RE: [xml-dev] Responding to Katrina (offtopic even if XML is part of the soluti on)

["Nathan Young \(natyoung\)" <natyoung@cisco.com>]

I wonder if there were lessons from the tsunami that could have applied
to Katrina's aftermath?

What both have in common (and what I think a lot of future disasters
will also have in common) is that the number of people physically killed
by the disaster is dwarfed by the number that are killed in the
aftermath as a result of infrastructure destroyed.  Drinking water and
basic medical supplies seem to be the choke points here.  If people can
survive for a week without needing infrastructure support then there's a
very good chance they can survive until the infrastructure is adequately
repaired to take over for them again.

Information is arguably the next on the list.  If you know where to go,
where not to go, and how long you may have to wait you can make informed
decisions that optimize for your own survival.

Cutting down on the amount of urgently needed rescue work (and
decentralizing what's left??) also frees up resources for restoration of
basic infrastructure.

------------>Nathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:len.bullard@intergraph.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 1:06 PM
To: Nathan Young (natyoung)
Cc: XML Developers List
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Responding to Katrina (offtopic even if XML is
part of the soluti on)

BTW: while we are doing this American issues thread, keep 
in mind that just a very short time ago, India was struck 
by floods of equal and massive scale.  What we learn here 
surely can be applied elsewhere, not the politics, but the 
technical mitigations.  That is what I dispute: technology 
can be very helpful.  It costs money.  What can we do to 
improve that and reduce costs?

The known risk areas are prioritized and have been.  The New 
Orleans levees are on that list.  However, a MUCH bigger area 
than New Orleans was affected.  Bruce may be a security expert 
but he isn't a public safety expert and that is what you 
really want to study to determine how this got out of hand.
I agree that post 9/11 priorities got out of whack and I am 
in a position to know that.
 
I suspect when it is studied hard, the final conclusion 
will be that even with the best performance possible, this 
was of such magnitude that even adequate preparation would 
have fallen short.  

On the other hand... the comment that caught my eye was 

"With respect to security and defense: initial hurricane responders fell
prey to the same problem that impeded 9/11 rescue efforts: failure of
their
digital communication systems. Police and fire departments today rely
heavily on trunked radios. Each mobile radio uses a low-power signal to
communicate with a network of repeaters, which in turn send traffic
city-wide via a central computer-controlled station. Trunked radios make
extremely efficient use of scarce radio spectrum, but when the repeaters
fail (as in New York) or the central station is flooded (as in New
Orleans),
these critical first responders lose all communication. A military-style
radio system, or even a 20-year-old old-fashioned analog radio, would
serve
emergency officials far better in these worst-case situations. They
should
be ashamed to not carry such radios as backup.

Posted by: Daniel Feldman at September 6, 2005 04:53 PM"

That is something that can be fixed but it will cost.  Note that 
I mention this one on my blog:  mobile responders are the edge 
of the network where the work gets done.  It is critically 
important to have standards for these systems so that when 
central dispatch is overwhelmed, the failover to other regional systems 
can interoperate with them.  We can fix this.

Repeating:  there are issues here that members of the list and 
our technologies can improve.   No one here can fix the political 
problems of the US because they are rooted in a culture 
war that isn't useful, productive, or moral:  it's the politics 
of distraction.  We let our entire country become what was once 
attributed to 1960's era Alabama.  We made stupidity chic.

len (native alabamian)


From: Nathan Young (natyoung) [mailto:natyoung@cisco.com]

I remember the national geographic article as well.  I thought about it
when I heard Katrina was heading towards New Orleans.  In retrospect not
paying more attention to the levies was a horrible mistake, just like
not paying more attention to the fact that airplanes filled with fuel
can be used as bombs when crashed into tall buildings.

How many known areas of risk are out there right now?  I'm willing to
bet there are way to many to fix given the amount of money we have (or
could have even if we re-prioritzed defense w/re disaster preparedness).

People hate to ask optimization questions where loss of life is one of
the variables in the equation.  But in the absence of some kind of
optimization of how we spend disaster preparednes dollars, we're left
not knowing if we made the right decisions.  

+-------------+--------------------+
| Money spent | disaster happened  |
+-------------+--------------------+
|     X       |          X         |
|             |          X         |
|     X       |                    |
+-------------+--------------------+

The first row represents spending everyone can feel good about.  The
second row looks bad in retrospect (especially to people directly
effected).  The third row is in danger of looking like wasted money.

Big money gets spent on addressing big single points of failure.  It may
be that looking back at what actually killed people in Louisiana, there
are some quick wins, especially with small individual and distributed
efforts.

Bruce Scheier often talks about how to spend on security, when there's
always multiple points of failure and never truly enough money to go
around.  His blog article on Katrina is short and mainly makes the point
that money spent on disaster response benefits no matter what causes the
disaster.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/security_lesson.html