Good Afternoon Professor and class. As we know every incident we encounter is different severity and/or response. However, by taking our lessons learned from previous responses we can make future response better through enhanced training and practice of the incident command system. Such is the case for the responses to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. First let’s compare and contrast the responses to both hurricanes. Unfortunately, events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy happen few and far between, therefore, it makes keeping the public to be resilient tough. As for Katrina, having viable contingencies were an issue. No preparations were made to in terms of stock piling food or evacuation sites. According to a Newsweek article Katrina was coined a disaster within a disaster. There was a failure of a federal/local response and no evacuation order was given (Thomas, 2005, para. 12). This inaction at the local level was attributed by the lack of community resilience due to several near misses and the last major hurricane being in 1992 (Hurricane Andrew). In contrast, Hurricane Sandy had the same issue of ineffective community resilience which played a role casualties and property damage. However, from the federal prospective, FEMA was …show more content…
The federal/local government was by no means prepared for this incoming hurricane. Ways to improve this is to improve their risk communications plan to influence communities to become more resilient and not forget how a hurricane can affect their community, Secondly, the local government needs to enhance their training and exercise program. Practice makes perfect, as is the case with executing an Emergency Operations Plan. When items within a plan are not practiced member forget information and/or become complacent with the program, therefore, impacting resiliency. Now, let’s move onto how the Sandy response could have been