When Disaster Preparedness at the Local Level Fails

We know that the city of New Orleans had some time to work on improving their Disaster Plan but the more we look at it the more questions we have for officials at the state and local government levels. Even after a near hit with Hurricane Ivan last year the city of New Orleans was still trying to improve it's disaster preparedness plans. Only after realizing that Ivan pointed out flaws in Louisiana's disaster plan.

Residents and travelers looking to flee the wrath of Hurricane Ivan in Louisiana ran into traffic jams that lasted hours. Yet others could not afford to leave the city and had to find their own shelter. While the state avoided a direct hit from the storm, it exposed what experts call major flaws in the state's civil disaster plans -- especially in New Orleans.

"If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature," Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told The Associated Press.

It's always been a problem, but the situation is worse now that the Red Cross has stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes are too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4. With Ivan just hours away, the city decided to open the Louisiana Superdome to the public.

The main safety measure -- getting people out of town -- raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs, creating a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Eventually, police opened inbound lanes to outbound traffic.Gov. Kathleen Blanco acknowledges the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.

Perhaps a second time is a charm to make things work the next time, unfortunately.

However, nothing in the Disaster Preparedness plan talked about evacuating those without any means of transportation (ie. public school buses). Mayor Nagin failed to give an order on implementing the hundred of school buses to help evacuate those who have no means of transportation. How could he? The city never had a disaster plan in place specifically for that.

What's more interesting is that in April of 2003 Mayor Nagin proudly introduced the city's "IntelliCast Target Notification" to add to the city's safety plan. The ITN is an emergency warning system used to notify citizens of New Orleans for a wide spectrum of crises from hurricanes to missing children.

IntelliCast Target Notification is a telephone-based emergency notification tool used by public safety officials to rapidly identify, notify and instruct affected individuals in crisis situations. Intrado is a new corporate partner of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Mayor Nagin is the Chair of the Business Council for the Conference.

IntelliCast Target Notification is a cost effective, mass notification service for rapidly distributing critical information. It is a more comprehensive service than competitive systems because of its high calling capacity, and the accuracy of is telephone number and geographic information system (GIS) database. As a result, New Orleans officials will be able to contact thousands of the right individuals within minutes, delivering instructions on precisely how to respond to any emergency.

If the ITN is so cost effective and has the ability to mass notify the thousands of "right individuals" within minutes, then were the names of bus drivers included in their database as part of their hurricane evacuation preparedness plan? If not so, why not? And if so, did the city use ITN to try and round up bus drivers or emergency volunteer drivers to help evacuate the people of New Orleans?

The irony continues,

George Heinrichs, president and CEO of Intrado, maker of ITN, about the recent contract win from the city of New Orleans said, "Mayor Nagin's decision to implement IntelliCast Target Notification underscores that even in times of tight municipal budgets, our service is a must have public safety tool for New Orleans' safe city arsenal."

Here's another one:

"Public safety continues to be a top priority for mayors in this country," said New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, chairman of The Mayors Business Council, USCM. "We need to maintain our focus on keeping citizens secure. Public/private partnerships such as this one with Intrado (make of Intellicast Target Notification help us to further the USCM’s stated goal of working hand-in-hand with members of the business community."

Yet, those yellow school buses never moved once. Why?

And let us not forget the U.S. Coast Guard post-hurricane rescue efforts who have plucked almost 16,000 stranded people off of their roofs when those yellow school buses could've done the job before the storm hit:

But, within hours of Hurricane Katrina striking the city, and even before the deadly floods began, Coast Guard helicopters from Mobile and other stations were flying rescue missions over the city.

By Sunday evening, the helicopter missions operated out of the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center in Mobile had saved 4,243 lives from Katrina, officials said. The entire Coast Guard-wide effort had reached 15,655 lives saved, and Chief Petty Officer Paul Rhynard reported, "This is unprecedented for the Coast Guard."
Rhynard said further,

"These are continuous flights, around-the-clock, 24-hours-a-day."

The howling winds of the hurricane had barely died down Monday evening when helicopter crews began being dispatched from the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center at Mobile to pluck Katrina's victims out of the water and off the rooftops.

In more ways than one, the city of New Orleans was woefully inadequate to help people evacuate at the very beginning which would have alleviated many of the problems down the road.

For more information on other state and local preparedness plans, along with a partial timeline, and the outline on responsibilities of state and local governments, go here:

Everything start at the local level to help people evacuate. Then it goes to the state for more help and then finally a request to the White House for federal help from the Governor. But it is the Governor who has the power to request Federal help in disaster emergencies, not the Mayor.