I’ve been going back and forth with this idea ever since we did our group blog posts on specific hurricanes, and to be honest, I still don’t have a solid answer. We’ve seen–like in When the Levees Broke and in our current events–how the U.S. government has not prioritized relief efforts towards the victims of hurricanes in lower-class or “other” areas such as New Orleans or Puerto Rico. In our post here, my group analyzed how the Trump administration failed to respond to the victims of Puerto Rico in a timely and adequate manner. This is probably because Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States and not a state, so there wasn’t a lot of priority in Trump’s opinion.
For the purposes of this blog post, I am mainly analyzing the responses by our past and current presidents in disaster scenarios. This is because they are usually the ones with the direct blame by citizens since they are the figureheads of our country’s government. So upon reflection on Trump’s lack of efforts combined with the lack of aid George Bush’s administration gave to New Orleans post-Katrina–as seen in When the Levees Broke–I began to think about the concept of an “adequate disaster response.”
I’m sure that we can all agree that both of these latter responses were not “adequate.” Upon further thinking, however, what really constitutes as an “adequate” response of a government in a crisis situation? Is there a situation in which government officials can incur little to no criticism from the public? Further, is there a situation where almost, if not everyone affected by the disaster is accounted for and taken care of in a timely manner? It’s impossible to define an “adequate response” because what would one consider “timely?” Who would be defined as “everyone affected by the storm?” This is the reason why this post is so long-winded and why I’ve been putting it off until one of my final posts.
Continue reading “Is There Such a Thing as an Adequate Response to a Disaster Scenario?”
