It's time to restructure FEMA

[HurryKane]

was anyone aware that FEMA was prepositioned in the Superdome with water and food before Katrina hit? They were.

And what a debarkle that was ...

There's been a lot of rumors about what went on in the Superdome...Times-Picayune debunks several of them:

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/ ... tml#082732

[Ixolib]

was anyone aware that FEMA was prepositioned in the Superdome with water and food before Katrina hit? They were.

And what a debarkle that was ...

There's been a lot of rumors about what went on in the Superdome...Times-Picayune debunks several of them:

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/ ... tml#082732

Yep - HurryKane. I believe there are lots of pieces of this entire story (and I mean all of it) where extreme reports have led people both inside and outside the areas to draw unconfirmed conclusions. And the MEDIA - in its quest for the ultimate story - is the primary culprit, even though the Times-Pic took a reasonable step here toward the truth. When all the dust settles, probably in a year or so, the real deal will finally come to the surface. Until then, all of these extreme reports, knee-jerk reactions, and unsubstantiated finger-pointing should be taken with a grain of salt. Time will tell...

[cyclone_eye]

Splitting FEMA into a natural disasters response agency and a civil defense agency would be a terrible mistake, because the difference in response to the two is minimal at best. It's not an accident that the two duties are intertwined. You would have two agencies dedicated to functionally idential things. Pretty quickly you'd start to see, in the case of major disasters, both agencies, out of necessity, mobilized in case of a disaster/attack. All you'd end up with, really, is two redundant agencies, stealing resources from each other and costing twice as much as if they were one, functioning with twice the bureaucrats.

There are two major categories of hazards: "natural" and "technological". The structure for dealing with each is similar, i.e. "mitigation", "preparedness", "response" etc etc however the specific training for each and the agencies which are involved are different. The contigency planning for each is different as well.

Any disaster manager involved in the mitigation and preparedness phases of natural hazards would have a different academic orientation to those who work in the mitigation and prepareness for technological hazards (which includes terrorism and epidemics).