It’s good to see some alacrity in North America:

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 7 (Reuters) – A Canadian search-and-rescue team reached a flooded New Orleans suburb to help save trapped residents five days before the U.S. military, a Louisiana state senator said on Wednesday.

The story continued:

The Canadians beat both the Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. disaster response department, to St. Bernard Parish east of New Orleans, where flood waters are still 8 feet (2.4 metres) deep in places, Sen. Walter Boasso said.
— Canadians beat U.S. Army to New Orleans suburb
08 Sep 2005 05:08:07 GMT
Source: Reuters

One has to wonder why with all the resources spent on fast response teams in Iraq that some resources could not have been spent on fast response FEMA and National Guard teams. Sure, with a disaster of this scale it’s hard to scale up to handle the whole thing. But couldn’t some come early and more later? (A few did: the Coast Guard was there right away.)

Maybe the error was in depending on a top-down command structure instead of having many smaller response teams. That would also seem to have scaling problems. How do you lash together enough small efforts to deal with a disaster of this scale?

These questions are not unrelated to Internet security or insurance. Insurers deal with catastrophes through levels of financial instruments: insurance policies, backed by reinsurance, backed by retrocessional insurance, backed by catastrophe bonds. Internet security is best organized in layers, from per-host security to firewalls to diversification of paths, plus soon financial risk transfer instruments such as the above.

What’s the equivalent security in layered depth of firewalls, monitoring, insurance, and cat bonds for prevention and rescue for a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina?

-jsq

PS: I hope the Reuters article was misinformed when they mentioned the U.S. Army in the story. One hopes Posse Comitatus prevents the Army from intervening in such a case as first responders. We have Coast Guard and FEMA and National Guard and others for that.