Over at Daniel Drezner’s site is this sobering assessment of what Katrina tells us about our ability to handle a mass terrorist attack.
Money quote:
Natural disasters are obvious when they occur. Many types of terrorist attacks(biological attacks, radiological contamination) are not. If you think the slow pace of response to Katrina is bad, imagine the outbreak of an infectious disease, where fast diagnosis is all that stands between a few deaths and national tragedy. Natural disasters often come with warning. Terrorist attacks do not. This difference is huge. It is easy to forget, amidst the desperate struggle for survival by New Orleans residents, that many thousands more did successfully evacuate before the hurricane hit. In a massive terrorist attack, the likely scenario would be mass panic.
Here we are, only a few days from the 4th anniversary of 9/11 and, judging from the results we’ve seen, our ability to handle mass catastrophe isn’t much better than it was on September 10, 2001. If anything, it seems to have gotten worse.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things are better and New Orleans is an outlier. I don’t think so, though.
Previous Posts:
Katrina: Lessons Learned
Lessons Learned
Technorati Tag: Hurricane Katrina
