TigerHawk

I took a few minutes this morning to reflect on the Katrina disaster, lessons we might learn, geopolitical considerations, political consequences, and so forth. A good place to start is Glenn Reynolds' preliminary "lessons" post of last Wednesday if you have not been following the Katrina discussion closely.

Reynolds offers a few important lessons, supplemented by his readers. They are, roughly, (1) don't build your city below sea level, (2) order evacuations early, (3) have and execute an evacuation plan for people who cannot help themselves, (4) have an emergency relocation plan, (5) make critical infrastructure (e.g., police communications systems) survivable, (6) stock supplies and prepare facilities, (7) "be realistic," meaning educate the population to take care of itself, (8) put somebody in charge (meaning define the chain of command precisely), (9) "make people care" about the threat in advance. Readers added other points, including (10) "err on the side of overwhelming law enforcement," (11) evacuation plans should recognize that many people will risk their lives rather than abandon their pets, and (12) consider using churches for disaster preparedness (they are usually in very strong buildings, they are located in every neighborhood, and they have motivated organizational structures that want to help).

I'm sure there are many other thoughts in government, the media, academia and the souls of Americans. These are mine.

Disaster planning has to be subtle enough to accomodate public denial. People do not like thinking about the end of the world, or even their world. Just as everybody with two brain cells to rub together knew that the levees protecting New Orleans and the Mississippi River channel might fail one day, everybody also knows that a massive earthquake might shatter Los Angeles or a WMD attack might force an evacuation of Manhattan. Still, all sorts of sensible people with disposable income (never mind the poor, uneducated, or incompetent) who know that this might happen do not even do simple things to protect themselves in advance, and do not even like to hear about planning against such an eventuality because it makes them confront, well, the end of the world. Except immediately in the wake of a disaster when the average fool's mind is focused on their own fragile existence, politicians are reluctant to take any action that might be visible to that huge segment of the public that would prefer to die unprepared than think about the abstract risk that they might die. Disaster planning, therefore, needs to be both effective and subtle, or it will be ignored by the general public and the elected officials who only care about votes today.

Competent state and local politicians make a difference. The "constant" in American disaster response is dissatisfaction with FEMA, which obviously needs a major re-do. As in burn it down and start over. The "variable" in recent catastrophes seems to be the competence of state and local officials. Nagin and Blanco are no Giuliani and Pataki. Voters who elect people on some basis other than evident executive ability will pay a price for their foolishness. Are your mayor and police chief serious, well-organized people who can make a decision in a hurry, or do they "need twenty-four hours to make a decision"? (New Yorkers, who will vote for a mayor this year, would do well to remember that. Chicago may want to remember that before they drive Richie Daley from office over this or that petty corruption.)

Ex-ante evacuation may not always be a good idea. Katrina may teach us exactly no useful lessons about anticipatory evacuation (as opposed to post-disaster evacuation) applicable to any American city other than New Orleans.

Start with the idea that we do not want to order evacuations of cities frivolously. Evacuations are extremely costly, and run the risk of massive dislocation and destruction of both lives and economic value (from looting, lost business, accidents and other loss during the evacuation itself, the substantive cost of the evacuation and facilities necessary to deal with evacuees, stress on the evacuees, and so forth). "False positive" evacuations, in which a city evacuates and no disaster ensues, will destroy the credibility of evacuation orders in very short order. Once that happens, politicians will revert to a Blanco-like unwillingness to face reality and ex-ante evacuations will lose whatever effectiveness they might have had.

Therefore, in order for anticipatory evacuations to be effective in a comprehensive sense, they should only be used when we have a highly credible warning of a catastrophe sufficiently in advance to execute the evacuation. Most catastrophes other than hurricanes (and perhaps some tsunamis) will not advertise themselves with credible advance warnings. The earth may give us some early hints of the quake that destroys Los Angeles one day, but it is highly unlikely that they will be visible or credible enough to warrant an evacuation. If a seaquake triggers a huge tsunami, people in some coastal cities might have time to scramble to slightly higher ground, but that's it. A missle attack from North Korea or China will arrive too quickly. Intelligence that suggests a WMD attack on Manhattan will be ambiguous at best. We know that there was sufficiently credible intelligence of such an attack in the weeks following September 11 that the feds scrambled an intense (albeit secret) hunt for a nuclear weapon in New York (read this book if you doubt me), and even then we did not evacuate Manhattan. Indeed, if we make a policy of evacuating American cities on the basis of ambiguous intelligence of a WMD attack, we will have handed al Qaeda an astonishingly powerful weapon against the American morale and economy.

So, if you think about it, the Katrina scenario is just about the only situation in which we would evacuate an American city in advance. Most evacuation plans need to assume that the catastrophe has already occurred. Planning that does not incorporate the fact of the catastrophe is worthless.

Evacuations must be mandatory. All evacuations -- whether ex-ante or ex-post -- need to include people who do not have the financial or physical ability to leave on their own. More importantly, evacuations need to be mandatory. People who refuse to leave should be tied down and hauled out in paddy wagons. The reason is that those who are stay behind suck up a hugely disproportionate amount of search and rescue assets, and that jeopardizes the health and safety of the evacuees and those who were left behind unwillingly or unwittingly. Bill Clinton made precisely this point last week. People who do not cooperate with an ordered evacuation are not brave or in any way cool. They are anti-social, and indirectly responsible the morbidity and even mortality of people that they do not know. They should be roundly condemned, and not glorified in any way.

There are costly trade-offs between accountability and speed. If we get one, an honest appraisal of the local, state and federal decisions in advance and immediately following Katrina's landfall would probably reveal a lot studying of regulations and consulting with lawyers that delayed or deferred the taking of quick action. In advance of a catastrophe, when all dangers are still hypothetical, people are very concerned about how their actions will be seen in the aftermath if there is no disaster. Individuals and fiduciaries are worried about violating the law in some action taken, and everybody is worried about getting sued. Both of these considerations fade if the disaster actually occurs, but if it doesn't occur and losses result from "unnecessary" evacuations and other measures, the plaintiffs and investigators and prosecutors will circle like wolves. We should consider a comprehensive statute granting immunity from the consequences of good faith decisions made in the context of anticipated catastrophes. It would be tough to draft and very contentious, but without it we will continue to lose time to bureaucratic analysis paralysis.

We should consider militarizing rapid-response disaster relief. Other countries may be able to attract and develop effective mid-level bureaucrats, but the United States can't, at least not in general. Why? Because our private sector is "too" dynamic. Most Americans think that government employees are, on average, people who lack the ambition, work-ethic, or taste for risk necessary to succeed in our competitive private economy. The exception is the military, which is highly motivated and more often than civilian departments elevates the practical over the procedural. A lieutenant on patrol in Iraq makes more consequential decisions in less time than virtually any civil service grundoon of comparable authority (i.e., a similar number of "direct reports"). None of this is to say that the military is unbureaucratic (which would be a laughable assertion), but its organization and culture is substantially more conducive to rapid response than any American civilian organization I can imagine.

(As an aside, will the wonderful work of the military in New Orleans increase enlistments in the National Guard? I bet it favorably influences the decisions of at least some prospective recruits.)

We need to know what to do with evacuees over the short and long term. If a city is destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, the people who lived there need a place to stay in the next few weeks, and a place to live and work over the long-term. Competent middle class people will solve both problems on their own. They will impose on friends and family elsewhere in the country until they can return or start a new life elsewhere. What about people who are poor, or not competent? We can put them in camps over the short-term, but what happens next? We are unlikely to rebuild the inexpensive, fully-depreciated tenement housing where they lived before. Unless we want to build thousands of units of government housing -- which would repeat a well-understood policy mistake of decades past -- most of these people will have to move elsewhere. Will we help them relocate, or let them leave on their own accord? What if the camps, which at least provide food, shelter, security and certainty, are more attractive for some dislocated people than their alternative? The camps will morph into a "moral hazard," and we will have to decide whether to abandon people that persist in the camps or forcibly resettle them. These will be very tough choices that have not yet been widely considered in the public discussion (but which may explain why the FEMA camps may be fairly restricted places).

Comments are solicited.