Tempered by 30 years of emergency service - 24 of those as a command level officer - I watched the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and ached silently for the many people that have lost and endured so much in the Gulf Coast natural disasters. At the same time, I experienced frustration at the Monday morning prophets, know-it-alls and armchair analysts that came out of the woodwork to jump on the blame-game bandwagon. Why are there so many questions about the adequacy of the response to this overwhelming event? What does this say about our ability or inability to respond to future incidents, whether natural or human caused? What are the answers, and are we even listening if there are? After years of emergency response and disaster preparedness service, I’m certain I don’t have all of the answers, but I am also certain that we must develop a better solution to the nagging question: Why do good people sometimes produce bad results? As G.K. Chesterton said in Scandal of Father Brown (1935), “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution, it’s that they can’t see the problem.”

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In order to fashion a solution to a problem, one must first identify the problem. Regarding response to recent disasters and overwhelming emergency incidents, many people formulate opinions about problems with prevention, mitigation and recovery. One concern is that we are dealing with issues that tend to repeat themselves over and over throughout history with one critical commonality: the human element. It is my opinion that we can glean insights from analysis of actions at past incidents and if done correctly, integrate lessons learned into our “toolbox” of improved response techniques and decision making. The main question is: How do we do this effectively? It is critical to properly assess the dysfunctions and craft systemic change, because if one fails to diagnose the key pieces of the puzzle, the risk becomes one of a Rube Goldberg solution rather than a simple yet effective one.

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