Description
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF FINDINGS The Select Committee identified failures at all levels of government that significantly undermined and detracted from the heroic efforts of first responders, private individuals and organizations, faith-based groups, and others. The institutional and individual failures we have identified became all the more clear when compared to the heroic efforts of those who acted decisively. Those who didn’t flinch, who took matters into their own hands when bureaucratic inertia was causing death, injury, and suffering. Those whose exceptional initiative saved time and money and lives. We salute the exceptions to the rule, or, more accurately, the exceptions that proved the rule. People like Mike Ford, the owner of three nursing homes who wisely chose to evacuate his patients in Plaquemines Parish before Katrina hit, due in large part to his close and long-standing working relationship with Jesse St. Amant, Director of the Plaquemines Office of Emergency Preparedness. People like Dr. Gregory Henderson, a pathologist who showed that not all looting represented lawlessness when, with the aid of New Orleans police officers, he raided pharmacies for needed medication and supplies and set up ad hoc clinics in downtown hotels before moving on to the Convention Center. But these acts of leadership were too few and far between. And no one heard about or learned from them until it was too late. The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina show we are still an analog government in a digital age. We must recognize that we are woefully incapable of storing, moving, and accessing information – especially in times of crisis. Many of the problems we have identified can be categorized as “information gaps” – or at least problems with information-related implications, or failures to act decisively because information was sketchy at best.
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