Problem:
Hurricane Katrina was the textbook definition of a catastrophic disaster. Despite being designed in the post-9/11 climate to handle exactly these kinds of overwhelming situations, federal response frameworks like HSPD-5, NIMS, and the NRP instead solidified government red tape during Katrina. In the place of establishing unified federal/state/local response efforts, the actualization of HSPD-5, NIMS, & NRP froze agencies in the field trying to follow procedures during an infrastructure collapse, overwhelmed systems responding to local officials once their ability to communicate had been destroyed, and starved officials from above of situational awareness. In their report A Failure of Initiative, the House Select Committee quotes these as design failures of the NRP plan, but they neglected to account for how the NRP's centralized, bureaucratic, top-down "push" of resources could not be realized without a ground-level, or "bottom-up", demand to receive them. When public safety systems throughout the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Waveland, MS) and across New Orleans were instantly destroyed, there was no infrastructure with which officials could create requests or set up command posts. Federal systems did not-and were not designed to-"reach down" to push assets until that request was realized on paper. Even more problematically, Buck et al. (2006) describe how NIMS and ICS have been improperly viewed by federal policymakers as a silver-bullet "all-hazards" solution. Instead, mechanisms of ICS operate on environmental preconditions, like stable communications and reliance. Need Assignment Help?