Text 15193, 184 rader
Skriven 2005-09-11 13:03:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Matrina
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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/content/state/epaper/2005/09/10/m1a_r
esponse_0910.html#

Lack of plan hurt Katrina-hit states' response
By Dara Kam, Alan Gomez

Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Saturday, September 10, 2005

UPDATED: 3:50 p.m. September 10, 2005

TALLAHASSEE — One thing Florida knows is hurricanes.

Florida emergency planners criticized and even rebuked their 
counterparts -- or what passes for emergency planners -- in those states 
for their handling of Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Jeb Bush, the head of 
Florida AHCA and the head of Florida wildlife (which is responsible for 
all search and rescue) all said they made offers of aid to Mississippi 
and Louisiana the day before Katrina hit but were rebuffed. After the 
storm, they said they've had to not only help provide people to those 
states but also have had to develop search and rescue plans for them. 
"They were completely unprepared -- as bad off as we were before 
Andrew," one Florida official said. 

And how Louisiana and Mississippi officials have handled Hurricane 
Katrina is a far cry from what emergency managers here would have done. 
Mississippi was in the middle of rewriting its disaster plan when 
Katrina struck. Officials there were still analyzing what went wrong 
during Hurricane Dennis earlier this year when Katrina overtook them. 
Search teams from Florida were rescuing Mississippi victims before law 
enforcement officers there were even aware of the magnitude of the 
disaster.

Louisiana also lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite 
years of research that predicted a disaster equal to or worse than 
Katrina. Even after a disaster test run last year exposed weaknesses in 
evacuation and recovery, officials failed to come up with solutions.

"They're where we were in 1992, exactly," said Col. Julie Jones, 
director of law enforcement for the Florida Fish and Wildlife 
Conservation Commission, in a reference to Florida's state of emergency 
preparedness before Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Miami-Dade 
County. Since then, Florida has created what many consider a model 
emergency management system, initially developed by the late Gov. Lawton 
Chiles in response to Andrew and beefed up considerably by Gov. Jeb Bush 
in response to more than a dozen storms that have hit the state since he 
took office in 1998, including a record four hurricanes last year.

The state, under Bush, has learned even from storms that did not hit 
here. Bush was mortified by the long, stalled lines of cars fleeing from 
Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and ordered a study of evacuation alternatives 
that led to the state's current plan to convert certain highways to 
northern-only routes.

Meanwhile, Florida's western neighbors haven't faced as many storms, and 
their emergency preparedness apparently has not evolved as Florida's 
has.

Local and state officials in Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as 
federal officials, simply weren't prepared to deal with a disaster of 
Katrina's magnitude, according to observers, citizens and national 
experts on the scene after Hurricane Katrina wreaked catastrophic damage 
on the Gulf Coast.

One of the biggest differences between how Florida and other states 
handle natural disasters lies in the degree of cooperation between 
cities, counties and the state. In Florida, they are in constant 
communication with one another as storms advance and during the recovery 
phase. Not so elsewhere, as first responders from Florida discovered at 
dawn the day after Katrina made landfall. Search and rescue crews from 
the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission were poised in 
Pensacola on Sunday night in anticipation of Katrina's landfall Monday.

After scouting the Panhandle and determining it was OK Monday morning, 
Jones said she called Mississippi officials to see if they needed help.

"They said, 'We don't know,' " she said. "Monday night, Mississippi said 
'We still have not been able to evaluate the damage, so please go.' So 
Monday night, we were at the border ready to go, and we were in 
Mississippi by 6 a.m. Tuesday. So before Mississippi could wake up and 
say, 'OK, we have to start doing assessments,' Florida was in those two 
counties, in Jackson and Harrison."

Jones' crews made the first rescue in Mississippi at dawn the day after 
Katrina made landfall, and they spent a week in the area, ferrying 
Mississippi Marine Patrol officers whose vessels were destroyed by 
Katrina.

Florida law enforcement officials in each county hold monthly conference 
calls to discuss disaster coordination, but it wasn't until after the 
storm hit that these Mississippi officials were making a plan of what to 
do.

"The biggest frustration for us was sitting down and trying to get all 
the emergency managers in a county to sit down in their emergency 
operations centers and talk about a plan," Jones said.

Part of the problem was that Mississippi officials were in the process 
of rewriting their state emergency plan when Katrina hit, Mississippi 
Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Lea Stokes said. They hadn't yet 
evaluated post-Dennis hurricane response surveys when the Category 4 
storm and its 20- to 30-foot surge wiped out 75 miles of coastline.

Stokes and other Mississippi officials also blame problems responding to 
Katrina on its size and impact on telephone services. Land lines, 
cellphones and even satellite phones were useless, Stokes said.

"It was not so much a communications breakdown as it was a communication 
device breakdown," said Biloxi spokesman Vincent Creel. "So if we'd have 
had carrier pigeons, we'd have been using them. We'd have used smoke 
signals, but we didn't have water." Florida's emergency management 
chief, Craig Fugate, said just having any old plan isn't enough. It has 
to be adequate and a state needs an experienced organization well-versed 
in putting it into effect.

"I've heard comments made in other disasters that the first thing they 
did was throw the plan away because the plan was worthless," Fugate 
said. "A plan should not be some requirement. It should truly reflect 
what your real needs are, and what your real resources are." Louisiana's 
plan doesn't do either.

A November article published by the Natural Hazards Center, a University 
of Colorado research institute, analyzed what would have happened if 
Hurricane Ivan had hit New Orleans last summer instead of Pensacola.

"Hurricane Ivan would have pushed a 17-foot storm surge into Lake 
Pontchartrain; caused the levees between the lake and the city to 
overtop and fill the city 'bowl' with water from lake levee to river 
levee, in some places as deep as 20 feet; flooded the north shore 
suburbs of Lake Pontchartrain with waters pushing as much as seven miles 
inland; and inundated inhabited areas south of the Mississippi River," 
wrote Shirley Laska, a University of New Orleans disaster expert.

But the most recent Louisiana emergency operations plan doesn't address 
how to evacuate in the case of flooding from storm surge, saying simply 
that "The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area represents a difficult 
evacuation problem due to the large population and its unique layout."

It continues, "The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be 
personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles 
and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide 
transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require 
assistance in evacuating."

Buses were unable to transport New Orleans citizens for days following 
Katrina's landfall. The plan acknowledges that, in the event of a 
catastrophic hurricane, "the evacuation of over a million people from 
the Southeast Region could overwhelm normally available shelter 
resources." But it doesn't include a solution to the shelter issue.

Louisiana officials could not be reached for comment this week. 
Mississippi and Louisiana officials, however, have increasingly decried 
what they called a slow federal response to the disaster, blaming the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Gov. Bush defended FEMA.

"If we weren't prepared, and we didn't do our part, no amount of work by 
FEMA could overcome the lack of preparation," he said. Natural Hazards 
Center director Kathleen Tierney agreed, saying emergency planners in 
the Gulf states should have taken a tip from the jazz legends that made 
New Orleans famous.

"Organizational improvisation" is essential to cope with unpredictable 
events such as Katrina, Tierney said. "Research on jazz musicians shows 
that people don't just pull stuff out of the air when they're 
improvising. These are people with an extremely wide knowledge of 
musical genres. They have always practiced and practiced and practiced. 
Similarly, improvising involves a deep understanding of the resources 
you have at hand in your community."

Local officials, she said, "could have listened to researchers. They 
could take seriously Congressman Patrick Kennedy's bill called the 
Ready, Willing and Able Act that calls for more interaction with the 
community. They could have approached this improvisational task with 
imagination." And they might yet, Biloxi spokesman Creel said.

"Believe me, we're going to be doing a lot of what you call critiquing 
of this, but we haven't reached that point yet. We're still at the midst 
of it." 

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