Four years ago, when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US federal government failed on every level. New York Mayor Rudy Guilani and President Bush stood tall as leaders in those fateful days, to widespread acclaim, and firemen, police officers, airplane passengers and countless others displayed great heroism, but the fact is that the government itself failed miserably on that day. Its failure was structural and systemic.
Four years is a lot of time to rebuild the emergency and security system and prepare the government for emergencies. The federal government restructured into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security (the blogosphere, you remember, was mostly skeptical).
There is still much we do not know about who did what after the Hurricane Karine, but already now we can say that the government - local, state and federal - with few honorable exceptions again failed miserably.
Mark Steyn's op-ed doesn't mince any words, as always, and it is worth reading every word.
One thing that became clear two or three months after "the day that everything changed" is that nothing changed -- that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner's and Sam Donaldson's play-farming activities. But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual -- and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans' foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.
Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what's waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That's what they told us they were doing, and that's what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who'd be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known -- New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership -- it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising -- like, say, a biological attack.
Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America's enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?
Can big government ever transform itself into an effective machine to handle disasters and respond effectively to the unexpected?
As Norwegians watch the disaster in an uncomfortable mix of horror and glee (sad to say), I find myself reminded about our own little touch with disaster last xmas. Maybe a thousand of our countrymen were affected by the Boxing Day Tsunami, most of them vacationing in Thailand. Our government wasn't even able to maintain a simple list of names. The tsunami apparently killed 84 Norwegians, but even the prime minister for some time feared it could be more than a thousand! In Sweden, the mess was even worse.
So, if Norway, also one of the wealthiest countries in the world, had been hit by a comparable disaster, I have no doubt the government breakdown would be similar, even if some lessons are learned.
How can governments handle such disasters? A bureaucracy is created to ensure getting it right and fair, not getting it done quickly. So how can an organisation created to deal with predictable events in a slow, legalistic manner be transformed into a fast and dynamic entity in a time of trouble?
I am by no means an expert, but even I know two things: 1) the line of command must be clear and unambiguous; and 2) exercises. The organisations have to go through regular, well-designed exercises involving top, middle and low-level decision-makers and first responders, for a lot of conceivable disaster scenarios, and probably a few inconceivable ones, too. The performance on every level must then be evaluated after the exercises. This way, when disaster comes, everybody will already know what to do. Errors and failures will still happen, but leaders are at least given the chance to hit the ground running.
There is a reason the best armed forces in the world use so much time exercising.
9:44:50 PM 
|
