So, um, not everything sucked in Katrina, right? Well, according to the Senate (when they proposed the FEMA-nator), two groups did well: the Coast Guard and private businesses.
Great! Rock on, let's copy those guys. What'd they do, again?
The Coast Guard and certain private sector businesses both conducted extensive planning and training for disasters, and they put that preparation into use when disaster struck. Both moved material assets and personnel out of harm’s way as the storm approached, but kept them close enough to the front lines for quick response after it passed. Perhaps most important, both had empowered front-line leaders who were able to make decisions when they needed to be made.
Interestingly, neither of these cases is discussed much in the actual document. But I think you can argue that all (okay most) (possibly some) of the governmental groups involved did the above things. The fact that these two groups were picked as the success stories is really instructive as to the nature of the failures. Why? Jump on, my friend.
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Katrina was not (as the House claimed) a failure of initiative. It was the triumph of reactivity. The Coast Guard and private sector success stories were success stories because their areas of the disaster reacted well to reactive thinking.
The principle success of the Coast Guard? Their 33,000 rescue missions. For the private sector? Their massive effort to restore their communications infrastructure.
It's not that either one of these efforts is not noble. Certainly, the image of people trapped in their attics as water crept up their legs stills keeps me in nightsweats.
But both issues fall squarely in the range of expected problems--the kind of problems you can drill for. I don't think that's so different than the FEMA effort or the state work. The problem for the actual response structure is that it failed massively to shift from reactive to proactive thinking.
Really, Mitch? You might say. Or, more cruelly, WTF? Nothing crashes that fast just because someone has to think proactively.
Yeah, well, the drill is written deep into the response training model. And even the exercises follow careful scripts. All I'm saying is that the Coast Guard and private sector success doesn't make them models for the response structure--it just means that their tasks fell into the accepted range of possibilities, i.e. they got thrown a pitch they could smack out of the park.
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