1520 Why could Florida respond and other Gulf states couldn't?
Florida had disaster teams in Mississippi and Louisiana before those states' responders did. Why? How? Preparation. Planning. Learning from the past."And how Louisiana and Mississippi officials have handled Hurricane Katrina is a far cry from what emergency managers here [Florida] would have done. Mississippi was in the middle of rewriting its disaster plan when Katrina struck. Officials there were still analyzing what went wrong during Hurricane Dennis earlier this year when Katrina overtook them. Search teams from Florida were rescuing Mississippi victims before law enforcement officers there were even aware of the magnitude of the disaster.
Louisiana also lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite years of research that predicted a disaster equal to or worse than Katrina. Even after a disaster test run last year exposed weaknesses in evacuation and recovery, officials failed to come up with solutions."
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Florida holds STATEWIDE disaster preparedness day once a year. They call out all resources and practice the various aspects of handling a disaster, primarily but not limited to, hurricanes. Communications, which failed miserably in New Orleans because of lack of foresight is focused on heavily. If you cannot command communicate and control your forces, you are doomed to failure.
I was just over at our counties backup EOC last week and they were checking and testing the mobile command posts, something New Orleans seemed not to have.
The Governor of Florida also assures all counties and municipalities have coordinated hurricane plans, shelters and public awareness campaigns.
There is also a small matter of leadership. Louisiana has none.
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