Let me introduce Hurricane Pam. That storm wasn’t real, but it was an exercise to help the authorities to deal with a storm like Katrina.
What amazes me about the summary of actions is the fact that communications is missing from the list. It is clear that communications infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption by such a storm, the first and most important thing to do is to allow the authorities to coordinate properly. Emergency comms infrastructure should be back up and running within hours of the storm receeding. If that means dangling a GSM base station from the bottom of a helicopter thats what you should be doing, at least until you can get a more permanent solution sorted out. The japanese have zeppelins armed with base stations ready to send up as soon as an earthquake strikes, they’ll be back online in a matter of mintues – true, the situation is different, the atmosphere isn’t hazardous in that scenario.
Without comms everything else falls apart, nobody knows what anyone else is up to, coordination disappears, its difficult enough to keep the city running at the best of times but when stuff like this is going on it is vital that all agencies involved are pulling in the same direction. Ideally there would be a single agency that takes the lead for all decisions being made across the disaster area, so theres no conflict of interest. Sure, there are problems about the integrity of that agency, but they’re going to be less of an issue than the troubles encountered by the kind of miscommunications that have been seen in the NO area.
Which brings me on to another thought. Do we need to reconsider our desire to live in cities? If, as the global warming I-told-you-so bunch would have it, we are going to be seeing more of these kinds of extreme conditions over the next few decades then we need to consider whether cities really are the right way to house our population growth. Cities are all well and good while everything behaves itself. But there is a risk that when such a disaster strikes it causes such an impact that the advantages of city living are outweighed by the problems when the infrastucture breaks.
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