Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Put aside who's in charge for a minute- what plan do you expect to be in effect? If they had a plan to evacuate NO "if the levees break in a major Hurricaine" I would want to know why they didn't get out and beef up the levees.
the page starts out by saying most problems are handled locally- and only major things are national- major things are less predictable and less the stuff for which you can plan.
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Put aside who's in charge for a minute - do you really think it's acceptable for our national incident management system to be composed essentially of the following?
1. Organization
We should come up with some kind of organization to handle emergencies.
2. Communication.
People at different agencies and levels of government should be able to communicate. We should come up with a plan and some standards for how to do that.
3. Maybe we should come with some other stuff, too.
I'm not being critical here of New Orleans. I'm being critical of the fact that DHS hasn't put into place a working framework to deal with emergencies at all.
DHS and FEMA have had years to come up with a basic structure to use to handle emergencies, and the best they've come up with is "we should come up with something."
Here's what I want to see:
- Communications standards.
- First responder checklists and protocols
- Command checklists and protocols
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Clear instructions for organizing and handling an emergency, including protocols for deciding who is in charge, when, for what, and for how long.
I've written disaster recovery and incident response plans. For the most part, they don't address particular emergencies (i.e. do this if a terrorist attack, do this if a tornado) because such planning is ultimately fruitless. Instead the create a framework to deal with almost any emergency. It's not rocket science, but it does take a little work and a fair amount of thought.
Good plans are structured as organizational charts and cheklists. Bad plans talk about structures without actually creating them, so that in a time of emergency, nobody has a chance of figuring it out. NIMS is a bad plan.
The worst part is that restructuring the government to create DHS appears to have destroyed what functional systems that did exist. I don't know what the system was like before the DHS era, because it wasn't of professional interest at the time. But it didn't seem to be this broken.
