From left: David Y. Miller, Christopher J. Earls

It wasn’t just the U.S. government—as personified by Michael Brown, who subsequently resigned as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—that responded slowly and inadequately to Hurricane Katrina, Pitt Professor Louise Comfort said during a Sept. 21 panel discussion sponsored by Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).

Local, parish, and state agencies also failed the people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities, according to Comfort, a professor of public and urban affairs in GSPIA.

“I want to point out that it is very unusual for government agencies to fail at all four levels,” she added. “Usually, if one level fails, then another comes in” to compensate.

GSPIA’s panel discussion, held in 1700 Posvar Hall, was titled “Hurricane Katrina: Our Vulnerabilities Revealed,” and panelists agreed that Katrina—a fearsome Cate-gory 4 hurricane packing sustained winds of 140 m.p.h.—revealed serious vulnerabilities, geographical as well as man-made.

GSPIA Panel Discusses Economic Solutions to Global Problems By Karen Hoffmann Extreme poverty—defined as lacking access to adequate nutrition, clean drinking water, safe shelter, and basic health care—kills 20,000 people every day, noted Siddharth Chandra, an associate professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), during a Sept. 21 GSPIA forum titled “Environmental Threats to Human Security: Problems and Policy.” Poverty, Chandra pointed out, is tied to environmental degradation. “There’s a direct relationship between natural capital [the environment], the services it produces, and the condition of the poor in developing and even developed countries,” he said. He noted that Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected poor people, arguably was linked to global warming. Nutrition is intimately tied to ecology, observed GSPIA Professor Stephen C. Farber, who organized the panel: Ecological systems purify water and regulate disease; humans eat 3,000 species of plants, and the multitudinous microbes in soil are what allow those plants to grow in the first place. Monoculture crops—the roughly 20 varieties of plants we eat most often, like wheat, corn, and barley—may not be reliable if climates change, Farber said. Among the solutions Farber offered for the declining number of species were biodiversity reserves and removal of what he called “perverse” subsidies for agriculture, energy, and urbanization. Even simple changes in accounting practices could improve our environment, he said: Gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of a country’s wealth is limited and inaccurate. “In GDP accounting, we account for the loss of man-made capital, but we don’t do the same with respect to natural capital,” he said. Instead, Farber called for “green accounting,” which would take into account costs of environmental damage and could provide incentives for sustainable development. Rising oil prices are spurring conservation and development of alternative energy sources. Rather than offering subsidies to cut prices, GSPIA Assistant Professor Aaron Swoboda proposed a “relatively steep” tax to bring U.S. gas prices in line with the rest of the world’s. He also called for a massive investment in other energy sources, an “alternative-energy Manhattan Project.” “Economics tells us that as the price goes up, we’ll find new technologies to substitute,” said Swoboda. “The biggest worry is that prices will change too suddenly, and we won’t have time to adjust. Imposing some taxes now would get us used to these higher prices and give us the resources to devote towards solving the problem.” Panelists also discussed overpopulation. GSPIA Assistant Professor Shanti Gamper-Rabindran noted that sex-education programs involving birth control have been shown to be more cost effective than abstinence-only programs. “For every dollar you spend on convincing people not to have sex, that dollar could be better spent on condoms,” she said. The discussion, held in 3911 Posvar Hall, was prompted by the September 2005 issue of Scientific American, which presented a series of articles on population, disease, poverty, energy, water, and biodiversity.

“The quintessential responsibility of government is to protect its citizens in terms of life, property, and continuity of operations for their communities,” Comfort pointed out. “And disaster events, when they occur, reveal all of the flaws of a particular policy or administration. There’s nowhere to hide.

“If we put inexperienced people in critical offices that have responsibility for managing disasters,” she said, referring to FEMA’s Brown, “we are not going to be able to get the job done.”

Another panelist—Rob Skertich, chief operating officer for the Southwestern Pennsylvania chapter of the American Red Cross and a public policy administration doctoral student in GSPIA—was understandably reluctant to criticize fellow emergency responders.

“The Red Cross is neutral and impartial,” Skertich observed, although he added, “I have a hard time balancing that with being very opinionated.”

Skertich did point out that FEMA “is not like a fire or police department. It’s not a first responder during a disaster, and neither is the state. People say: ‘Where was FEMA? Why weren’t they on the scene immediately?’ Well, I’m not here to defend FEMA, but it’s not like there’s this standing disaster-relief army that FEMA just picks up and puts into an area. FEMA’s primary role is supplementing local and state efforts.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the Katrina debacle, Skertich said. “Did FEMA goof up? Probably here, probably there. Did they do something right? Probably here, probably there.”

Former FEMA director Brown has said he found it nearly impossible to establish a clear chain of command in responding to Katrina, a problem that Comfort attributed to FEMA’s post-9/11 incorporation into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Previously,” Comfort noted, “FEMA was a freestanding, independent agency that reported directly to the president, so the director of FEMA could pick up the phone and report, ‘I need this, I need that.’”

Making FEMA part of the homeland security department was intended to improve coordination of federal disaster-relief efforts, but the move has backfired, according to Comfort. “It’s not very effective to have to go through layers of bureaucracy in order to get action when you’ve got people in danger, and I, for one, would support a return to a freestanding FEMA.”

She and Skertich suggested that the 9/11 attacks prompted U.S. officials to emphasize antiterrorism measures at the expense of preparing for natural disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Rita (bearing down on Texas and Louisiana as the Pitt Chronicle went to press) and earthquakes; the last strong quake to rattle a major U.S. population center—the 6.7-magnitude trembler in the Northridge area of Los Angeles in 1994—caused more than $15 billion in damage.

“The pendulum of attention has gone toward [counteracting] weapons of mass destruction and terrorism,” Skertich said. “Millions and millions of dollars have been put into local communities to train fire, police, and emergency medical service personnel. Maybe it’s time for us to get back into natural disaster training, or at least more emphasis on dual-use training.”

Skertich stressed individual responsibility in preparing for natural disasters. Rather than relying exclusively on government and emergency relief agencies to come to the rescue, he said, “You also need to take action to prepare yourselves for emergencies, so that you’re not caught off guard when you’re told to evacuate your house.”

It’s not as if nobody foresaw the destructive potential of a Category 3-or-stronger hurricane striking New Orleans—a city located seven feet below sea level; built atop loosely packed, silty soil (like Venice, the Big Easy is slowly sinking, at a rate of five feet per century); protected only by an aging system of levees and flood walls against inundation by the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River; with an estimated 100,000 residents (one-fifth of the city’s population) living in poverty and lacking the resources to evacuate on short notice.

Pitt Continues to Aid in Hurricane Katrina Relief Pitt’s response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has ranged from enrolling displaced students to providing hot meals prepared at the Petersen Events Center to hurricane survivors arriving in Pittsburgh. “Structuring effective and appropriate responses to a disaster of this magnitude and at such a distance is difficult,” Chancellor Mark N. Nordenberg wrote in a University Web-posed statement. “However, our University has been attempting to be of help on a number of different fronts.” Nordenberg added: “The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, with the active participation of members of our health sciences faculty, is fully engaged in providing a wide variety of specialized assistance to the victims of this disaster.” The full texts of the chancellor’s statements concerning the University’s response to Hurricane Katrina are on the Pitt home page (www.pitt.edu) under “News.” The following is a sampling of recently held or announced Pitt hurricane-relief activities: • A Sept. 10 staged reading of Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending, held in Pitt’s Studio Theatre by Department of Theatre Arts students, faculty, and staff, raised $1,359 to benefit Hurricane Katrina relief work by The Red Cross and the Brother’s Brother Foundation; • In response to a request from law enforcement officers in Mississippi and Louisiana, the University of Pittsburgh Police Department sent 17 boxes of uniforms and equipment to police in those states who are dealing with the aftermath of Katrina; • Pitt’s Student Government Board will sponsor a fundraising benefit for Katrina survivors at 7 p.m. Sept. 29 in Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, featuring performances by the Heinz Chapel Choir and other Pitt groups and individuals; • Profits from ticket sales for the 35th Annual Pitt Jazz Concert, scheduled for 8 p.m.Nov. 5 in Oakland’s Carnegie Music Hall, will benefit Katrina relief efforts; and • Pitt is collaborating with The Watson Center on a project to produce pamphlets explain to adults how they can best support and reassure young people displaced by Katrina. For more information, visit www.projectreassure.org.

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted an elaborate exercise, involving local and state officials as well as federal emergency responders, based on the scenario of a Category 3 hurricane striking New Orleans. A 2004 study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that preparing New Orleans for a direct hit by a Category 3 hurricane would require a $2 billion, 30-year upgrade of the city’s levee system plus a similarly long-term restoration of surrounding wetlands (cost: at least $13 billion), said panelist Christopher J. Earls, who is William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow and associate professor and chair in the Pitt engineering school’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.The wetlands bordering New Orleans have been eroded by storms and waves, and the city’s levee system has arrested their natural replenishment by silt from the Mississippi, Earls said. “The result is that these wetlands are retreating, and by 2040 they may be gone,” he noted. “Why does that matter? Well, it matters because there is a rule of thumb that says you can mitigate or attenuate one foot of storm surge for every mile of wetlands that the storm surge traverses on its way inland.” In addition, the friction generated by blowing across wetlands reduces wind energy, Earls said.Compared with Katrina’s staggering toll of $200-$300 billion in damages (rebuilding New Orleans alone is expected to cost $100 billion), allocating a few billion dollars over the last decade or two toward upgrading levees and other public infrastructure seems like a no-brainer, Earls stated.

“In hindsight, it doesn’t sound like it would have been that expensive,” he said. “But you have to understand that policymakers have to weigh costs today versus projected risks. That’s especially difficult for long-term projects that transcend different administrations.”

And, while Force 4 hurricanes like Katrina aren’t unusual, Katrina’s path was, according to Earls. Prior to Katrina, meteorologists had determined that such powerful storms could be expected to hit New Orleans just once every 500 or 1,000 years, Earls said.

Disaster planning in itself is useless unless plans are practical and widely disseminated, he and his fellow panelists said. For example, New Orleans’ disaster plan called for school buses to evacuate residents who lacked cars or money to pay for alternate transportation. “Embedded in there is an important point,” said Skertich. “The plan says, ‘We’re going to use school buses to get people out of town.’ But did anybody talk to the school bus people? And what are you going to do when the school buses are underwater? If you’re making emergency plans, don’t assume that that resource is going to be there for you.”

Panelists predicted that lessons learned during Katrina, combined with intense public scrutiny, will lead to better governmental responses to future natural disasters.

“There was so much criticism about the response to Katrina,” Comfort said, “that you notice everyone is paying attention to Hurricane Rita, including the mayors of Houston and Corpus Christi, the governor of Texas, President Bush… . I think, at all levels now, public officials are very much aware of the danger.”

David Y. Miller, associate dean and professor of public and urban affairs in GSPIA, who moderated the Sept. 21 discussion, had the last word about Hurricane Katrina.

“Was Katrina primarily a natural or a man-made disaster? I think the jury’s still out on that question,” he said.