National Guidance Of Hurricane Katrina's Wake

There became an obvious need for immediate assistance from the National Guard and the Active Duty Army to stop looters, crime, and other chaos that ensued shortly after the flood. Gaining assistance from state controlled National Guard units was not overly difficult. Unfortunately, use of Federal soldiers comes with the stipulation that “the Governor of the affected state must request use of the resources of the DoD”. (Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance) The Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco and her staff were already failing to control and lead emergency efforts.

To what extent do you agree with President Bush´s description of Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster? In August 2005, over 1,700 people lost their lives as a result of Category 5 hurricane Katrina. The hurricane affected over 90,000 square miles in many of the Gulf Coast states, under which Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. (Hurricane Katrina).

Hurricane Katrina shift the position of the Department of Homeland Security from making natural disasters an equally as important as terrorism. This even showed that disaster planning requires a great deal of collaboration. The Department of Homeland Security who swallowed up FEMA where not quick to react to Hurricane Katrina because all their focus was spend on planning for a prevent terrorist attacks. The failure of the disaster response system resulted in over 1,200 lives lost in Louisiana and Mississippi. FEMA failed to work closely with its State and local counterparts and communications between these partners and the public were strained at best.

The response explains the faults that took place that delayed the ability to get victims in New Orleans health care and also shows the steps that should have taken place to help the citizens in New Orleans. It begins explaining the proposals that were suggested after hurricane Katrina. There were two different policy’s, one was a bipartisan proposal from congress that aimed to provide temporary, federally funded Medicaid coverage to low-income individuals affected by the hurricane, no matter where they sought care. It would also have 800 million dollars to help uninsured victims of the hurricane. While the estimated cost of this would only be 8.9 billion.

Reduce the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and key resources, essential leadership, and major events to terrorist attacks and other hazards. Provide grants, plans and training to our homeland security and law enforcement partners. We have taken significant steps to create a unified and integrated Department that will enhance our performance by focusing on accountability, efficiency, transparency and leadership development. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was the final weak link in the then-existing confusing chain of command. FEMA 's head, Wallace E. Stickney, had no apparent experience in emergency management or disaster response (Franklin, D. 1995).

It was 6:10 in the morning August 28 2005 and New Orleans had just been struck. Homes were being demolished, people were screaming, innocent people were getting killed from the result of the storm surge. . To this day there are 705 people still missing. While people are living there normal lives, they have not yet to know that in the middle of the Atlantic warm air is rising and it is getting replaced by the cooler air. the Not to forget, the hurricane affected their economy because of $81 billion dollars of property damage.

Furthermore, the utilization of response to address life safety, incident stabilization, property preservation and social-economic impacts continue to play a role in emergency response lessons learned taught today. Response Comparison: Hurricane Katrina

Lastly even though people blame here and there, I think it also the responsibility of state-trained the entire citizen and tell them the evacuate route in the case of emergency. Only if victims had some emergency equipment and resources for them at home they would not have to suffer as they did suffer in Katrina. Personally I always have emergency kit and the first aid box, food and stuff for the emergency at home , even

More and more authorities continue to be taken away and have been spread across many agencies within DHS. “FEMA no longer manages a comprehensive emergency management program of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery and the agency function that President Carter and the Governors envisioned in 1979 no longer exists” (FEMA, 2013). The sole focus has turned to terrorism disaster preparedness and FEMA has become somewhat dismantled and lost its ability to provide the command and control that it had prior to the move to DHS. This will prove to be a major flaw and will again, show the failure of FEMA in the next occurrence of natural disaster the United States faces. There are other agencies within the DHS that need to be scrutinized as

Following the tragic event, the Water and Sewage Board in New Orleans ordered taller levees to be constructed. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 caused leaders to redesign the levee system and the responsibility of levee construction was placed under the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Once again citizens of New Orleans started to reconstruct their city after another natural disaster. Only forty years later Hurricane Katrina, the unfortunate event that was due to the failure of levees to withhold water, left many homeless, dead and looting for survival. Not only did the levees fail the people of New Orleans, but their government also fell short of supplying the desperate citizens of the city with aid and support.

at the state level , specifiably in Louisiana, President Bush sent Governor Blanco a request to take over command of the law enforcement, but this petition was written off by the Governor. Governor Blanco however make a request to the Federal government for more National Guard troops to add to the 5,600 National Guard troops in Louisiana at the time. However, the request made through the federal National Guard was not sent until Wednesday, 24 hours after the hurricane made land fall and much of the city was already under water, the Governor said that she didn't understand the types and number of troops needed. Governor Blanco also failed to intact a pact with other states that would have allowed her to move pass the National Guard Bureau in a quest for more troops.

From the book Zeitoun proves that Fema had mismanaged funds and did not take care of the most important tasks during the hurricane. According to the website Prison Legal News “Over 6,000 prisoners who had been packed into the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) were displaced as a result of Hurricane Katrina” (Williams, Bob). That a mass of amount of prisoners in a short period of time at the cost of the Federal emergency management agency costing Fema big. Another fact for the state by Prison legal news “The DOC reportedly received funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for each prisoner in custody -- the more prisoners, the higher the per diem payment.

the flooding alone from this hurricane was anywhere from 1 foot to 10 feet deep depending on where you were in the city but 10 feet is almost as tall as a house. That is a lot of water. The craziest is the 135 billion dollars in damage that 's a lot of money for a hurricane to cause the most out of any hurricane actually (plyer, 2015). This drastic event also caused the death of 986 Louisiana residents that 's over half of the deaths caused by all of hurricane Katrina. There was an estimated 1833 people killed by the whole hurricane.

Bush meets with members of the White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Recovery on August 31, 2005, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. The United States Coast Guard began pre-positioning resources in a ring around the expected impact zone and activated more than 400 reservists. On August 27, it moved its personnel out of the New Orleans region prior to the mandatory evacuation. Aircrews from the Aviation Training Center, in Mobile, staged rescue aircraft from Texas to Florida.

FEMA’s mission and priorities were changed so that, “terrorism prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery became central to the emergency management mission” (Haddow 325). As a result of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the country’s focus shifted completely from natural disasters to an outright major assault on all things terrorism with no second glance at the potential emergency’s natural disasters presented. There might be a possibility that because of the nation’s extreme obsession with terrorists and terrorism that Hurricane Katrina was not given full priority nor given as much thought as it should have been because the whole focus of the government was on terrorism. When an agency and governmental structure, such as the defense agencies, undergoes an extreme shift within the course of a few years brought on so suddenly, there are bound to be weaknesses. Hurricane Katrina was the most challenging threat that tested the DHS as well as FEMA’s preparation and mitigation of natural disasters since the shift of focus.