In yesterday’s class the major topic at hand was disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina. In order to begin my blog I wanted to bring up a quote that really inspired me during a presentation during class. It stated, “The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina showed that we are still a very analog government in a digital age”. To me, this quote meant that our government has the potential for so much more, and yet we were not well enough prepared when this terrible disaster hit New Orleans. The government needs to create better crisis mitigation plans for a lot of different possibilities, which can be very difficult at times.
I also feel that one of the most important things to take away from the Hurricane Katrina incident was the system NIMS. The National Incident Management System is a system used in the United States to coordinate emergency preparedness and incident management among various federal, state, and local agencies. Basically, NIMS wanted to get all the government agencies to come together and work as one unit, which failed terribly during Hurricane Katrina. All of the separate government agencies are too stubborn to coordinate with one another because they do not wish to share information with one another, due to the fact that they would all like to keep their own secret information. Because of this, disaster relief can never be maximized and just creates a sloppy mess during any type of disaster because information is not shared between the agencies.
It is for this reason that the government was overwhelmed when the Hurricane Katrina hit, which left the emergency response in the hands of the individuals and nonprofit agencies. One of the ways civilians attempted to help was to put up many different websites to either get or supply help for the hurricane victims. One very bright person decided to invent a program called PeopleFinder, which is still up and running till this very day many years later. PeopleFinder linked all these sites people were building to help one another during Hurricane Katrina, but had the problem later that they couldn’t remove their information once it was created. This program was very useful during and right after Hurricane Katrina, but years later it created havoc because it left peoples information up when they didn’t want it to be for everyone to see. This led to bad occurrences such as identity theft and so on.
I also wanted to discuss a little bit about one of the articles that was do for last class called “How high-tech is coming to the rescue”. The link can be found below and is on Angel:
In this article, I found a few new technologies that could be very useful at a disaster relief site. Some of these new technology prototypes included three foot long robot planes and helicopters that could survey and send wireless footage back to rescue teams. Two others included night vision sensor systems and triage sensors. All of these technologies worked well and I believe should be implemented into permanent use for disaster relief situations. I also believe we can learn from the mistakes we as a nation made at Katrina, and develop better layers of protection and mitigation in the future.
I would have to agree with your statement when you talked about our government having so much more potential to do great things when it comes to disaster relief. This is very true because our nation does not put enough time, effort, and money into this topic. Instead we are too focused on our defense. With the amount of money that we pump into our defense and military, we could have a totally different outlook on disasters. Our military has come up with some great technology for war efforts. This is contributed to the amount of money they have to work with. If our disaster relief had this amount of money to work with, we could have far better technology to save lives instead of take them.
ReplyDeleteWith the system of NIMS that you mentioned, I blogged about the same idea. Our system of government is faulted in the fact that it is split into different organizations. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but when each of these organizations wants to be the best, a sense of competition begins to come into effect. The problem with this is that each agency will not divulge the data they receive or work for, with any other organization. I believe that is problems stems from the root of money. Once again money comes into play. This is because the top agency or the best agency will receive more funding from the federal government. Since money is scarce, it is difficult to obtain it and will only go to the best agency. Again, I will refer to the beginning of my comment, if we had more money to spend on our disaster relief, agencies would not have to compete for this money; it would be readily available to for them to use to their disposal.
I agree that the government is very analog in a digital age. The government needs to spend more time on disaster risk management and come up with more feasible plans that will not take the better part of two weeks to implement. This will come in time hopefully with what I believe will be the positive results of the Living Lab study. If not it will have to come about on its own and god help us if it comes down to that. Governments do not like change.
ReplyDeleteAs for the tech being implemented I believe that will come in due time. I do not believe they should be implemented at this point. Also it bothered me that a lot of the technologies we learned about we only used in areas that were not as hard hit by Katrina as New Orleans so who is to say that they will work under the worst of the worst conditions. Yes they should be tested and hopefully some of them will be implemented but we need to figure out the communication problems first. I do not feel it would be wise to add more variables to an already confusing equation. Until we figure out a good form of communication during disaster response we should not further complicate it by adding more things we need protocols for into the mix. This is just my opinion.
Very good article and gave me a lot of food for thought