[KyARES] RE: [KYHAM] National Disaster Response Plan Needed?

[N4AOF]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Howell" <jeff at k3dhs.us>
> Interested considering the fact that we've had the National Response Plan
> (NRP) (formerly called the Federal Response Plan) for years.  Some 
> probably
> don't even know it exists, let alone if they've read it.

Quite true, especially the part about not reading it.
Clearly no one "above" the FEMA Regional level had read the NRP

However the military suggestion that a plan is needed may have some validity 
to it.  One shortcoming of the NRP (and the FRP before it) is that the plan 
deliniates who is responsible and lays out a detailed process for the local 
government to ask their state for help, for the state to ask the federal 
government for help, and for the federal agencies to coordinate with each 
other about who is supposed to help.  But nowhere in the NRP (or the FRP) is 
there one single word about actually DOING anything.

According to the system mandated by the FRP and continued in the NRP, only 
the state and local plans have to address any specific actions.  This is a 
good system because it ensures that each local plan will address the 
specific kinds of disaster that may strike their particular area; and the 
disaster specific annexes of the state plan are basically a collection of 
the corresponding annexes of the local plans with the state resources 
allocated.

What this system fails to envision is a disaster where national level 
resources are needed immediately (personally I am not convinced that federal 
resources were needed "immediately" in Katrina, but that is an entirely 
different discussion).

The difference between the military concept of a plan and the FEMA concept 
of a plan is that when the military makes out a plan, they write down what 
they need to DO, along with who does it, when, and how.  If the military had 
planned a response to Katrina, there would have been a massive detailed plan 
with hour-by-hour assignements (all of which would have totally ignored 
state & local resources and priorities) and a complete list of everything 
needed (no one would have read that plan either, except perhaps the one Army 
Corps of Engineers captain who was tasked to write it).

New Orleans would still have been trashed, and we still would not have been 
ready, but we would know exactly who to blame for each and every specific 
failure.

The "Category-5-Hurricane-Hits-New-Orleans" has always been one of the 
"Worst Case" national disaster scenarios -- but no one has ever taken it 
seriously, most especially not the state of Louisiana or the city of New 
Orleans.  Just as no one takes 
"Richter-8.6-or-above-Earthquake-Hits-New-Madrid" seriously.  These are both 
disasters we have always known WOULD happen someday.  Now that the New 
Orleans hurricane has actually happened, we will start spending the money to 
protect the rebuilt city against the next once-in-a-century hurricane (and 
continue to ignore all the other once-in-a-century natural disasters that 
are also going to come one of these days)

73 de N4AOF