Hurricane Katrina

It was the morning of August 29th, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. Many had fled the city. With power out and telephone lines down, relaying information was difficult for those that remained. The reporting outlets that FEMA would typically use in these cases had also escaped, leaving only one available agent to transmit information. However, multiple outside sources continued to provide what they knew of the situation, which proved to be conflicting. Amidst all the noise, FEMA had to parse out the credible on the ground agent from the multitude of other sources they were also receiving and got it wrong. FEMA held a press conference later that morning telling the nation that the situation was largely under control, that the levees remained operable, and there were no extensive flooding situations.

Meanwhile, the lone agent managed to get a Coast Guard helicopter ride over New Orleans that afternoon and filed an urgent report the only way he could with communications lines down, by email. Flooding was widespread, the email said; he had seen bodies floating in the water and hundreds of people stranded on rooftops. Later, a Senate debriefing meeting uncovered that officials didn't receive the email until the next day.

By then, flooding covered 80 percent of the city. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center sheltered twenty thousand refugees. Another twenty thousand were at the New Orleans Superdome. Over five thousand people were at an interstate overpass, some of them abandoned by rescue crews and most carrying little more than the clothes on their backs. Furthermore, hospitals were without power and suffering horrendous conditions. Looting began as people became desperate for food and water. Civil breakdown became a serious concern.

It first falls on the local government's responsibility during disasters like these. However, the local government couldn't mobilize to support the city's swift degradation. When people finally contacted local officials, they would put them on hold to figure out who was responsible for their request along the chain of command. The traditional command and control structure broke down. The local government needed to make too many decisions with too little information about what help was needed.

The local government was correct in asking for outside resources. They requested the aid of the state, which in turn asked for the use of regional states' National Guards and called upon the Federal Government. However, this disaster was unique, and adding more layers to the traditional command and control structures only exacerbated the communication issues. The Federal Government wouldn't yield power to state officials who wouldn't yield power to local officials.

The result was a logistical nightmare. Trucks carrying food supplies were diverted away from the city or refused entry. Officials requested buses to transport tens of thousands of evacuees from the US Department of Transportation, but those requests didn't reach the DOT until two days later. Meanwhile, officials weren't aware that two hundred local transit buses were sitting idle on higher ground nearby. Communication breakdowns also delayed much-needed emergency responders such as medical services, firefighters, law enforcement, and search and rescue.

Government officials wanted to be part of the solution. However, they failed to realize that power needs to be pushed out of the center as far as possible during complex issues. Due to the dependence on the traditional command and control structure, people were looking towards the central government for direction, but that wasn't possible.

FILLING THE VOID

The bright spot in all of this was the private sector's fantastic response to step up and fill the void. The public and government, after the fact, credited Walmart for empowering its employees to make decisions above their level. Walmart made sure their employees were in constant communication and opened a twenty-four-hour call center for them. Walmart employees set up temporary mobile pharmacies and offered free medication. Within two days after Katrina hit, Walmart's logistics teams rerouted their trucks and were able to get much-needed supplies past roadblocks and into the city. Store managers took it upon themselves to distribute what supplies they had. Employees who couldn't open the stores themselves took bulldozers and loaded up any supplies that they could salvage.

However, the lesson here isn't that the private sector is superior to the public sector. What Walmart did is also within the public sector's ability. Instead, the lesson here is the differences in their responses.

LEARN

LARGE AMOUNTS OF POOR DATA TEND TO PREEMPT ANY AMOUNT OF GOOD DATA.

We must be careful when choosing our data sources. We're inclined to choose data that?confirms our biases , but it takes immense strength to recognize data that goes against what we want to believe. It is even harder in extraordinary circumstances because typically credible sources may have existentially changed. In this case, officials believed that the situation was better because that is what their often reliable reporting outlets were telling them and ignored the lone on-the-ground agent.

In addition, humans tend to believe that things are better than they are - a?positivity bias . Think for a moment about your memories. Are they?mostly?positive? Positivity biases create positive feedback loops by ignoring data that would have caused them to short-circuit, and as we learned in?my last article , positive feedback loops are dangerous.

LOOSE SYSTEMS LAST LONGER AND FUNCTION BETTER.

The knowledge needed to address complex situations usually exceeds one individual or central entity. Efforts to dictate every step from the center are counterproductive, and people need room to act and adapt, but at the same time, they need to be working towards a common goal. What is required is a combination of both freedom and coordination towards a common target. The objective serves as a check and balance to ensure that individuals act according to the overall mission while also providing them the power to express their creativity to solve problems with changing constraints.

This realization reminded me of a technical talk I attended in NYC back in January 2016 (see if you can see me in the audience) by Gerald Jay Sussman entitled?Flexible Systems: The Power of Generic Operations. Yes,?that ?Gerald Jay Sussman. In the talk, Professor Sussman calls robust yet flexible systems “the holy grail.” But we know that often our systems fail because they are too rigid and inflexible. Software engineers, for example, have rigorous requirements about the inputs into their systems and guard against any erroneous ones. But nature isn’t like that, as Professor Sussman points out. Nature’s systems are organic; they can take in nearly any input. Sometimes when you give a natural system a particular adverse argument, the result becomes stronger. It doesn’t weaken, and it doesn’t break. Robust and flexible systems are still coordinated but leave individual components the power to do what they do best.

SOURCES

The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned

What FEMA could learn from Walmart