More on the Katrina stuff

qamar posted two fas­cin­at­ing links: 

1) a Kat­rina timeline which shows that Bush did indeed declare a Fed­eral emer­gency before Kat­rina made land­fall, but *then* went on to con­tinue his hol­i­day, which I still think is cal­lous; that Brown really is incom­pet­ent and as far as I can see, a lot of the blame should lie with FEMA; and that Bush con­grat­u­lated Brown for a ‘great job’ when he should, by then, have known better.

2) a 2002 BBC report on a Cat­egory 5 hur­ricane in Cuba where 60,000 homes were des­troyed but abso­lutely no one died. The Cuban Gov­ern­ment in part focussed on com­munity-based responses and man­aged to evac­u­ate every­body, even though many of them were poor.

I still argue that com­munity-based emer­gency train­ing and pre­par­a­tion has more of a chance and I think this shows it to some extent. catcom last night likened it to com­munity bush­fire responses: every­body knows what to do, they come together to fight the dis­aster and then they dis­perse again.

I real­ise this is a lot bigger than a bush­fire, but the Cuban exper­i­ence shows it’s possible.