"We need help now! When is the President sending it?"
"Where the hell is the cavalry?"
Katrina? No, the first quote actually was from a Gulf resident after Hurricane Camille wiped out a huge swath of the Gulf Coast in August 1969; the second was from the Director of the Miami-Dade County Emergency Response Department after Hurricane Andrew leveled southern Florida in August 1992. Obviously, local frustration with the speed of the federal government's response to natural disasters is nothing new. It is easy to sympathize. When your community has been destroyed and hundreds of friends and neighbors have been killed and maimed, getting help yesterday is not fast enough. In the case of Hurricane Camille, President Richard Nixon took two days before declaring the area a disaster area. It was not until eight hours after Andrew made landfall that the first President Bush declared a disaster and another week before a limited number of federal troops were deployed.
In comparison to many past major natural disasters, federal response after Katrina has been swift and certain. Compare the responses to Hurricanes Camille and Andrew to what is happening along the Gulf Coast in the week after Katrina.
* 17,417 Active duty personnel are on the ground (supporting 43,000 National Guardsmen from 42 states).
* 20 Navy ships, 360 helicopters, and 93 airplanes deployed in support of operations
* 75,000 persons were evacuated from the region and 14,224 persons rescued from imminent danger; 7,500 patients have been evacuated by ground and another 2,552 by air.
* 5,512 persons have been treated in new established emergency facilities.
* 11 million meals (10 times the total of any previous disaster), almost five million gallons of drinking water, two million pounds of ice and 32 tons of medical supplies were delivered.
By any standard, this represents an incredible and generally well-coordinated effort to rapidly help a devastated area. There are many reasons for this success, including President Bush's foresight in declaring a disaster the day before Katrina made landfall, and long before Louisiana's governor made her declaration. This gave federal agencies the authority to start preparing, though legally they still had to wait for local governments to request aid before any assistance could be sent. A second reason for success-despite some problems: the National Response Plan generally worked. Finally, in the person of lieutenant General Russel Honore, 1st Army commander and a native of Louisiana, the president put the right person in charge. It would be hard to overestimate the effect his take-charge, no-nonsense, "I will get it done" attitude has had on the local population, rescue workers, and the nation as a whole. It would be remiss not to credit all of those who came to help. We have become so accustomed to remarkable achievements from our service members and other emergency responders that we take their excellence for granted. There is a word for this kind of performance: awesome.
So, why is there a widespread perception the government failed the people in the stricken area? There are several reasons, starting with the complete collapse of local government. If there is one lesson we all need to walk away from Katrina with it is: never design a plan on the assumption that every mayor is another Rudolf Giuliani. Instead of leadership, Louisiana's politicians cried on national TV, blamed everyone else for failure, and kept up a running commentary of woe and doom. There is a word for this kind of performance, too: sickening. By the time the president stepped into the local leadership vacuum it was already too late.
The real failure was the government's horrible performance at what we commonly call strategic communications. Officials simply failed to get the message out that the entire nation was riding to the rescue. People, in general, would have accepted that a massive response was still 72 hours away, if they were assured it was starting to roll. Until General Honore stepped up to a microphone, however, the country was offered a succession of apparently clueless federal bureaucrats who simply failed to inspire hope and to meet the challenges that confronted them. In the future, the federal government needs a well-developed plan to make sure everyone in the stricken area as well as the rest of the world knows about everything being done to help them.
Failing to get the word out early is no reason that a simple fact should be obscured: The national government did what for any other nation would be impossible and is continuing to do it incredibly well.
Lt. Col. Lacey is a frequent Proceedings contributor.