Katrina’s triple failure: technical, ethical, political

The experience of disaster management around the world has three lessons for the United States, says Michel Thieren.

Political storms follow the management of natural disasters with the inevitability of flash floods after a hurricane. The “who to blame” question makes the most noise in a disaster’s aftermath, but immediate, finger-pointing reactions often identify the wrong culprits. To make accurate judgments about what went wrong is a matter of basic accountability to the victims, and this makes it even more important to pose two other questions: “what to blame, and what for”.