Global Surveillance Capabilities:

This session talked about the different monitoring and surveillance capabilities for natural disasters, etc.

We went over the different disasters that our world has faced during this century as well as potential solutions to such disasters.

The interesting thing is this: In many of these situations, it seems like the response to such disasters in some ways caused even more harm than the disasters themselves!

For example, take Hurricane Katrina: Yes, the hurricane itself devastated the city of New Orleans. The government response, however, seemed to make it worse! First of all, people were not properly evacuated. Secondly, those who were evacuated often suffered from extreme hunger and thirst due to lack of food/water supplies (which should have properly been distributed by the government).

To further this criticism, many government officials, including those from FEMA, had promised to provide transportation for all citizens who needed to evacuate within 48 hours. Yet, many people were still forced to find their own transportation.

My favorite government excuse is this: Many people criticized the government, saying that the emergency relief response was too slow. One of the things that the U.S. Congress said in response was that there weren’t enough National Guard members in the New Orleans area due to being on active duty in Iraq. They were on duty in Iraq! It is ironic to me that these troops were in Iraq fighting an utterly useless war while there was a major hurricane going on in the U.S. and thus a major need for them to be on U.S. soil.

So my question or dilemma is this. We can say that we are creating fancy detection technologies. We can advertise the need for good epidemiology and surveillance systems. Indeed, this class lecture was great in identifying promising new technologies in the future. Yet, this seems completely useless without the government having the political will and compassion to address such situations. The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world and has all the tools available to ensure a safe, smooth response to any disaster that occurs on this soil. Yet, laziness on part of the government made the situation with Katrina so much worse.

A key part of developing sound surveillance and monitoring systems to detect potential disasters is encouraging governments to prioritize such a need.
Basically, in the case of the U.S., we need to stop spending so much money on a useless war and invest the money spent on the Iraq war in protecting our citizens. Without this move, I fear we will face another Hurricane Katrina type disaster very soon.