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326Summary of case studiesmomentum prior to landfall, a category 3 storm stillinundated New Orleans and much of the surroundingregion. Within five hours of landfall, several sections of thelevee system in New Orleans were breached and 80 per centof the city was under water. Residents unable to leave thecity prior to Katrina’s landfall were either stranded in theirresidences, in temporary shelters, or died. Katrina’sestimated death toll in the Gulf Coast region was approximately1100 people and hundreds of thousands weredisplaced throughout the country.Nine months prior to the hurricane, in December2004, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)authored the National Response Plan (NRP) that outlined asystem of coordination between local, state and federaldisaster responses. The plan defined the roles and responsibilitiesof each key player in the event of an emergency.However, as seen through the Katrina experience, therewere major emergency preparation and coordinationfailures.Post-Katrina investigations have clearly illustratedshortcomings in implementing the NRP, mostly at the federal(rather than the state and local) level. As was discovered bythe Select Bipartisan Committee that investigated preparationfor and response to Hurricane Katrina, the federalgovernment failed to recognize the magnitude of Katrina’spotential impacts, project future needs, fully engage thepresident and respond in a proactive and timely manner. Theincorporation of the Federal Emergency ManagementAdministration (FEMA) within the DHS and the coordinationplan laid out in the NRP created an additional bureaucraticlayer separating the president further from direct contactwith FEMA and, consequently, with the individuals immediatelyinvolved with disaster management. Hence, keydecisions became the responsibility of the secretary of theDHS, rather than the director of FEMA. The following arecited by the Bipartisan Committee as key actions that theDHS implemented too late or not at all:• The designation of an incident of national significance(INS). As spelled out in the NRP, an incident of nationalsignificance is an impending event, which due to itspotential magnitude, requires coordination between thethree levels of government to mobilize and implementan effective response that will minimize the impact andhelp to save lives. As Hurricane Katrina was meteorologicallywell documented more than 50 hours prior tolandfall, and the impact of a category 3 storm in theGulf Coast region was also widely known, it should havebeen considered as an INS. By establishing this disasteras an INS, a better-organized response plan could havebeen implemented at least two days prior to landfall.• The authority to convene the Interagency IncidentManagement Group (IIMG). When an INS is declared,the IIMG, a federal-level multi-agency group, convenes.The IIMG acts as an advisory group to the Secretary ofHomeland Security and refers information to the WhiteHouse. The role of the IIMG is to provide the executivebranch of the federal government with informationpertaining to the coordination and management of adisaster, in addition to acting as a key strategic partnerproviding guidance to the secretary of homelandsecurity and to the White House. The IIMG did notconvene until Tuesday evening after landfall, clearly toolate to coordinate a federal response.• The designation of the principal federal officer. A principalfederal officer was not designated by the DHS forHurricane Katrina. This federal officer acts as the localfocal person for DHS while an INS evolves. The officer’sresponsibility is to coordinate and facilitate all managerialresponsibilities of the secretary of homelandsecurity on the ground in addition to any federalsupport/response. Furthermore, an officer is expectedto provide real-time insight into the changing events onthe ground, in order for the federal government tobetter monitor the situation. Had a principal federalofficer been in position, this officer would have beenable to keep DHS and the additional partners at thefederal level abreast of the rapidly evolving situation.• The invocation of the National Response Plan’sCatastrophic Incident Annex. The annex, which servesto shift the federal response from a reactive response toa proactive one, was not implemented. If the DHS hadimplemented the annex, the response to HurricaneKatrina would have been very different. The BipartisanCommittee further showed that the government ratherresponded in a reactive fashion that is not appropriatefor disasters of Katrina’s magnitude.The experience of implementing the NRP in response toHurricane Katrina clearly illustrates the challenges of coordinatingdisaster risk reduction activities at various levelswithin a federal system of governance. Where a nationaldisaster management system is over-ridden with multiplelevels of responsibilities and bureaucracy, preparedness andresponse efforts are at risk of being obstructed.