popular logistics

In Case of Emergency - also known as BreakGlass.WordPress.com — is a blog, like this one, about public health and disaster preparedness. We’ve listed the formal blog name and the URL just to make sure everyone gets it. The author of this blog is doing a much better job than we are in many areas: to give an example, his coverage of the CDC is excellent. We’ll be adding In Case of Emergency to our blogroll, and intend to be frequently linking to their coverage.

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) (Click Here) or (Here)

“A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction.”
- James Madison, the Federalist papers. (Click Here)

“With the radical Right, we have a political faction disguised as a religious sect and the president of the United States is heading it. Bush uses a religious blind faith to hide what is actually an extremist political philosophy with a disdain for social justice that is anything but pious by the standards of any respected faith tradition.”
- Al Gore, The Assault On Reason. (Click Here)

Donahue and Tuohy , in Lessons We Don’t Learn, identify recurring problems in emergency management which are identified – repeatedly – in “lessons learned” and “after-action” processes:

• lack of commitment to plans
• cached materials “often inadequate to meet actual need”
• mutual aid assets being counted by different agencies as part of their resource bases, creating a net overstatement of capabilities
• tracking systems for volunteers and donated resources are weak, causing assets to be underutilized
• “short shrift to pre-incident public education”
• inadequate followup on identified problems
• the use of simulated “table-top” exercises to the detriment of inter-agency field exercises – “agencies fail to derive perhaps the most important benefit of the exercise process: relationships with other agencies, jurisdictions, and disciplines”
  

Donahue and Tuohy note that “[t]he wildland fire community uses a very effective nationwide resource ordering and deployment system, but this approach has not been replicated by other disciplines.”

That’s Craig Fugate, then and now the director of emergency preparedness for the state of Florida. What’s he talking about? The post-Katrina reorganization of FEMA, DHS and the National Response Plan.

I found this line in Christopher Cooper and Robert Block’s book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, an excellent account of the top-level decision-making in Katrina. About which more shortly. Fugate is clearly first-rate.

The Rules, according to Fugate:

1. Meet the needs of the disaster victim
2. Take care of the responders
3. See rule 1.

And he has a website - “DisastersRUs” - check out his Emergency Management 101.