Is Kansas City Ready for Its 'Katrina'?
by David Smale
The images from Hurricane Katrina are imbedded in our minds. Most of New Orleans—a city roughly the size of Kansas City—sat underwater. People climbed to their roofs to catch rides with boats or helicopters. The Superdome that was used for an evacuation shelter suffered damage and it had to be evacuated. There was near total devastation in the city.
Then it really got bad. There seemed to be little planning for dealing with a disaster that had been predicted for decades. Government officials at all levels pointed fingers at everyone else, while their citizens sat— or floated—in dangerous, stagnant water, waiting for help and direction.
“I think Katrina was a failure of the system,” said D.A. Christian, Director of Kansas City’s Emergency Operations System. “The emergency management system did not function the way it was planned to go. The information I take from it is that you need to have a vigorous and well-understood system. You would think they would have had that in New Orleans, being as likely a target as they were.
“It was a failure at all levels. The mayor of New Orleans and the other officials there should have had the forethought to place food, medicine and law enforcement in the Superdome and other locations where they’re asking people to evacuate to, under the assumption that levees could fail. Levees tend not to get blown out by rising water. They tend to weaken by saturation, then they turn to mush. It often happens a day or two later. That’s not news to me, so it shouldn’t have been news to them.”
Christian went on to highlight other problems, from buses that could have been used for evacuation sitting underwater to the local and state government failing to ask for help in a timely and feasible manner.
Clearly, the entire Gulf Coast region, especially New Orleans, was not ready to handle the disaster. Which raises the question: are we?
Kansas City won’t experience a hurricane that places most of the city underwater. We have 360 degrees of options for evacuation if we did face a wide-scale disaster. But a crisis is coming. It’s only a matter of time. Most experts agree that the metropolitan area is ready to handle whatever comes our way.
“Are we prepared? Yes. Can we always be more prepared? Of course,” Christian said. “It’s a continuum.”
“I truly believe we’re better today than we were yesterday,” said Erin Lynch, Emergency Services Director for the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), which covers Leavenworth, Wyandotte and Johnson counties in Kansas and Platte, Clay, Cass, Jackson and Ray counties in Missouri. “And we’ll be more ready tomorrow.”
To the west, the Topeka area seems to be prepared as well. Gary Middleton, Director of Shawnee County Emergency Management, said, “I would say that, based on the resources we have available to us, we’re quite well prepared. We’ve had two opportunities to demonstrate that lately.
“We prepared a shelter for up to 1,500 people who would have been evacuated from Hurricane Katrina. That never happened, but we were prepared. It was an excellent exercise for us, because it allowed us to test our ability to do mass care. Then, we also had the floods in northeast Kansas in October. In between, we’ve had two exercises. We are as prepared as we can be.”