How Will We Do When the Next Hurricane Strikes? Not So Well, Disaster Professor Believes
September 14, 2005
Our nation’s disaster response to Hurricane Katrina was awful, says a University of Richmond disaster sciences professor, but responses to future events might be no better, he believes.
That’s because we have a history of not responding well, according to Walter G. Green III, associate professor of emergency services at the university’s School of Continuing Studies. “Our response to Katrina was no better but not significantly worse” than responses to previous catastrophes.
“We’re in a mess,” Green said. “But the response to New Orleans is not a lot different from the response to major events throughout United States history, event after event.”
It just looked worse, Green said, because of the heightened expectations from the reorganization of Homeland Security and the infusion of money and because of the size and scope of Hurricane Katrina.
But “in spite of the largest federal re-organization in the county’s history and the allocation of billions of dollars into homeland defense, our response in point of fact was no better” than in the past, Green said. But it was probably no worse, either, than response to such cataclysmic events as the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the 1927 Mississippi Flood.
Why? Green believes it’s a seeming inability or refusal of politicians to focus on the future. “We’re always overtaken by today’s crisis,” Green says, from local to state to federal. “Local officials, for example, who repair potholes and pick up the trash today, get reelected. Visionaries get voted out of office.” Politicians know that planning for future events that may take place on someone else’s watch takes away time and money from solving today’s problems.
But after Katrina, won’t it get better? “Katrina has been a disaster for the Bush administration and for my profession,” Green said. “I’d love to say, yes, it will get better, and I wouldn’t want people to say I’m a cynic. But I am.”
“After the recriminations, the finger pointing, the promises to do better, something more immediate than disaster planning will negate the lessons we should have learned,” Green says. “We don’t get big events.”
We won’t understand them any time soon, either, he says, until we make response to disasters a priority. Terrorism is sexy, but the time and money spent fighting it is way out of proportion to its threat, Green believes. Historically, disasters have occurred more often and done more damage than terrorist acts.
We also won’t be able to cope with disasters until elected leadership listens to emergency managers and until Americans start trusting their political leaders, says Green. “Until we listen to career disaster managers, who understand the range of problems, results will always be unfortunate.”
Green teaches emergency services management and disaster science to undergraduates and graduate students in the university’s School of Continuing Studies. His Disaster Database Project tracks the global history of disasters from hurricanes in Florida to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It can be found online at cygnet.richmond.edu/is/esm/disaster/.