Until last week, I didn’t even know the academic field of disaster research existed. Maybe FEMA director Michael Brown didn’t either.
The National Hazards Center, headquartered at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been studying disaster responses and how to predict and reduce the effects of disasters for 30 years.
In November 2004, as part of its Disasters Waiting to Happen series, it outlined what would occur if a Category 4 hurricane hit New Orleans.
In its newsletter, the Natural Hazards Observer, it predicted that evacuating the city would be extremely difficult; that it would take nine weeks to pump the water “contaminated with chemicals and toxins” out of the city; that the disaster’s cost would exceed $100 billion; and “survivors would have to endure conditions never before experienced in a North American disaster.”
The Hurricane Katrina catastrophe was not just entirely predictable; it unfolded like a script for a cheap horror movie.
Everybody saw it coming, said Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at CU and director of the Hazards Center. In fact, in the disaster research community, “all eyes were on New Orleans.”
So with all this knowledge and expertise at her command – much of it funded by the National Academy of Science and FEMA – it seems that Brown would have had Tierney on speed dial.
Not a chance.
The only federal official who sought the center’s help in the wake of Katrina was Janet Benini, deputy director of emergency transportation in the Department of Transportation.
Chances are Brown and others at FEMA ignored Tierney’s expertise because they didn’t want to hear what she had to say.
Last June, she gave a presentation to the FEMA Higher Education Conference in Maryland on how ill-prepared the U.S. was to respond to a natural catastrophe.
“This is something we knew in the disaster research community, the civil engineering community and the environmental science community,” she said.
“We recognized that there was a failure to take the actions identified well in advance that would have mitigated the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans” – things such as reinforcing the levees, replenishing the wetlands and developing evacuation plans for the poor, the elderly and the disabled.
Instead, the nation’s emergency system had what Tierney calls “9/12 Syndrome.”
“There was nothing on the radar screen of Homeland Security except terrorism,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
This is not an opinion, she said, citing Homeland Security’s own budget documents. “This is a fact.”
So when she saw Hurricane Katrina on the weather maps last month, Tierney said, she experienced a feeling of “absolute helplessness.”
On the day it made landfall, she filled her car with gas, arrived at the office early and assigned her staff and graduate students to begin documenting what she knew would be “the largest catastrophe in our history.”
Less than two weeks later, with data still streaming in, Tierney confirmed the obvious: It was a massive failure of our emergency response system, she said.
“This is absolutely unacceptable.”
Now, she and her colleagues across the country are demanding that an objective, independent commission be empaneled to “answer the question that everybody in America is asking: What on earth happened and what does this say about our preparedness for future extreme events?”
Such a commission reviewed FEMA’s failures during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. “Yesterday I pulled out that report and I couldn’t believe how much was similar in what’s going on now,” she said.
Former FEMA director James Lee Witt “tried to implement those recommendations” but everything changed after 9/11.
Tierney said a commission with no connections to the White House or Congress must be convened.
If there’s anything we’ve learned from Katrina, it’s that there’s no place for politics in disaster management.
Too many lives are at stake.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
