“Not as Bad as Katrina” Posted by Moira Whelan

Current reports indicate that the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas have evacuated over a million people. Kudos to them: this is a tremendous effort and an excellent result. It looks to be roughly 90% at this point which is tremendous. In many respects, the impact on human life will hopefully be better than we saw three years ago.

However, we need to remember that by using Katrina as a measure for how this country handles disasters, we’re setting the bar far too low. The goal needs to be—at all levels of government—to do things as well as we can do them. That means resources where they need to be and preparedness, response and recovery happening the way it should.

If the media wishes to serve the interest of the people in the case of a natural disaster, they should stop using the worst example we have seen of government in years as the benchmark. Surely, the Bush Administration likes the frame because they’d have to work hard to get it worse than they did in 2005, but in reality, this is not political. People have a right to expect their government to help them when they cannot help themselves in situations like these. If that is the perspective we use, then “not sucking that bad” is not an acceptable frame from a public leader.

Think about it this way: if a terrorist attack happened, it would be reprehensible to measure it as “not as bad” if not as many people died as did on September 11. We simply would not accept that as an answer, and we can’t accept it as an answer regarding Gustav. By pushing leaders at national, state and local levels to answer to a standard of excellence, we’re simply pushing them as hard as I believe they’re pushing themselves right now. The end result is that they’ll make people safer, and that’s really the priority here.

Comments

[anon]

I agree with your general point but I don't see how you can say "this is not political." Our political system is the way we hold government leaders accountable. In that sense, the government's response to Katrina was very much a political issue and challengers had every right (I'd say obligation) to ask their incumbent opponents why they allowed the government to screw up so badly.

Now, if by "not political" you mean that hurricane preparedness is a serious issue that should not be treated in the shallow and unintelligent manner that the media treats our politics in general, I couldn't agree more. But I think the same could be said about every issue facing the nation.

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Now, if by "not political" you mean that hurricane preparedness is a serious issue that should not be treated in the shallow and unintelligent manner that the media treats our politics in general, I couldn't agree more. But I think the same could be said about every issue facing the nation.

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