Press Release
Jon Rutter
Sunday News Staff Writer
johnrutter@lnpnews.com
A Master of Disasters
MU professor, who visited tsunami sites, will lead group to Louisiana and Mississippi to study hurricane tragedy and the handling of dead.
A disaster expert who studied the impact of last winter's tsunami in Thailand will soon train his researcher's eye on Mississippi and Luisiana.
Dr. Henry W. Fischer III of Millersville University's Center for Disaster Research and Education said he expects to travel to hurricane-ravaged communities in the Deep South in late September.
As before, the project will be funded by a National Science Foundation grant. And Fischer will again coordinate teams of students and faculty from MU, Oklahoma State University and North Dakota State University.
The MU contingent will likely include three students and two faculty members.
Their work will parallel that done in Asia, where researchers helped develop better emergency strategies and documented how the bodies of the dead were handled.
While Fischer anticipates some contact with survivors, he said, the main focus will be on interviewing official responders and gauging what went wrong.
There should be much to analyze.
State, local and national leaders have been pillored for their slow response to the catastrophe.
More than 12 days after Hurricane Katrina burst through levees in New Orleans, relief workers are laboring to feed and clothe survivors, pump out the wrecked city and recover the bodies of what might be thousands of victims.
On Tuesday, concerned about natural gas leakes and toxic floodwaters, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin authorized law enforcement officers and military personnel to forcibly remove some 10,000 people who had refused to evacuate.
Sadly, Fischer said, the storm and its aftermath were all too predictable.
"Anyone in the mergency management business... has known for the last 50 years that this was going to happen some day."
Yet preparedness fell far short, and Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown was under fire last week for dragging his feet before requesting help.
Washington made a concerted effort to strengthen defenses after terrorist attacks four years ago today, Fischer said. But the storm revealed a nation still distressingly vulnerable to natural and manmade disasters, especially the possibility of simultaneous assaults on multiple urban targets.
As have other experts, Fischer lamented the consolidation of national emergency response services after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
"Many of us in the research community quietly protested making that change, putting FEMA into Homeland Security."
"Many of the people in FEMA were demoralized" by the reorganization and left or retired early, he said.
"Frankly, in my view, we are reaping the results of that."
