Disasters and How We Make Them Bigger

Is it just the better TV coverage, which makes it seem like a new disaster invades the living room each week or maybe is there something happening out there that we haven’t quite noticed, especially with this unseasonally good winter weather?
Just this year we have had Asian Tsumanis, Bay of Plenty floods and landslides, London bombings, daily Iraqi tragedies (with and without bombs), floods in Europe and now the horror of the New Orleans fiasco.
Ever since the 9/11 New York terrorist attack the world seems to have embarked on a
drive to maximise the impact of adverse events. Not content with just concentrating on potential terrorist attacks, the Bush administration decided to invade another country at the same time as it set about reducing environmental protection both at home in the States while also turning its back on the Kyoto agreement.
The flooding of New Orleans after the storm actually veered away is a monument to dumb central administration planning. The levees simply were not high enough and US Army Corps of Engineers resources to upgrade them were taken away to support foreign wars at a time when laws were eased to allow further development of the storm surge reducing wetlands.
The slow response from the President reminds us of 9/11 where he sat listening to kiddie’s stories for seven minutes before anything registered. The lack of timely US government action triggered worse trouble than anyone imagined, namely the outbreak of home grown Iraqi-like behaviour from the heavily armed locals, enjoying the absence of local troops, deployed to the real Iraq.
What will happen here in the event of a major disaster?
Well the effectiveness of disaster response depends most on the leadership and decision making skills of whoever is in charge, coupled with flexible planning and clear communications. This needs fore thought and imaginative political choice well ahead of the event.
Not much of that is evident back here in NZ. We have handed disaster control to unknown bureaucrats in regional councils. These people are not faced with difficult decision making in their daily lives, content with planning meetings and make believe training of probably the most unlikely of catastrophes.
They lack the regular experience of controlling complicated organizations and instead revert to whatever is in the rulebook in the mistaken belief that the rulebook writers could foresee the event. New Orleans saw that with anthrax medicine sent in to an area needing flood relief.
Chain of control does not easily revert from Police and military heads to regional council officers, especially when Mayors and other dignitaries enter the fray, often to divert attention from any previously questionable decisions.

My own experience when a hospital envelope containing white powder burst in front of me does not auger well for how a disaster here might turn out. Suspecting anthrax, Fire and Police were called. A squabble over control of the site broke out between safety-clad firemen and gung-ho Police. No signs of regional council involvement were evident and the evidence was contaminated then lost. The antidote medicine was not available at the hospital and generally it was lucky for all that it turned out to be a hoax.
I wrote of the possibility of volcano activity hitting Auckland and got wide interest from readers but no inputs from authorities. Given the lack of progress on traffic problems or the separation of stormwater from effluent one would seriously question the choice of local government to lead any real disaster.
A small panel of skilled citizens whose daily lives involve sorting out big complex service problems would seem to be a better solution than mandating plodding bureaucrats to tackle what could quickly become very threatening situations, as we have seen in New Orleans. They would operate like a risk management committee on our behalf, free of the territorial behaviour that dogs most branches of civil service.
Worth a try, eh!
Wayne Brown