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Description
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Disaster planning is a growth industry for local governments. As major weather disasters become more frequent, and disasters of all kinds become more expensive to handle, local governments are increasingly trying to protect themselves and their taxpayers against failure in the aftermath of a disaster. The stakes continue to grow, especially in view of the opportunities and challenges posed by dependence on technology and the need for support from higher levels of government.
Yet no amount of planning can fully prepare anyone for a disaster of great magnitude, one in which local services and infrastructure are not only seriously impacted but wiped out or suspended altogether. No recent examples demonstrate this better than Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which slammed into the Gulf Coast in August and September 2005, triggering the flooding of most of the New Orleans metro area and causing widespread catastrophic wind damage in southern Mississippi. To prepare for disasters like these, planning must be accompanied by a wide-ranging locally led effort both before and after the fact to improve local government's financial and logistic ability to restart quickly and go on operating as closely as possible to normal.
GOVERNMENT DISPLACED
What set these hurricanes apart from most other natural disasters was their scale. Administratively, this meant the wholesale displacement of local government departments. During Katrina, administrators throughout metro New Orleans decamped en masse to Baton Rouge, the state capital, in order to be able to continue doing business. Non-essential personnel had already left before the storm; storm-affected areas of Louisiana were subject to mandatory evacuation.
Had they stayed, they would have been able to do very little. Two parishes, St. Bernard, which covers New Orleans' eastern suburbs, and Plaquemines, which covers the Mississippi delta, were totally underwater. St. Bernard sits on subsiding swampland left over from an ancient Mississippi outflow and does not have a single point more than 10 feet above sea level. Parish school district offices, in the words of superintendent of schools Doris Voitier, "escaped" with four feet of flooding.
Ten miles west of Voitier's flooded offices in Chalmette, New Orleans city officials confronted almost as bleak a situation on a far greater scale. While New Orleans's Vieux Carre and its river banks, a few feet above those in Chalmette, remained more or less dry, more than two-thirds of the city was underwater due mostly to structural failures in levees--most dramatically of all, the historic Lower Ninth Ward between central New Orleans and Chalmette.
The Mississippi Gulf Coast saw the worst of Katrina's surge, at up to 28 feet near Bay St. Louis between Gulfport and the Louisiana state line. The small saving grace for Mississippi is that with higher ground, the flooding did not penetrate as far inland as it did in Louisiana. Nonetheless, the damage here was also enormous, with most business districts and coastal neighborhoods devastated along the state's three-county Gulf coastline.
The public employees who remained in place were preoccupied more with keeping people alive than keeping them paid. The scale of the rescue effort was without precedent, with 24-hour shifts becoming routine among public employees. "The smaller storms we'd had before, we were hit on Friday and back on a Monday' Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department finance chief Paul Rivera said. "With Katrina, for the first seven to 10 days we were just rescuing people and commandeering ice trucks and our motor pool department turned into a feeding station."
As for the general population, evacuees were routinely unable to return for several weeks. Some parts of the New Orleans metro, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, the low-lying neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain,... |
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