Lessons We Don't Learn
Lessons We Don't Learn: A Study of the Lessons of Disasters, Why We Repeat Them, and How We Can Learn Them
On February 23, 2006, in a press conference to release the White House report on lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Frances Townsend said “[The president] demanded that we find out the lessons, that we learn them and that we fix the problems, that we take every action to make sure America is safer, stronger and better prepared.” The lessons Townsend called out in her briefing concerned planning, resource management, evacuation, situational awareness, communications, and coordination. No one in the emergency response community was surprised. We know these are the problem areas. We knew they would be before Katrina ever hit the Gulf coast. Why? Because we identify the same lessons again and again, incident after incident.
In fact, responders can readily predict the problems that will arise in a major incident and too often their predictions are borne out in practice. Even a casual observer can spot problems that recur: communications systems fail, command and control structures are fractured, resources are slow to be deployed. A quick perusal of the reports published after the major incidents of the past decade quickly shows this to be true. Consider the following:
Hurricane Katrina, 2005 In terms of the management of the Federal response, our architecture of command and control mechanisms as well as our existing structure of plans did not serve us well. Command centers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and elsewhere in the Federal government had unclear, and often overlapping, roles and responsibilities that were exposed as flawed during this disaster…This lack of coordination at the Federal headquarters-level reflected confusing organizational structures in the field…Furthermore, the JFO [Joint Field Office] staff and other deployed Federal personnel often lacked a
On February 23, 2006, in a press conference to release the White House report on lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Frances Townsend said “[The president] demanded that we find out the lessons, that we learn them and that we fix the problems, that we take every action to make sure America is safer, stronger and better prepared.” The lessons Townsend called out in her briefing concerned planning, resource management, evacuation, situational awareness, communications, and coordination. No one in the emergency response community was surprised. We know these are the problem areas. We knew they would be before Katrina ever hit the Gulf coast. Why? Because we identify the same lessons again and again, incident after incident.
In fact, responders can readily predict the problems that will arise in a major incident and too often their predictions are borne out in practice. Even a casual observer can spot problems that recur: communications systems fail, command and control structures are fractured, resources are slow to be deployed. A quick perusal of the reports published after the major incidents of the past decade quickly shows this to be true. Consider the following:
Hurricane Katrina, 2005 In terms of the management of the Federal response, our architecture of command and control mechanisms as well as our existing structure of plans did not serve us well. Command centers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and elsewhere in the Federal government had unclear, and often overlapping, roles and responsibilities that were exposed as flawed during this disaster…This lack of coordination at the Federal headquarters-level reflected confusing organizational structures in the field…Furthermore, the JFO [Joint Field Office] staff and other deployed Federal personnel often lacked a