Road Split in Homeland Security

Are Americans well-prepared to deal with megadisasters? And, if so, should disaster preparedness strategies focus on local implementation or central federal prescripts? These questions and others were raised at recent Heritage Foundation conference on “Homeland Security’s Wicked Problems.”

Panelist Irwin Redlener, M.D., outlined what he saw as “four enduring barriers to having a prepared country,” which were

a) “[V]ery, very little evidence  of evidence-based policies;”

b)“[A] phenomenal disconnect between what we need to do and what the money is available;”

c) “[S]ystemic political paralysis;” and

d) That “the civilian population is and always has been disengaged with respect to getting ready for major disasters.”

“Right now people are worried about jobs, they’re worried about the economy, they’re worried about their IRAs,” said Dr. Redlener. “They’re not ready to hear a message of getting prepared for nuclear terrorism.”

With regards to the third barrier, the Columbia University professor expressed his frustration on what he termed the “failure of federalism.” He said,

“And, finally, in terms of the systemic failure of federalism–you can’t have policies that are effective in terms of response to large-scale national significance disasters if in fact the states and local jurisdictions have the ability to say, you know, we’d rather not….. I don’t know, other than changing the [U.S.] Constitution I’m not sure what we’re gonna do about this but let’s not be afraid to speak the truth here which is that we have federal goals, federal objectives, federal concerns, and a willy nilly ignoring of those on a state and local level.”

Dr. Redlener is the Director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) and author of Nation at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do. Megadisaster, according to Dr. Redlener, means “a very high-consequence, catastrophic event, no matter what causes it, that overwhelms or threatens to overwhelm the local or regional ability to respond to that event…”

However, localization—not centralization—of homeland security efforts might be more effective in promoting a “culture of preparedness,” argued Kathy Settle at the conference. She handles local response capability efforts in the United Kingdom. Settle emphasized in her presentation that local interests and citizen trust are essential to the success of any disaster preparedness strategy. “The next point, it really is the really critical one, that this is not something we are going to do to people,” she said. “This is something that people have to want to do for themselves, have to take ownership [of] themselves.”

She later added that “when people actually take action they take action on the risks that they think are most likely to affect them and their families, so if they can see flood water lapping at the door of their house, that immediately gets their attention; but we’ve found that some of the issues like terrorism, or even pandemics, are actually so big people can’t actually get their heads around them and it doesn’t drive them to action…” Therefore, she said, “… it has to be something that actually they can feel is relevant to them, something that they’ve experienced, something that they can see might happen to them. That’s what drives action.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.