Lessons Learned
From Katrina Help Info
The thing at which wiki's are actually best is what I have come to term "distributed knowledge capture". In the outcome of Hurricane Katrina, and the destruction it engendered, many lessons will be learned. If we do not capture them, we will have them to learn all over again... the next time.
Consider this a resource for good ideas, no matter how hard or easy they might be to implement in the real world.
Necessarily, we will have to touch on things which were done wrong. If this page, section, and site are to remain usable, it will be absolutely essential that we refrain from politics, and as much emotion as we can. Please stick to the facts, and be careful with your adjectives. Try to adhere to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy as far as you possibly can.
Topic to be discussed here can pertain to this site, to the use of the Internet to aid in disaster prep and recovery, to media interfacing, to government incident management, command and control, or to any other topic on which you feel we either have learned something... or need to. Add problems, or solutions, of any size or scope. Feel free to add problems to which you do not see an obvious solution, as well.
Unlike most wiki pages, I believe this one will work best if it serves as it's own talk page; please try to confine your comments to the comment section of each topic, and allow it's introducer to modify their original comments as they see fit, unless a section appears abandoned. If this policy doesn't work out; we'll change it. :-)
| Table of contents |
Formatting
Each item should have three sections:
Sample
Problem
Describe the problem, as succinctly as possible. Keep each section to one problem.
Perceived Cause
Why do you think it might have happened? Give as many details and specific web or media citations as you can. The more detail you provide here, the easier it will be to converge on what really caused a specific problem.
Suggested solution
Put here your suggested solution, no matter how large or small it is. Give some thought to the problem: it may be that you need to go two or three steps back up the chain of causes to find the right thing to fix.
Communications
Problem
In the aftermath of Katrina, response to the situation at all levels was hampered materially and severly by the fact that, even if a given individual or organization *knew* who it was supposed to report to and take orders from, it may have been difficult or impossible for that party to be contacted.
Perceived Cause
The scope of the disaster knocked out many more layers than might have been the case in a smaller incident. Municipal power went down to the tune of almost 2 million service addresses. This affected telephone, radio and television broadcasting, trunked municipal public service communications, commercial trunking services such as Nextel popular with many agencies other than life safety and emergency organizations, and almost every other communications service in the area.
Amateur radio communications, often the mainstay of support in such situations, was late getting organized as well, because of the timeline of the event.
Suggested Solution
Several commercial carriers operate voice and Internet connected data networks delivered via satellite instead of terrestrial facilities. These include Iridium, Globalstar, and several networks like DirecPC targeted more to home Internet delivery at higher speeds in the Continental US, as opposed to the global reach, but lower bandwidth, of the first two carriers.
Baylink's Approach
Solicit whichever carrier seems the best mix of speed, coverage, and cooperativeness to create and maintain accounts specifically for disaster recovery communications, with the expectation that the accounts will generate little to no traffic except test traffic, except in periods of emergency preparation and recovery.
Acquire, or solicit the creation and provision of radio terminal equipment for low to medium speed IP packet data tranmission, in large quantities, which can be deployed to storage at the locations where all organizations which might need to communication in a major disaster will have it conveniently available. If such equipment is custom designed, it should meet several requirements:
- Power efficient
- Built in router and 802.11b wireless access point
- ...
Fund this equipment and service from homeland security budget.
It may be necessary to provide computers to support this mission as well; avoiding the problems which are caused on the public Internet in non disaster situations by provisioning the machines with a LiveCD distribution of Linux pre-prepped for the necessary types of communications seems indicated.
An example of the sort of thing that would play right into this project is the MIT Media Lab's $100 laptop (http://laptop.media.mit.edu/), intended originally for students, but useful for so many other things
Other people's comments and extensions
... on this particular Suggested solution. Other people's solutions should go on a three-equal header, appropriately labeled. Other problems should get the full treatment.
Command
Problem
Everyone was surprised when Lt. General Russel Honore arrived in New Orleans, and, as some press reports had it, "started kicking ass and taking names". Everyone except anyone who's ever paid any attention to the United States Military. There was a distinct lack of perceived command authority in many other places, at almost all levels.
Perceived Cause
The US military makes a distinction between "line" and "staff" officers. Line officers, in the US military, rank staff officers of equivalent grade and time in rank, because their specialty is combat command, which is considered to better bestow the criteria on which officers are judged, chief among them command experience.
It seems to me to be the nature of municipal administration positions (such as mayor and governor) that they more closely align with staff positions in the military than with line positions. There are some exceptions; primarily these are commanders in municipal support organizations which are closely modeled architecturally after the military, such as law enforcement and firefighting.
There remain, though, problems of scope. The only people in the disaster area with the necessary scope of authority were people without line command experience; the mayors, parish presidents, councilmen and governors. The people in the area with the command experience: state police captains, National Guard officers, and the like, did not have the necessary scope of command (to other chains of command) to coordinate response.
Suggested solution
I'm not sure what solution can be posited to this problem that fulfils the necessary requirements for times of disaster without endangering civil rights in normal times. Suggestions are welcome; I just wanted to capsulize the problem. I expect that many problems contributed to this page will start this way, in search of suggestions.
