Lar­ry John­son sug­gests imag­in­ing Kat­ri­na as a ter­ror­ist threat:

The inept response to this dis­as­ter is an omi­nous har­bin­ger of things to come if ter­ror­ists hit us with the big one. Ignore for a moment that fact that this sce­nario in New Orleans had been iden­ti­fied as a poten­tial threat we should pre­pare for. …

The cri­sis response to a hur­ri­cane is the same as a response to a ter­ror­ist attack. Restora­tion or ser­vices, reme­di­a­tion, and human­i­tar­i­an help are the same regard­less of whether it is man made or nature made. The biggest prob­lems in any response are always the same–chain of com­mand (i.e., fig­ur­ing out who is in charge) and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It is inex­cus­able for the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to claim they had no way of antic­i­pat­ing this dis­as­ter or plan­ning for it. At least they’ve been con­sis­tent. We now know that the fail­ure to plan for the after­math in Iraq was but a pre­cur­sor of things to come at home.

Hope­ful­ly this deba­cle will inspire the Repub­li­can con­trolled House and Sen­ate to get off their ass and demand the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion explain how it will respond if ter­ror­ists det­o­nate a nuclear device in the har­bor of New York City or Los Ange­les. We don’t know if or when such a tragedy will hap­pen, but we do know it is some­thing that could hap­pen and that we should be pre­pared to han­dle. That is the pur­pose of hold­ing cri­sis man­age­ment exer­cis­es. You work on prob­lems and poten­tial solu­tions before you are in the midst of an actu­al crisis.

Yep. The ques­tions raised about our response to Kat­ri­na aren’t meant as fin­ger-point­ing or blame-cast­ing. We live in a world where domes­tic tragedies like this are increas­ing­ly com­mon. We knew this was com­ing, and it still took days before the USNS Com­fort set sail. The hos­pi­tal ship was docked in Mary­land and will take 4 days to reach New Orleans.

When avian flu hits the US, it won’t hit one place only, and it won’t give us a week’s warn­ing. When al Qae­da hits domes­ti­cal­ly, there won’t be any warn­ing. The casu­al­ty counts will be high, we’ll have to restore ser­vices, rebuild the infra­struc­ture and sup­ply human­i­tar­i­an aid. There need to be plans on the books that will work.

As I under­stand it, the US has war plans drawn up for any con­flict that might break out. When it hap­pens, they dust them off, make sure they’re up to date, and take action. Until the ’50s, we had plans on file for a war with Eng­land (can’t remem­ber where I saw that, but it was a rep­utable source). 

Does FEMA have the same thing? Was there a plan for a mas­sive hur­ri­cane in NOLA? Is there one for a nuclear attack on one of the large cities? Earth­quakes in SF? What about a rapid­ly spread­ing con­ta­gion, like avian flu? I assume so, and it’s clear that FEMA had been doing paper sim­u­la­tions of a hur­ri­cane hit­ting New Orleans. It’s also clear that they feel the reac­tion to those exer­cis­es was ham­pered by underfunding.

What’s the state of that plan­ning? Is FEMA respon­si­ble for all of that, or is it else­where? How often do they loop local law enforce­ment, DoD, CDC, etc. into their planning?

I know I have at least one FEMA con­nect­ed read­er, and I’ll be ask­ing some­one I know at DHS for some more info. 

At this point, defend­ing the plan­ning before hand for the sake of defend­ing Pres­i­dent Bush is dan­ger­ous. If things went wrong, we need an hon­est dis­cus­sion about it in order to do bet­ter next time. This isn’t par­ti­san. Avian flu will be seri­ous, and we need a good plan to keep it from killing mil­lions of peo­ple. We can do this, but we need to have a seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of what we did right and what we did wrong with Kat­ri­na to under­stand some obsta­cles to an effec­tive response to H5N1.