Response Essay Sample on Jared's and Andreas' Post

Response to Jared's Post

America is often met with natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornados that greatly affect the livelihood of the victims (Frailing, Harper, & Serpas, 2015). Multiagency cooperation in search and rescue missions is usually vital and highly encouraged in fastening recovery processes and possibly reducing the impact of the calamities. True to this, Jared explains that Boulder County in Colorado received an excessive amount of rainfall that caused road closings and mudslides. The situation necessitated multiagency support from the local disaster management teams all the way up to FEMA (Amette & Zobel, 2016). I agree with Jared when he says that the first responders and other disaster management crew did a good job since they saved quite many lives. From the proper coordination of disaster management and rescue operations, it was clear that there was appropriate Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed to determine how teams would respond to the disaster even though they did not represent the affected jurisdiction. Great lessons were learned from a similar flood that occurred in 1976 meaning that more lives were also saved though the evaluation of the damages was in the tune of billions of dollars (Romero-Lankao & Norton, 2018).

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Response to Andreas' Post

Andreas describes the Hurricane Katrina disaster that shook the whole of New Orleans 13 years ago. I agree with my colleague that a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) should have been created before the occurrence of this major catastrophe so that authorities would be more prepared. This is important because we could all witness how the handling of Hurricane Katrina by FEMA exposed America's weaknesses in disaster management and response systems (Westwood, 2015). For instance, FEMA often gave faulty information to the public due to confusion and failed to learn from the "Hurricane Pam" drilling exercise.

Moreover, there was great communication breakdown, supply failures, indecision, and fraud (Nobo & Pfeffer, 2012). The fraud was highly unfortunate such that approximately a billion dollars worth of individual payments did not go to the right individuals. The New York Times even cited the disaster relief payments as one of the largest scams in modern history that cost taxpayers an estimated 2 billion dollars (Lipton, 2006).

References

Arnette, A. N., & Zobel, C. W. (2016). Investigation of material convergence in the September 2013 Colorado floods. Natural Hazards Review, 17(2), 05016001.doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000214

Frailing, K., Harper Jr, D. W., & Serpas, R. (2015). Changes and challenges in crime and criminal justice after a disaster. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(10), 1278-1291.doi: 10.1177/0002764215591184

Lipton, E. (2006, June 27). 'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid. Retrieved January 29, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/washington/27katrina.html

Nobo, C. C., & Pfeffer, R. D. (2012). Natural disasters and crime: Criminological lessons from Hurricane Katrina. In Climate change from a criminological perspective (pp. 173-183). Springer, New York, NY.

RomeroLankao, P., & Norton, R. (2018). Interdependencies and Risk to People and Critical Food, Energy, and Water Systems: 2013 Flood, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Earth's Future, 6(11), 1616-1629.doi: 10.1029/2018EF000984

Westwood, S. (2015, August 28). 10 years later, the extent of Katrina fraud still unknown. Retrieved January 29, 2019, from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/10-years-later-extent-of-katrina-fraud-still-unknown