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4. Emergency Management and the Courts in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
- University of Massachusetts Press
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4 Emergency Management and the Courts in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina Thomas A. Birkland This essay describes emergency management issues facing the courts, with a particular emphasis on the generally poor response to Hurricane Katrina by the courts in New Orleans (Orleans Parish), Louisiana. A broader purpose is to examine this failure through the lens provided by more than fifty years of research on human behavior in natural disasters. Particularly since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and continuing to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a considerable body of literature on disasters has been developed and published by nonexperts. Much of their findings and advice are naïve, ungrounded in theory or evidence beyond one or two cases and disconnected from the research that preceded it. Hurricane Katrina has also caused many very talented natural and social scientists to study the broad range of disaster issues, from the reasons the floodwalls along the canals failed, to understanding the physical and mental health aspects of disasters, to understanding the sociopolitical, economic, and institutional reasons for the failure of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the U.S. government to respond effectively to this disaster. It therefore worthwhile to approach the question of the collapse of the New Orleans courts from this “hazards research” perspective. Failure to do so will result in the continued propagation of myths and falsehoods about disasters in general and Katrina in particular. A key reason for the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina is the failure to mitigate the effects of the storm: the levees were not properly designed and constructed to withstand the storm surge Katrina generated,1 and the city and state had limited capacity, as matters of law, politics, or leadership, to take preventative steps before Katrina to minimize the effects of such a disaster. The federal government had largely abandoned emergency management and the courts its efforts to improve hazard mitigation and response in favor of a near single-minded focus on “domestic terrorism” or “homeland security,” thereby reducing the federal government’s effectiveness in natural disasters to pre-1992 levels; in 1992, Hurricane Andrew was the debacle that induced the federal government to put professionals, not political appointees , in charge of sound disaster management and policy advice. Thus, a running theme is that the failures of the New Orleans courts to effectively prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina are reflective of the broader lack of capacity and commitment in the region: capacity to effectively plan for a storm and the commitment to actually practice and then carry out the plans. The outcome of Katrina also reflects the federal government’s return of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to a civil defense organization, away from the organization it became during the 1990s, when it focused on disaster mitigation and effective relief aid. An overview of Disaster Research The study of natural hazards and disasters, and the interrelation between natural disasters and national security disasters as fields for study, dates to well before World War II. Of particular interest to social science are two major questions: how do people and groups behave in the face of an impending or actual disaster, and how do communities increase or decrease their vulnerability to natural hazards?2 Within these broad questions have come many questions, including what kind of policy tools governments can adopt to mitigate hazards,3 what sort of relief schemes should be developed to compensate people for their losses after disasters,4 how do people alter their physical environment to increase or decrease disaster vulnerability, and what measures can be taken to reduce vulnerability5 ? Many of these key questions stem from pioneering work in sociology and geography, the two major disciplinary wellsprings of disaster research. The sociological strand can be dated to 1920, with the publication of Samuel Henry Prince’s6 research on the community response to the 1917 explosion of an ammunition ship, the Mont Blanc, which destroyed nearly the entire north end of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Prince found that the initial psychological shock and the physical damage of the event was mitigated by the emergent organization of community effort to take care of the injured, fight fires, assess damage, and plan recovery. Sociological case studies of natural disasters become more important during and after World War II. Much of this research was driven by interest in [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:15 GMT) c ha P ter F o u r the results of...