Hurricane Katrina: Leadership and Interagency Collaboration Failures

Introduction

The problem with the response to Hurricane Katrina was not that a National Response Plan (NRP) was not in place or that a National Incident Management System (NIMS) did not exist. The problem was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had been in decline for years, was suffering from significant turnover among top leaders, and the individuals who were in charge lacked the appropriate leadership experience and knowledge to oversee an effective response to a natural disaster of Katrina's magnitude (Lewis, 2009; Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, 2006).

This paper addresses three main areas. First, it describes three major examples of the leadership demonstrated in preparing for and responding to Hurricane Katrina, assesses each example, explains why each was pivotal to the response's outcome, and considers how each could have been improved. Second, it describes three examples of interagency collaboration during the response, assesses each, and explains why each was pivotal to the outcome. Third, it considers the challenges facing the leader of an interagency team operating in such an environment and identifies three significant issues for an interagency (IA) leader: information sharing, coordination of effort, and managing personnel directed by various leaders.

Three Major Examples of Leadership

Three leadership failures stand out in the Katrina response. First, FEMA had inadequately trained staff, and New Orleans' Incident Command System (ICS) was neither ready nor prepared to respond to a disaster of Katrina's scale. This was the fault of leadership under both FEMA Director Michael Brown, who resigned shortly after the storm, and New Orleans' local government. Second, FEMA failed to provide adequate shelter for those displaced by the hurricane and subsequent flooding — a direct result of leadership's failure to organize. Third, leadership failed to provide adequate logistics in handling the response and had to rely on the U.S. Coast Guard to accomplish anything of substance in the aftermath of the storm (Samaan & Verneuil, 2009). The U.S. Coast Guard excelled and surpassed expectations because it acted as an independent, autonomous organization with a single purpose and a clear spirit of mission (Samaan & Verneuil, 2009). That spirit, vision, organization, and independence was precisely what FEMA needed to demonstrate.

Prior to Katrina, the ICS in New Orleans was being used only for fire-related incidents, not for major flooding or hurricane relief. This gap could have been remedied by incorporating hurricane and flood response into the ICS concept well before the storm season. As a result of this failure, response was delayed for days while teams struggled to understand their roles (Samaan & Verneuil, 2009). The emergency operations center (EOC) was not trained in ICS either, which meant it became a liability rather than an asset. Katrina exposed the absence of realistic preparation and planning between agencies at both the local and federal levels.

The second failure — FEMA's inability to shelter the displaced — was pivotal because hundreds of thousands of people were without homes and needed to be relocated. FEMA should have coordinated with local leaders ahead of time to determine where and how emergency shelters would be established.

The third failure involved logistics. Confusion about who was in charge, a lack of communication among agencies, and the mishandling of assets caused logistical operations to collapse from the outset. Few responders had been prepared to put the ICS concept into practice; ICS training had to be given on the spot, and insufficient on-site coordination among various departments compounded the difficulty (Samaan & Verneuil, 2009). For ICS to function properly, it must be understood, embraced, and utilized by all agencies involved. At Katrina, that was not the case — only the U.S. Coast Guard demonstrated effective emergency response procedures.

Three Examples of Interagency Collaboration

The first and most effective example of interagency collaboration was led by Admiral Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard, who coordinated across all three levels of agency response. As the Brookings Institution (2007) noted, "the Coast Guard rescue teams had pulled roughly 33,000 stranded Katrina victims off rooftops and overpasses. [Admiral Allen] was personally responsible for injecting some capacity for interoperability among the various civilian agencies at different levels — local, state and federal — integrating with that an effective military response" (p. 3). This collaboration was pivotal because it aligned civilian agencies with the Coast Guard under a single objective: the rescue of thousands of stranded persons.

A second example was the collaboration — or lack thereof — between the Department of Defense (DOD) and FEMA. The E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative (2008) found that the DOD was "sluggish" both in the days before landfall and immediately after Katrina struck. When the DOD did spring into action, "it did so on its own terms. It established its own command, and frequently did not coordinate with FEMA and other agencies" (E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative, 2008, p. 2). Both FEMA and the DOD waited for information to be fully processed before responding, when pre-planning exercises could have accelerated the bureaucratic authorization process. FEMA should have obtained pre-written military authorizations well in advance so that, once the hurricane made landfall, military assets could be deployed with a single phone call (Philipps, 2017).

A third example of collaboration was the cooperation between National Guard and active duty forces under General Honore, who coordinated with General Landreneau by meeting face-to-face outside the Superdome. Honore stated that "the art of command is to take the situation as you find it…and unconfuse people….And that's what General Landreneau and I did by standing outside the same tent outside the Superdome, was to work together in collaboration to achieve a unity of effort, not through staff, not by long distance, but the most personal way that can happen, face to face, and collaborated decisions" (E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative, 2008, p. 11). This coordination filled a critical gap left by DOD and FEMA leaders who were not communicating effectively.

Conclusion

Katrina offers several enduring lessons for an IA leader and illustrates why interagency collaboration and pre-planning are indispensable in disaster response. Agencies must be led by experienced, practiced leaders who understand what to do in a crisis — leaders like Admiral Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard. FEMA failed because its leaders were inexperienced and unprepared, and there was no cohesive spirit of mission running through the agency. Equally damaging, FEMA had not established a ready response plan in advance and therefore failed to take control of the situation when it was most needed. The contrast between FEMA's dysfunction and the Coast Guard's effectiveness makes clear that leadership quality, pre-crisis planning, and a unified sense of purpose are the decisive factors in an effective disaster response.

References

The Brookings Institution. (2007). 9/11, Katrina and the future of interagency disaster response. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu

E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative. (2008). Collaboration amid crisis: The Department of Defense during Hurricane Katrina teaching note. Retrieved from https://www.maxwell.syr.edu

Lewis, D. E. (2009). Revisiting the administrative presidency: Policy, patronage, and agency competence. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(1), 60–73.

Philipps, D. (2017). Seven hard lessons responders to Harvey learned from Katrina. The New York Times.

Samaan, J. L., & Verneuil, L. (2009). Civil–military relations in Hurricane Katrina: A case study on crisis management in natural disaster response. In Humanitarian Assistance: Improving US-European Cooperation. Center for Transatlantic Relations/Johns Hopkins University; Global Public Policy Institute.

Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. (2006). A failure of initiative. U.S. Government Printing Office.