Katrina: Using local standards to evaluate performance

There's talk the President and Senate will be reviewing issues. However, the issue isn't what "Washington wants," but what the locals were doing.

If you do an audit, you don't use made up standards. You use local standards. Then you compare how they did, relative to what they promised to do.

This guide and this guide will show what Louisiana signed up to do.

The next step will be to contrast the above standards with the following anecdotes from Katrina:
- Personnel leaving their duty stations [so much for "protect and serve" when it really matters];
- transportation options not executed [where were the buses for evacuation?];
- back-up transportation not available for emergency services [police running out of fuel];
- water-based transportation not available in numbers needed [why not large scale storage of life rafts, dingys, or other flotation devices on barges upstream?].

Here are some sample questions for the Senate to consider relative to these local plans:

How effectively the transportation plans were implemented;

Did the plans, as originally published, get executed as planned, or were they ignored;

How did the internal hiring, training, and promotion plans [based on potential] compare with the actual results of the personnel?

What changes are needed in the planning and promotion to ensure the most effective personnel, plans, and resources needed in times of an emergency are available?

Katrina