such as water. This type of government failure scenario plays out time and again, making one wonder why anyone would consider handing over the Internet to this same process.

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Homeland Security: Status of Federal, State, and Local Efforts

If you stand back and look at the sweep of history, there seem to be inflection points where the course of history changes, where in a military endeavor, in a business or economic endeavor, perhaps even a social endeavor, the dimensions and elements of success change. Usually, when there's a change of that nature, there's a particular event or date that becomes locked in the mind as being characteristic of that inflection point.
In the area of response, there are a lot of lessons that will come out of Katrina. We don't know the most important ones yet. The investments that we've made as a nation in communications capabilities are important, and they work pretty well, although they didn't seem to work terribly well in the response to Katrina. Planning and having some integrative plans obviously is very important. Every governor in the country is going to be updating their evacuation plans.
I would also note that in this post-9/11 world, we need response that is far more agile, fast-moving, and innovative, where decision-making is done on a rapid basis. I believe that one of the challenges in Katrina was the lack of fast-moving decision-making, clear authority, taking action without jumping across bureaucratic state, local, and federal boundaries and saying this needs to get done, that needs to get done.

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http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/hl904.cfm

Diseases and Red Tape

Red flags and red tape

FACING widespread criticism and playing a complex blame game following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to reevaluate its disaster response system, and, to be sure, made a great deal of progress before having to cope with Hurricanes Rita and Wilma. Despite these advancements in response method, however, the problem at the heart of FEMA has yet to be addressed: the tangled web of bureaucracy that makes it ineffective at its objectives.
FEMA's purpose is, according to its Web site, "to lead the effort to prepare the nation for all hazards and effectively manage federal response and recovery efforts following any national incident." The agency unites organizations such as the American Red Cross, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Guard to coordinate the overall relief effort and optimize the performance of each individual organization. Yet, as many seeking aid following Katrina saw, oftentimes FEMA prevented the smaller groups from doing their jobs. The cause of this hindering was undoubtedly the layers of bureaucracy through which smaller organizations had to wade before accomplishing their goals.
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Infectious Disease and Dermatologic Conditions in Evacuees and Rescue Workers After Hurricane Katrina

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck states along the Gulf Coast of the United States. In the days after the hurricane struck, approximately 750 evacuation centers were established in at least 18 states to accommodate more than 200,000 evacuees.1 State and local health departments, with assistance from CDC, initiated enhanced infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response activities, implemented by teams of public health and rescue workers, including military personnel. Outbreak monitoring included direct reporting of conditions of public health significance to public health agencies; daily contact between CDC and local public health officials; canvassing of reports from CDC, public health departments, and news media for potential infectious disease outbreaks; and investigation of reports of infectious disease with outbreak potential. This report summarizes infectious disease and dermatologic conditions reported during the first 3 weeks after the hurricane, before effective local surveillance was fully implemented. One outbreak of norovirus was reported among evacuees in Texas; no other outbreaks requiring unusual mobilization of public health resources were reported among evacuees or rescue workers.
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http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/294/17/2158

People helping people

Life will return to normal

Over 12,000 homes were flooded and an additional 18,000 damaged, Davis said. Approximately 104,000 St. Tammany citizens have registered for FEMA relief. Of those, he said 45,000 families could receive temporary housing. Davis said eight weeks ago he requested delivery of 23,000 mobile housing units, of which only 732 have been delivered and placed.
"I won't rest until every citizen in need has some sort of temporary housing," he said.
"When we began our assessment, 100 percent of the utilities were down, all sewer and water stations were down, 100 percent of our roads were blocked and all lines of communication were down," Davis said.
Once the assessment of the damage was complete, Davis said his objectives involved clearing roads to hospitals, acquiring fuel for the generators running the shelters, securing badly needed pharmaceuticals and distributing food and water.
Within three days of the storm, he said, all shelters were operational and 90 percent of the roads were passable.
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http://www.slidellsentry.com/articles/2005/11/01/news/news02.txt


Reviewing Louisiana Animal Evacuation And Rescue

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hosted a gathering at the Joint Field Office Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005 to discuss the evacuation, sheltering, and rescue aspects of protecting Louisiana’s pets and livestock during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Many representatives of animal rescue and voluntary groups responded to the invitation, along with several state and parish officials directly involved with these activities. Federal, state, and parish officials provided informational briefings on the existing state- and parish-level plans for evacuating animals during hurricanes and discussed the importance of the human-animal bond. With 1.2 million dogs and nearly one million cats in the state of Louisiana, officials and rescue groups agreed local officials and residents should know who to contact locally for aid and instruction in a crisis. Other important topics included the need for improving communication and ensuring local animal-control officials are familiar with the parish and state incident command structure.
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51 Fired from New Orleans Police Force

New Orleans Police Fire 51 for Abandoning Their Posts Before or After Hurricane Katrina

Amid the chaos that ensued as Hurricane Katrina struck the city, dozens of police officers and civilian employees left their posts unexpectedly and were not heard from again. On Friday, the New Orleans Police Department fired 51 of them 45 officers and six civilian workers for abandonment.
"They either left before the hurricane or 10 to 12 days after the storm and we have never heard from them," acting police superintendent Warren Riley said.
Police were unable to account for 240 officers on the 1,450-member force following Katrina. The force has been investigating them to see if they left their posts during the storm.
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The mass firing was the first action taken against any of the missing officers. Another 15 officers resigned when placed under investigation for abandonment.
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Backpack generates its own electricity

New design may offer way for relief workers to power crucial equipment.
In the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, radio and phone communication suffered, in part, when rechargeable batteries died and could not be recharged due to widespread power outages. A new backpack design may offer a way for first responders and disaster relief workers to generate their own electricity for communications devices, night vision goggles, water purifiers or other crucial, portable electronics.
All the person wearing the backpack has to do is walk — the backpack does the rest. The backpack captures energy from the up-and-down movements of its heavy contents and converts this energy to electricity.
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Gaps remain in government strategy for handling natural disasters

Despite the billions of taxpayer dollars spent every year on emergency preparedness and disaster cleanup, the United States lacks an overall strategy for reducing the number of lives lost and the amount of property destroyed when Mother Nature unleashes a wildfire, earthquake, flood, hurricane, tsunami, or other calamity.
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Black and White

Hurricane's human disaster

The stories victims of Hurricane Katrina tell are all right there in black and white. Literally, say two CU researchers.CU PhD candidates Michelle Miles of media studies and Duke Austin of sociology left nearly a month ago for a trip to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina to study the effects of race, class, and gender differences following a natural disaster.They've been back for but two weeks and are already presenting their preliminary findings.Miles and Austin spoke Monday at CU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and described conditions they encountered visiting New Orleans and Fort Chaffee, Ark. - a staging area for Katrina victims - and explained their methodology in conducting personal interviews with Katrina's black and white victims.
Miles and Austin said they found that the people they interviewed were most interested in talking about race.“We see a divergence in the construction of reality between whites and blacks,” said Austin.As a bi-racial team, the two researchers had an advantage, said Austin, who is white. He said he believes white people told him things they wouldn't have told a non-white, and black people said things to Miles, who is African American, that they probably wouldn't have been comfortable telling a non-black person.“Once we got to New Orleans, it was much more relaxed,” said Miles. “New Orleans was more comfortable for me.”One of the racial differences that Miles observed was the concept of “family.” She said that African-American communities tend to define family as something other than just blood relatives, which presented a problem for National Guard troops running shelters like the one at Fort Chaffee, who defined family only as blood relatives or relatives by marriage.
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In the future....

Civil Air Patrol Members Respond To 2005 Hurricane Disasters
One of the basic principles of disaster preparedness is planning for the worst and hoping for the best. When the triple whammy of hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- two of the most powerful storms on record -- and Ophelia slammed into this country's Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard respectively within a mere four weeks of each other, that principle was put to the ultimate test when the Civil Air Patrol, along with other federal, state and local disaster-response agencies, responded in the wake of these devastating storms.
Prior to the arrival of these storms, CAP units began re-positioning aircraft and assets to safe areas as far away from the projected storm track as possible in order to be ready for immediate post-storm assistance. Members of the CAP, the all-volunteer civilian auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, found itself playing a key role in the aftermath of both storms. Tasked by the Air Force's 1st Air Force, which is positioned at Tyndall Air Force Base, FL, CAP aircraft, aircrews and ground teams from 14 states -- responding as a total team -- began operations shortly after each hurricane blew ashore.
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Groove P2P System Assists Hurricane Relief
The havoc that Hurricane Katrina wreaked on the Gulf Coast this summer brought national attention to the myriad challenges of coordinating local, state, federal, nonprofit and private disaster recovery efforts. Florida, the state that has known more hurricanes on a first-name basis than all other states combined, is all too familiar with the challenges these disasters present. Consider last year's devastating hurricane season, in which Florida was battered by four major hurricanes within a six-week period.
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