20 years after Hurricane Katrina: How NZ can learn from disaster response

fifty thousand did not or simply could not leave. The official death toll is believed to be nearly fourteen. Later, we'll speak to doctor Lauren Vannell Massi, University Senior lecturer of Emergency Management, about how New Zealand's systems have evolved over the years. But first on the Front Page, University of Olbany Professor of political Science, Eric Stern is with us to examine some of the painful lessons learned from Katrina.

were many things that did go right. One of the lasting images and probably we'll get back to that later in terms of lessons, was the folks who got trapped in New Orleans in the Superdome under horrific conditions, with poor sanitation, toilets weren't working, issues with food and water, issues with security, just horrendous conditions. But what a lot of people don't know is that about eighty percent of

the population of New Orleans was evacuated by car. Before that those were folks that had access to their own vehicles or vehicles that were provided by friends or family. And in fact, it was a textbook operation, very effective what's called contra implementation of what's called contraflow, so they take both sides of a major highway and have them all going in the same direction, so you double the

bandwidth for exiting folks. As you can imagine, that's a kind of tricky operation if people get on the highway and the wrong direction. I guess, as tourists in New Zealand probably sometimes do, since you guys are a drive on the left, we drive on the right. That could be very dangerous. And in fact, that was beautifully choreographed by state police and others, and probably the most successful evacuation Carboorne evacuation of a major city in modern history.

That being said, the problem was that about twenty percent of the population ended up being left behind because the decisions were made too late and the vehicles that were needed to get people out were not available, And there

were many, many different reasons for it. But I do want to make a general point, which is that even in a case which is branded a failure, there are likely to be successes, and even in a case where it's celebrated as a great success, there are often lessons to be learned about things not to do as well.

And so what people like I do is to try to put events like this under a microscope and try to pick out the good performances from the less good performances, the systemic issues to try to figure out how to do better in the future. And I've really dedicated most of my career to doing that.

and increasingly bringing in volunteers as well. One of the problems during Hurricane Katrina was that local government was overwhelmed by what was happening. The police force the fire, their command and control was disrupted, a very human thing to do, but a lot of people ended up trying to rescue their their own loved ones. Number of studies have suggested that an unusually high percentage of folks left their posts,

and that's something that you have to think about. One of the world formal definitions social science definitions of disaster is that and legal as well in the United States, is that it's a situation that overwhelms the resources the coping capacity of a jurisdiction. And so if the local resources are not enough, you're going to need provincial or

central government, depending on how your system is organized. And if the provincial is not enough, you need national Sometimes you need international assistance as well.

in North Carolina. Recently, there was an image of a crying child that became the iconic image of the event, but it turned out to be a manufactured image and if you if you look very closely at it, you could see tells that had to do with the shadows on the boat that she was in. So the problem is that there there are various bad actors or sometimes people who are playing dirty political tricks, that have an interest in spreading bad information. Sometimes it's for financial reasons.

There are a lot of scams that try to separate disaster survivors from their their property or their or their money, and these are people that are at their most vulnerable, really terrible thing to do. Other times it's political motives, you know, to to discredit the government's response to something. We have in the United States a very polarized media environment at the moment, and we've seen in a number

of events. Also during Hurricane Alina, North Carolina, there were rumors spread that if you applied for aid from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that they could confiscate your property. People didn't dare to ask for help that was available and was badly needed because they because of these rumors and myths. So emergency managers have to try very hard to get their message out in this very competitive, sometimes toxic information environment.

congregation's hall. And here in New Orleans, the street cars will once again rumble down Saint Charles, and the passionate soul of a great city will return.

some similar things. UK resilience had some of the same elements, but basically the idea was that in the past, the people who made the emergency management plans often were elites that were not always making an effort to capture the needs of the whole community, and the community was often not included. It was a very top down process and often the most vulnerable socioeconomic groups, ethnic minorities, disabled folks, their needs were not reports entered at the table when

the emergency plans were made. They might not have been included in emergency management exercises. The facilities that are used to shelter people may not have been adapted to their needs, and often we're not. In fact, post Katrina, the whole community doctrine says, no, you can't make those plans, you know, just having the officials and the professionals. You have to invite the community in, you have to bring in the stakeholders,

you have to have conversations. You have to plan and prepare and develop capabilities such that the most vulnerable are not left behind. In fact, they need special attention. And we know that the most vulnerable are often the ones that are hit hardest in disasters, both both in terms of the health consequences and in terms of the financial impact.

wasn't only his fault. Was a highly complex political environment, and at that time FEMA was under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, which it is now as well, and there was there were complexities about or uncertainties about who who was actually in charge what the the authority of the FEMA administrator, who is the boss at FEMA, what what authority that person would have there? There are many, many aspects of the case that that are really memorable.

We learned some things about the power of the private sector. Uh turned out that the the way that the private sector uh big box stores and uh soorts like Walmart, they were more effective at moving vital supplies quickly sometimes than the public sector. UH and and and some of the things that they did we were in an improvised

way turned out to be very important. That was built into that whole community idea that we we we need to also draw so not only take care of everybody, leave no one behind, but also draw on the resources of the whole society, including volunteers. Another legacy of Katrina is a volunteer groups like the so called Cajun Navy. These are folks with boats that go to two major disasters, not just in Louisiana, but other parts of the country too and help to rescue people when the public sector

official rescue services are completely overwhelmed. And actually that was the case during the christ Church earthquakes as well. I'm not as up to date on how things are in New Zealand at the moment. But at that time, the dominant mindset was if you have a big disaster, put yellow tape around it and let the professionals do their job. But if you have a disaster on the scale of what happened in christ Church, there's just not enough official responders to meet the needs. And so they had to

on the fly find ways of integrating community volunteers. And here's the upside of the of the information technology that we have. They use social media. To let me think, it was the student volunteer Army and the Farming Army UH which was spontaneously brought volunteers and the farmers had heavy equipment you know that could be used for debris removal and other tasks to help get christ Church on

its feet again. Actually, the New Zealand story there is has been well documented and it's something that that other parts of the world have learned from.

You know a few years ago we shifted from having a Ministry of Civil Defense Emergency Management to having the National Emergency Management Agency, which was a bit of a bit of a shakeup. I think, you know, generally that's been there's been a good change. I think it's helping things work better. But you know, that's not to say

that we still can't improve these things. So where eagerly anticipating more details of the Emergency Management Bill, which one of the main points there is to help clarify some of the roles and responsibilities at different levels, to help sort of streamline some of that communication.

self and coverage or internet connection. So definitely we're wanting to try to find ways that we can allow communication to occur between people on the ground to know what's happening people outside the region, providing support in instances where we may not have the full range of technological options available for communication.

So actually, one additional benefit of you know, communitating to people where the shelters are, what they can expect that we're ready to look after them, is that those people are going to be more likely to evacuate and take themselves out of danger with something like a storm or a flood event if we're able to get more warning. What what we'd like to see is also people considering maybe whether they can go and stay with friends or relatives.

Any pressure we can take off those temporary evacuation shelters. We obviously don't want, you know, sixteen thousand people descending on a single place. Even if it's well prepared dealing with that larger group, it's always going to be a challenge.

helping each other. The private company is an interesting one. I'm not entirely sure how much of that plays into consideration around planning, but I know, for example, with the new Emergency Management bill that's being worked on, there's going to be consideration around roles and responsibilities for groups that maybe haven't so much been officially included in the past.

I'm thinking particularly Ewe and Harper. We know in New Zealand our Mardi community is really really good at standing up and looking after you know, themselves, but also other members of the community. The private company one is an interesting question though. Definitely. You know, if we can find anyone who's able to help take some of that burden off of a disaster response is going to be helpful.

think our current one is from twenty fifteen. How local seed and groups update their group plans regularly, so it's not like we're still working to what we knew in two thousand and two. But the update to some of that underpinning legislation, I think is going to help move forward towards more where we would want our emergency management system to be.

need to be, you know, including people in personnel. I think one issue is that we have so many events because we are prone to a lot of different nets hazards that we see quite a lot of turnover and quite a lot of burnout amongst our emergency management personnel. All great people, really really passionate, but it is really

hard work. So I think more support for the people doing this work, you know, including professionalization, so training, but also in a psychological support helping them cope with the you know, the challenges and difficulties of responding to these events, so that you know, after one major event, we don't then lose everyone because they're too tired and burnt out, and then next time it's people going through it again. It'll be great to see more of that experience retained within the system.