Incident responses to violence or any other probably cause of mass death can be hard to prepare for and execute. Events like this are not limited to what happened on 9/11. Examples of different but still cataclysmic events include Hurricane Katrina, the OKC Murrah building attack and the Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that recently occurred.
¶ … SAR teams that responded to the Oklahoma City attack perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh. The second question pertains to Hurricane Katrina and the NRP/NRF responses. The final question deals with key players relative to the NIMS process.
OKC SAR Response
The official report issued by Oklahoma had a "lessons learned" section and part of that section related directly to the response and recovery operations that ensued after the bombing. Issue 1 of that section was very striking. Due to the chaos and the overloading of networks such as those from cell phones, the overall communication abilities of the SAR teams was very limited to nothing. The fact that these teams were ostensibly relying on civilian communication arrays is fairly jaw-dropping but not surprising given other events in U.S. history that have been botched.
This leads to two issues the author of this paper would identify regarding that fact. First, OKC SAR's should have their own communication channels along the same lines as fire and police operations. It is true that it will likely never be used extensively, but not having it in a time like the OKC bombing is nuts. If a tornado hit OKC like it did Joplin, this would happen all over again. The second issue is that the communication problem persisted for more than half a day and that is equally appalling. To imagine if the World Trade Center attack, which was an attack on a much wider scale, would be sobering to consider.
Lastly, per the request of the instructor, the catastrophic event annex is to be looked at. As far as FEMA and their CEA framework, one major tenet is that federal intervention and assistance is required to effectively deal with such an event, but the state really needs to be as self-sufficient as they can be. The destruction of a town would most certainly need to involve FEMA, but this was just one building and immediate surrounding area. Even so, the USAR was dispatched by FEMA just before 9 am on the day of the attack (Ghilarducci, 1995). The communications that did occur were all to go through the Rescue Command (RC) center, which is a good idea (Edmonson et al., 1995). Medical contingencies should be addressed when handling such an event, as was proven by a USAR member from FEMA that got a 106 degree temperature en route to the blast radius (Barbera, DeAtley & MacIntyre, 1995).
Katrina NRP/NRF Response
The Hurricane Katrina response was a darn mess. Federal, state and local response and the coordination thereof was a complete debacle. It is obvious that Louisiana did not implement or embrace the Catastrophic Incident Annex as state/federal coordination was abysmal and entirely too many people were still in the hurricane damage area, which is especially appalling since much of the New Orleans urban area is under sea level.
A report by the GAO noted that Red Cross coordination with FEMA must be improved as it fell way short after both Hurricanes Rita and Katrina (Fagnoni, 2006). Unfortunately, many have played the blame game and politics does not even have to come into that statement, although it certainly can (Goodin, 2007).
The United States Department of Homeland Security was specifically blamed in the wake of the storm. This is a federal department and does not reside in Louisiana or in New Orleans except for a field office (Strohm, 2012).
Not implementing the NRP/NRF frameworks is an insipid choice for any urban area or metro city that can be in a path of a hurricane, which is basically anyone along the Gulf of Mexico or along much of the Eastern seaboard. Personal freedoms and choice to say is all well and good, but forced evacuations should have been done and the parking lots full of empty buses prove that this can and should have been done had anyone had the temerity to do it. The state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans should fully implement the NRF/NRP frameworks so as to prepare for the next storm, which will come.
Two Concerns
One issue that predates 9/11 and has gotten both better and worse since then is airport security. Some of the screening tactics and procedures engaged in by the TSA are reassuring but some of them are head-scratching. When grandmothers and infant children are being poked and prodded for bombs or weapons, that is lunacy. Israel is widely condemned for their unapologetic racial profiling, but they simply point to two facts. The first is that most airplane-oriented terrorists are Muslim men in the 18-34 age range and the second is that Israel screens people based on psychosocial techniques as well as racial profiling and they are never hijacked (Weinberger, 2010)(Hasisi, 2011). This would never fly in the United States because the focus on the TSA doing their right includes terrorism events but also includes tertiary topics such as how to screen transgender passengers. The latter is an issue because it begs the question whether a transgender should be frisked by a male or a female.
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