From terrorist attacks to hurricanes, America has time and again witnessed devastation of horrifying proportion. Even after these disasters, we have chosen to ignore the obvious implications: we in D.C. are woefully underprepared to respond to the consequences of catastrophe.
It is comforting, then, that Mayor Adrian Fenty met last Friday with Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine and Maryland Governor-elect Martin O’Malley to discuss the preeminent issue of homeland security. Dubbed the “three amigos” by Kaine, the trio pledged to coordinate regional disaster response and jointly compete with five other high-risk zones, including New York City, for grant money from the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Washington Post.
Similar regional summits have occurred regularly since 2003. But these have made inadequate progress, and the District still has a long way to go before it will be prepared to deal with the potential fallout of a major disaster.
According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and author of the recent book Americans at Risk, coordination of response plans among the various jurisdictions of Greater Washington has been insufficient, leading to major gaps in regional emergency strategies.
For example, the type of large-scale evacuation that a major disaster would precipitate is far beyond D.C.’s capacities.
Under the current District Response Plan, the District Department of Transportation is assigned primary responsibility for evacuation procedures. The DDOT has gone to impressive lengths to ensure the highest quality reaction to worst case scenarios. But as Dr. Redlener notes, no urban center is capable of organizing such an evacuation with its own resources; it would be quickly overwhelmed by the extremely large volume of traffic exiting the region.
Certainly, the District cannot deal with these problems without outside help. Many of the problems facing urban centers like the District require the assistance of the Federal government—assistance which historically has been less than satisfactory, according to Dr. Redlener.
It is also unlikely that the hospital system would be able to cope with the number of casualties that might occur in a disaster situation. Dr. Redlener says that this would be particularly unlikely if one or more of the hospitals were damaged. As recently as November, the District’s Department of Health was concerned with a threat to hospitals in the region, making this assessment all the more distressing.
But greater regional coordination is also desperately needed in greater Washington. The region’s newly- elected chief executives reopened the opportunity for such cooperation at last Friday’s meeting. It was a great show of solidarity; hopefully these “three amigos” will not allow it to remain a mere show.
