Disaster preparedness must be a priority in the presidential campaign

Thirty-two years ago, a tropical storm passed over a patch of superheated water and exploded into a monstrous Category 5 hurricane with winds of 174 mph.

Compact and powerful, Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida, leveling homes and leaving 65 dead. In the days that followed, our response to the disaster was a classic case of failure, with communication and coordination failing at every level of government. No one, from the White House on down, had the slightest idea what was happening. Peg Maloy, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time, put it best: “Something is wrong. No one knows where it is going wrong. I wish I knew for myself.”

The result of our government’s botched response was, as always, human suffering, and the affected communities were left to fend for themselves. The town of Homestead was a devastated landscape, littered with dead animals and the smell of human waste in the air. Dade County Emergency Management Director Kate Hale said during a televised press conference, “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?”

The bad news is that when it comes to disaster response, little has changed in the decades since that hot August morning some three decades ago. While some agencies (FEMA is a notable example) have improved their capabilities and processes, as a nation we have made no progress in preparing for major disasters.

This was clearly demonstrated 13 years later in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and, more recently, in our national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when a bumbling federal bureaucracy and its various components — from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Department of Homeland Security to FEMA — failed to take charge of the crisis. Instead, they blamed each other and dithered, as the virus spread rapidly across the country.

While it is true that the COVID-19 disaster occurred in a polarized political climate, its failures cannot be blamed on partisanship. The causes of our national failure arose from incompetence. The partisan divisions that emerged were the result of that incompetence, not its cause. Meanwhile, the absence of a cohesive national plan leaves us vulnerable.

Disasters overwhelm us, affecting us all in the same way and at the same time. They ignore political boundaries, they sow chaos, and they demand information and resources far beyond what is immediately available. Many people, even some crisis management professionals, think the challenges are too great. They believe that disaster planning is a wasted effort, an exercise in futility. They are wrong.

Planning (i.e., what needs to happen and who is required to do it) enables coordination, and with effective coordination, nothing is impossible. Only national executive leadership can craft the plan that establishes accountability across all levels of government, connects with the private sector, and deploys the resources and solutions needed to address widespread and urgent human suffering.

Now is the time for us to stop dithering and pointing fingers at each other and start retooling to meet the unknown in a complex environment. With the national nominating conventions over and the candidates locked in a nine-week sprint to Election Day, this is a crucial opportunity to raise this question. Preparing the nation for the inevitable next catastrophe — whether a natural disaster, a pandemic, or a terrorist attack — is a fundamental responsibility of the federal government. The president is responsible for this matter, and we must not let the candidates get away with it.

How many more failures will we have to endure before we get the plan we need? Voters deserve to know.

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Kelly McKinney is the associate vice president for emergency management and enterprise resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He is a former deputy commissioner of the New York City Office of Emergency Management and the author of “The Moment of Truth: The Nature of Disasters and How to Prepare for Them.”

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