Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort

Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort

After President John F. Kennedy manfully took the blame for the Cuban "Bay of Pigs" disaster, he observed that, "Victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan." Hurricane Katrina provided enough defeats to fill a large orphanage, and there have been few volunteers for paternity tests!

Affirming blame publicly is often unpleasant and contentious. However, it is usually necessary in order to identify the corrective actions that must be taken before the unthinkable happens again.

The increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters should give greater urgency to making the changes required to prevent them, to lessen their destruction, and to respond more quickly and effectively to the damages they do cause. In every one of my five years in the Senate, parts of Minnesota have experienced enough destruction from floods, droughts, tornadoes, freezes, and other natural disasters to qualify for federal emergency assistance. While those disasters did not reach the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina, they were just as devastating to the Minnesotans who were directly affected by them. One elderly man saw his home in Granite Falls ravaged by a second "one hundred year flood" just five years apart and commented, "I know I'm old, but I'm not that old."

The lessons from past failures (and successes) may identify needed improvements; however, they do not guarantee that those improvements will occur. Changing institutional behavior is even more difficult than changing individual behavior. I once heard then-Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfus say, "Trying to change a bureaucracy is like trying to move a graveyard. It's very hard to generate any internal support!"

My own corollary is that "Everyone is for change, as long as it doesn't happen to them!" From my own observations and experiences as a public official, I believe that the following changes are needed in our governments' responses to public emergencies.

1.) Someone must be in charge. A public emergency is like a military battle: there must be a single, effective chain of command; or there will be catastrophic chaos. In New Orleans, the overlapping governmental jurisdictions and multiple authorities delayed critical decisions and crippled the effectiveness of actions taken.

2.) That commander-in-chief must be identified, and agreed upon, by the other public authorities, before the emergency occurs, and everyone else must follow orders. In a football game, the quarterback or coach calls the play, and the other players carry out their assignments, whether they agree with the play called or not. If they coordinate their actions, they have a chance to succeed; if they each act separately, they are almost certain to fail.

3.) We must expect, and accept, that actions taken before an emergency will sometimes be "wrong." Hindsight can be perfect; foresight cannot. I learned this lesson when I closed my Washington Senate office last fall, after reading an Intelligence Report that predicted a strong possibility of another major terrorist attack against the United States. If I had waited for the certainty that an attack on the Capitol was actually occurring, it would then have been too late to save my staff. However, I was ridiculed for acting in advance of the possible emergency and condemned when, thank God, it did not occur.

4.) Emergency responses are also subject to greater error. After the city of Roseau suffered extensive flooding in June 2002, federal agencies' reviews of some victims' requests for emergency assistance, home and business owners' reconstruction loan applications, and local officials' flood prevention proposals were maddeningly slow. Those delays were caused, in part, by FEMA's careful but cumbersome attempts to assure that no taxpayers' dollars were improperly expended. Under normal circumstances, those lengthy review procedures may be warranted; in emergency situations, they are not. No emergency justifies the indiscriminate or wasteful spending of public funds. However, an inevitable consequence of faster approvals is that honest mistakes will be made. That marginal tolerance must be understood and established in advance.

Senator Coleman and I both serve on the Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Our Committee has been designated by the Senate Majority Leader to conduct oversight hearings on the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. I intend to offer these and other ideas for improving our country's disaster preparedness, prevention, and resistance.

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