Is The U.S. Ready For A Natural Disaster ?

Right now the Japanese people are trying to deal with the aftermath of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami that resulted from it -- not to mention the possible "melt-down" of one to three nuclear power plants. Living in an earthquake-prone country, the Japanese government was probably about as well-prepared as they could be for a natural disaster, but even they are being overwhelmed by the scope of this disaster.

And this is certainly not the only major disaster that has struck recently. New Zealand is still trying to dig out of a major earthquake that struck in a populated area, and we are just a little over a year past the catastrophe that occurred in Haiti, just to name a couple of others. It is a reminder that Mother Nature is no respecter of nations, whether they are poor and undeveloped or rich and developed. Natural disasters can strike anywhere and anytime and on an unexpected scale.

This brings me to what I have been recently thinking about. Is the United States prepared for such a disaster to strike in this country? Just a few years ago Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and quickly exposed the disaster relief program in this country as a deeply flawed program -- and although very serious, it was not a catastrophe on the scale of Japan or Haiti.

Still the U.S. program, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was very slow to respond to the destruction caused by Katrina and even when it did respond it did a very poor job. Lives were needlessly lost while the government showed its incompetence and unpreparedness. Has this been fixed? We are told that it has, but I have serious doubts -- especially in light of all the budget-cutting and paring-down of all kinds of necessary government agencies.

This is not an area where saving money should be a prime consideration. I want FEMA fully-funded, and maybe even over-funded to take care of an extraordinarily large catastrophe (like the once-in-a-thousand-years Japanese disaster). Once a natural (or man-made) disaster has occurred, it is already too late to talk about funding.

After being fully-funded, I expect the agency to be able to demonstrate a supreme level of competence. I don't want to see news organizations getting to a disaster faster than FEMA (in  the case of Katrina it was several days faster and that was inexcusable). I want FEMA, at least an advance team, to be on the spot almost immediately (and in the case of a predictable disaster like Katrina they should be in place before-hand).

And the FEMA workers should be trained well enough to recognize needs quickly and direct their resources to where they are needly without delay. It should never take days to get adequate resources to the affected area. This is a case where too much is a lot better than not enough.

But one of the main changes that needs to occur is to stop using the top job in FEMA as a reward for political cronies. That was what happened in the Bush administration, and once Katrina hit it didn't take long to discover that "Brownie" was not only incompetent, but didn't have a clue as to what to do to handle the situation. Frankly, I don't care what political party the head of FEMA has. He/She can be a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist or anything else -- as long as he/she is a good leader and an expert is disaster relief. I can assure you the people affected by the disaster will care only about their competence, not their politics.

We have been told that the agency has been approved, but when Hurricane Rita hit there were still a lot of complaints about FEMA's response and competence. I wish I felt more confident that the agency's problems had been resolved, but I don't. I think it is more likely that the problems have just been covered over -- to be exposed once again when the next disaster hits (and it will hit us, there is no question of that -- the only question is when).

Are we ready? What do you think?