We like to think that our country stands for the greatest of things, and of those things freedom in particular is one that we celebrate often. Freedom, however, is a complicated thing especially when bureaucracy gets in the way. Many things went wrong in New Orleans before and after hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and out of those things one stands out: politics. Michael Brown, Governor Kathleen Blanco, President George Bush, and Mayor Ray Nagin; these are all people to whom we point fingers for what went wrong. Hindsight is always 20/20 but some of the mistakes made by officials within the local, state, and federal goverment could have been seen by the blind. Although efforts were put in to help the places and people affected, I think that a lack of uniform political structure was the root of all the other problems that followed.
Jenny Bergal words it perfectly when she says in City Adrift that "New Orleans wasn't devastated by an act of God. It was devastated by the inaction of man" (3). Since New Orleans was founded, people have been aware that it is located in a highly suceptible place for disasters to occur and though some seemingly sane measures were taken (e.g. uneven levee building), it wasn't enough and what's worse was that people in charge knew it wasn't and only manged to stand by. Not only had a hurricane of the magnitude of Katrina been predicted in the past, hurricanes like Betsy had already passed through New Orleans and still no rightful prevention was taken against it. In Front Line-The Storm, it became clear that the combination of the Federal goverment's inaction with the wrong steps taken by the local government ended up affecting poor people the most.
It took the Federal goverment a total of five days to finally step in and help New Orleans. After troubling disasters in the past had been inadequately dealt with, President Jimmy Carter signed an act to create the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an organization that was to help deal with disasters in the United States that were too severe for the local government. In 2005, FEMA's Michael Brown, a man with little experience in the disaster/emergency field, was of minimal help to the people of New Orleans. Pointing fingers at Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco for not being able to correctly communicate what their needs were, Michael Brown's plead reminded of me of Mr. Gladwell's chapter on communication and airplanes. A lack of interoperablity was indeed a problem. For the sake of the public's safety, interoperability is a system that teaches how to better communicate during emergencies. Though some states in the United States have interoperability already, the majority does not. Troops were not sent in until later in the process, food was not getting to people in need, and the national goverment rejected international help on more than one ocassion. I don't mean to blame everything on FEMA, though, as an organization with one purpose only, to help the country with emergencies, FEMA did a great job with 9/11; however, once it was taken over by the Department of Homeland Security, an all-encompassing unit, it was difficult for it to compete with "more important" issues, such as terrorism, so much so that a lot of its budget suffered a great cut. This cut substantially hurt FEMA and the country in retrospective as they were working on 'PAM', a hurricane simulator that was extremely similar to what happened in Katrina when the rug was suddenly pulled from underneath them and they were not able to address the most important step: how to respond to the emergency.
Four years after Katrina happened, the United States still lacks many of the things that it did back then in regards to disaster preparedness. Someone in the video said that this is the result of Federalism, to which another man responded "balloney". Though Federalism gives states and local authorities the freedom to make many decisions about how their constituencies are run and to spend the money as they better see fit, I agree with the latter in that the United States should a have a Federal standard, at least, that all states should adhere to when it comes to emergency preparedness just like we do with education and clean air. Unless a clear and uniform stance is taken by our government officials, the kind of man-made disasters that followed Katrina are bound to repeat themselves under equal or acuter circumstances.
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