The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article by David Glennn on Sociology and Hurricane Katrina Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen?
The article discusses what disaster sociology has to say about the disaster in New Orleans. The article makes a number of good points about panic, command and control, and managing uncertainty.
The article starts up with a discussion of the panic myth:
One of the central tenets of disaster sociology is that most communities can, to a large degree, spontaneously heal themselves. People affected by disaster obviously often need resources from the outside world — food, water, shelter. But that does not mean that disaster victims also need outside direction and coordination, most scholars in the field say.
A prime example of spontaneous cooperation was the extraordinarily successful evacuation of Lower Manhattan during the September 11 attacks. James M. Kendra, an assistant professor of emergency administration and planning at the University of North Texas, estimates that nearly half a million people fled Manhattan on boats — and he emphasizes that the waterborne evacuation was a self-organized volunteer process that could probably never have been planned on a government official’s clipboard.
“Various kinds of private companies, dinner-cruise boats, people with their own personal watercraft, the Coast Guard, the harbor pilots — in very short order, they managed to organize this evacuation,” Mr. Kendra said.
The evacuation in New Orleans, of course, was not so smooth. Disaster sociologists say that they are eager to determine how much chaos and looting actually occurred there, and how much was conjured through rumor and news-media exaggeration.
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