Organizational improvisation ... Research on jazz musicians shows that people don't just pull stuff out of the air when they're improvising. These are people with an extremely wide knowledge of musical genres. They have always practiced and practiced and practiced. Similarly, improvising involves a deep understanding of the resources you have at hand in your community.
They did anticipate breaching of the levees, that the pumps wouldn't work, ... couldn't get the federal assistance they needed. They knew they were living on a time bomb.
More than 80 percent of the housing was destroyed. It's an island; there was nowhere to go. They didn't know when help was going to come. Law enforcement was rendered ineffective. They didn't know when they'd see another meal.
To wait for someone else, or to expect someone else to make my life richer, or fuller, or more satisfying, puts me in a constant state of suspension.
We've been on this trajectory for about 15 years. We're seeing increasingly bigger disasters and increasingly higher losses. Now just about any place a hurricane is going to come in, it's going to hit a developed area. This is the way it's going to be from now on.
The question is not whether we need something like the Red Cross, but whether its capacity is scalable to true catastrophes and multiple disaster events, ... Now we're talking about a pandemic. Where would the Red Cross be?
If we weren't prepared, and we didn't do our part, no amount of work by FEMA could overcome the lack of preparation.
It is extremely important that a commission independent of the executive and legislative branches analyzes the Katrina disaster and the events leading up to it.
We need a panel of qualified experts that is knowledgeable and objective and has all the investigative and subpoena powers necessary.
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