Disastrous Management
Eugene B. McGregor Jr. 
The cold logic of disaster management on the scale of Hurricane
Katrina has involved assembling and activating the many concurrently
operating systems and subsystems required to meet the challenges
that ripped through Louisiana and Mississippi. Moreover, the cascade
of the hurricane and failing levees required many responders to
“work now and grieve later” in order to rescue the
living, complete a mass evacuation of the helpless, and meet mission
critical challenges that included rapidly collapsing power, water,
and communication systems and predictable threats to human health,
safety, and security. The totality of the onslaught dwarfed any
possible private or nonprofit response and the power of any single
level of government or government agency. The Katrina disaster
was (and continues to be) project management on steroids.
Painful as the public revelations were about the ineptitude of
would-be responders and the hard realities of America’s
two-tier society, a public record now provides lessons galore,
including the following:
Readiness is crucial: It does not diminish the magnificence of
leaders who rose to the occasion to suggest that preparedness—the
plans, training, and systems locked in place prior to disaster—drives
the prospect for success. It is ironic that the greatest heroics
are often most obvious when preparedness is inadequate and on-the-fly
leadership is required.
Response is structural: The search for scapegoats should not deflect
attention from the managerial wisdom that effective systems, rather
than heroic ad hoc leadership, determine outcomes (see lesson
#1). FEMA was founded in 1979 by the Carter administration, elevated
to cabinet status in the Clinton administration, and then absorbed
as an ancillary agency by the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), a newly created federal conglomerate designed to deal with
terrorism threats.
Even light drilling through into the strategic planning verbiage
of the www.dhs.gov Web site reveals that FEMA’s basic job
is to
“… focus on its historic and vital mission of response
and recovery” (emphasis added). In short, FEMA is now a
reaction agency, not a preparedness agency, and its “response
and recovery” focus is reflected in its budget, staffing,
organization design, work plans, and operating procedures, according
to September 6, 2005’s Wall Street Journal.
Federalism can be dysfunctional: Complex intergovernmental decisions
confront any exercise in disaster management. The public record
reveals serious weaknesses in the city of New Orleans and its
relationship with the state of Louisiana, as well as in the federal
estimate of the emergency management capacity of state and local
government.
Watch the critical path: Disaster management feeds on precise
information. The informatics of command, control, and communication
(C3) constitutes a critical path in the design and deployment
of effective response systems and will take time to develop. Indeed,
the C3 problems of the Katrina response are not greatly different
from those revealed in the 9/11 disaster.
Notwithstanding documented failure, some things did work amazingly
well. For example, the heroics of those who had themselves been
wiped out and the robust systems of logistics wheeled into place
in record time stand as important benchmarks. Further, backup
systems quickly swung into action once the frontline response
failures were obvious. Indeed, the leitmotif for rapid adaptation
under pressure is nicely captured in a book, To a Young Jazz Musician,
by Wynton Marsalis “…Swing is supreme coordination
under the duress of time. Swing is democracy made manifest; it
makes you constantly adjust. At any given time, what’s going
to go on musically may not be to your liking. You have to know
how too maintain your equilibrium and your balance, even if things
are changing rapidly.…”
How appropriate it is that such “quintessentially American
concepts” confronted their greatest challenge in a place
that now presents a platform for the rapid learning inherent in
both jazz and disaster management.
Eugene McGregor Jr. is a professor at SPEA, IUB.
His teaching interests center on the interaction of public policy,
organizational structure, and management practice. Special current
research interests focus on the relationship between public education
and economic development and the impact of information technology
on the structure and management of public enterprise. Professor
McGregor received a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1968.
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