Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In studying the response to hurricane Katrina and specifically the tragic lack
of evacuation services for those who were transportation dependent, it has been
difficult to specify the policy tools that are available to the Federal Government in
attempting to correct the problem. We see a whole host of federal and state laws
passed stating that lower levels of government are responsible for making
evacuation plans for the transportation dependent, and offering grants to those
lower levels of government to cover some of the cost of developing such plans.
Unlike policy in which the government uses regulation to “bring individual motives
in to line with community goals”, this policy arena is not one in which the individual
is regulated (Stone, 2001, p. 266). Rather, higher levels are regulating lower levels
of government. In cases when individual action is being regulated, inducements are
used to convince people to change their actions, either by offering a reward for the
desired behavior or a deterrent for the undesirable behavior. In a federal system,
the Federal Government cannot impose mandates upon the states in the same way
they can impose them upon individuals.
Though the Federal Government often tries to use inducements to get the
states and local governments to implement a specific program or plan, all they can
do is offer grants or other subsidies as an inducement. This is exactly what has
occurred in the situation with hurricane evacuation of the transportation
dependent. In the Stafford Act and Post‐Katrina Act the Federal Government has
made suggestions and recommendations on what should be included in the state
and local evacuation plans and offered grants to agencies to assist with the
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development of such plans. The Federal statutes explicitly requires the evacuation
plans developed with the grant funding to include “detailed and comprehensive pre‐
disaster and post‐disaster plans for individuals with special needs…[and] those
unable to evacuate themselves…” ("Post Katrina Act," 2006, Sec 221). As Deborah
Stone indicates in her book Policy Paradox, the Federal Government has little power
to enforce these types of regulations. She eloquently describes the problem as
follows:
“The point of federal inducements is to get states to provide services to
their citizens that are otherwise unavailable. But the only leverage the
federal government has over state performance is to withdraw the funds,
depriving the very people it is trying to help” (Stone, 2001, p. 277).
This is exactly what has occurred. States and Local governments have applied for
and accepted the grants and started the process of planning.
The Federal Government can monitor the process but cannot withdraw the
funding without harming the population of transportation dependent people. The
City of Virginia Beach, according to the Deputy Director of Emergency Management
for the City, has focused its evacuation planning “on a lower category story, the
movement of large numbers of people outside the region is an outstanding planning
item” (M. Marchbank, personal communication, November 2, 2009). At this point
the Federal Government has no power to mandate the evacuation planning for the
transportation dependent take precedence over those with cars.
Outside of offering grants to the localities for planning, the Federal
Government has only taken one other action to induce states and local governments
to develop comprehensive evacuation plans. In the National Response Framework
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mandated by the Post‐Katrina Act, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) has made it very clear that the role of the Federal Government is to “provide
resources and capabilities to support the State response” at the request of the Sate
(National Response Framework, 2008, p. 6). The role of the State and Local
Governments is also clearly identified. Throughout the federal legislations is the
assertion that when the local government is “overwhelmed by an incident, there is
still a core, sovereign responsibility to be exercised at this local level with unique
response obligations to coordinate with State, Federal, and private‐sector support
teams” (National Response Framework, 2008, p. 5). This type of action is not
specifically regulation or direct action, but rather a default statement that places
responsibility and if necessary, blame.
7. Does it seem that different types of alternatives have been examined?
In the policy arena of hurricane evacuation planning for the transportation
dependent, there has not been many alternative government action taken beyond
the Federal grants and recommendations discussed above. This narrow scope of
action is a result of narrowly defining the problem. The only action that has been
taken is to recommend planning to react to imminent danger. This action defines
the problem as one of poor evacuation planning and narrows the scope to the policy
arena of emergency management.
There are many alternative ways of approaching the problem of
transportation dependent people being left behind during hurricane evacuation
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procedures. One is focusing in on the social welfare aspect of the problem. Instead
of assuming there is nothing we can do to help these people until a hurricane is on
its way, it is possible to address the welfare of these people in general. Questions on
poverty and social capital can be addressed to this issue to determine proactive and
preventative methods of allowing the transportation dependent to be self‐sufficient
in the time of a hurricane evacuation.
Another policy arena that apparently is addressed each hurricane season is
that weather control. In order to prevent the need to evacuation the transportation
dependent, the problem can be defined so as to address the issue of the hurricane
itself: is it possible to prevent hurricanes? According to the Atlantic Oceanographic
and Meteorological Laboratory (a division of the National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Agency, NOAA) website, there are regular suggestions to “simply use
nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storm” (REFERENCE). This suggestion has
been addressed with a rigorous scientific explanation on why it is not a good policy
option, but that is not to say that the idea of controlling the weather in other ways is
not a valid policy option. If the problem of the transportation dependent were
framed as a weather control issue that could be prevented altogether, new policy
options may evolve.
Framing the problem as one of population growth and land use is yet another
way of finding new policy options. There is of course the drastic idea of moving all
hurricane prone populations further inland, but this does not rule out the possibility
of discussion. If hurricane prone localities addressed population growth, including
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what kinds of structures are built on what level of grounding, the issue of evacuation
may be a different problem.
Current policy in response to the massive amounts of human lives lost is
currently focused around the problem of moving people who cannot move
themselves. If this problem were redefined it could be analyzed from a variety of
new policy arenas and possibly develop alternative solutions to the problem that
are not available under the current definition.
10. Multiple Stream theory
National Response Framework (2008). Washington DC: Department of Homeland
Security.
Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006(2006).
Stone, D. (2001). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York, NY:
W.W. Norton and Company.
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