Disaster Management Policy Paper

Abstract

“Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” is a good planning principle. Imagining the most terrible scenario is a troublesome till the terrible episode happens. What we can only then do is to weigh up our disaster response preparations. This paper evaluates the role of law enforcement agencies in two disasters of the last decades: terrorists' attacks on twin towers and Pentagon and hurricane Katrina. The assessment entails a high demand and need of a newly fangled public policy or modifications in the current policy for disaster management.

Disaster Management Policy Paper

Introduction

The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina should not have arrived as a bolt from the blue. Emergency management practitioners, academics, and journalists; all had been projected inundation of New Orleans that was something analogous to Katrina scenario therefore, it should not have been such sudden unexpected event that a calamity of that scale would devastate the response potential of local and state governments. The reason for the inadequacy of the national response was insufficient policies for the effective and efficient system for disaster management in the United States that poses difficult challenges to tackle the catastrophic situations. The report of the Katrina disaster emphasizes profound hindrances to efficient policymaking and administration. These obstacles can be recapitulated, for the sake of simplicity, as falling under numerous basic classes, encompassing organizational that is moving of Federal Emergency Management Agency in to the Department of Homeland Security has been extensively perceived as reducing its capacities in managing cataclysmic events; institutional i.e. imperative policy goal and incentive incongruousness is created by U.S. federalism between levels of government, and behavioral- inadequate individual preparedness for emergencies or disasters by Americans. Constraints or lacking in each of these interrelated domains, in the United States, poses difficulties in crisis and disaster management practices. (Gerber, B. J., 2007)

The most disappointing thing is that four years after the attacks of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina happened, when Department of Homeland Security has been carrying out its operations for the last three years and also created a National Response Plan in 2004. But in spite of the enhanced consideration to homeland security, there was a failure in response to Katrina. The world observed as government respondents appeared incapable to provide essential defense and safety from the devastations of nature. The sense of failure was summarized by the titles of two congressional reports. United States is judged as “A Nation Still Unprepared” by Senate report brought out in 2006 by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs while House Report was also published in 2006 by Select House Committee as “A Failure of Initiative”. “9/11 Commission Report” and “9/11 Pentagon Response after action reports” also point to the poor response came up from a management collapse of a number of risk factors. (Moynihan D.P., 2009)

September 11, 2001 is generally looked upon as one of the imperative disaster in the United States. Though there is dissimilarity between the intensity of both the catastrophes as unlike of Hurricane Katrina, the ...