In Flood-Zone Planning, Governments Make Predictable Mistakes, Scholars Say

By DAVID GLENN

"When assessing the risk of severe flooding, government agencies tend to commit a predictable series of errors, two scholars said here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Governments, corporations, and private households all tend to lapse into a false sense of security over time, the scholars said. And those errors can be reinforced, they continued, as local governments become dependent upon property-tax revenue from housing in flood-prone zones.

Michael A. Deegan, a Ph.D. candidate in public administration and policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has begun to develop a "system dynamics" model of flood planning. He has created computer simulations of government decision making over a 30-year period, and he will soon refine the model by interviewing dozens of policy makers in North Carolina and Louisiana.

Mr. Deegan cautioned that many elements of his new model do not apply to longstanding, densely settled cities like New Orleans. His primary areas of interest are flood-prone river and coastal areas where not many people live, but where there is pressure for new development.

"We're looking for points of leverage in the system," Mr. Deegan said in an interview on Sunday. A system-dynamics model, he said, "can identify policies that might seem effective in the short run, but in the long run actually die out. Or, on the other hand, we can identify policies that might not seem to have any immediate payoff, but have long-term benefits."

Mr. Deegan has developed his model with the help of Thomas A. Birkland, an associate professor of public administration and policy at Albany, who is the author of After Disaster: Agenda Setting, Public Policy, and Focusing Events (Georgetown University Press, 1997).

It is too early to determine exactly why the initial government response to Hurricane Katrina went so badly, Mr. Birkland said in an interview on Sunday. "We don't know yet whether or not things were slow because the plan was funky, or because people were too focused on homeland security, or because two-thirds of the National Guard is in Iraq," he said. "It's just much too soon to say."

One thing that is clear, Mr. Birkland said, is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "really did say that they needed more resources to protect New Orleans from a flood, and that resource wasn't provided to them."

Mr. Birkland said that if he were allowed to roam the halls of the Department of Homeland Security a month from now, he would try to learn how its officials feel about the implementation of the recently established federal disaster-management plans.

"I would want to listen to water-cooler conversations," Mr. Birkland said, "especially about how they react to the claims in the news media that they've been paying too much attention to terrorism and not enough attention to national disasters."

Referring to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Birkland said, "I'd like to watch Chertoff and his aides discuss what to do. In my dream world, I'd like to film them and show that film to James Lee Witt, the former FEMA director, and ask him, 'OK, now how do you think they're handling this? Do you think you would have handled this differently?'"

Mr. Birkland said that he would also like to study the behavior of lawmakers in Congress and the Louisiana Legislature as they try to make sense of the disaster. It is clear, he said, that many policy makers simply failed to comprehend that many people would not be able to leave New Orleans on their own.

"FEMA table-topped this more than once -- they ran scenarios for a New Orleans flood," Mr. Birkland said. "And it's been reported in the news this week that one official kept asking, 'What do we do about the poor people? What do we do about the people who can't evacuate themselves?' And that would be a conversation stopper. Not a word. Not a peep. Now, this guy might be self-serving, he might have his own agenda -- but I've been in meetings like that myself, when I used to work for a transportation agency."

Mr. Deegan's research has been financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation. His paper, "Extreme Event Policy Design: A Conceptual Model to Analyze Policies and the Policy Process for Natural Hazards," is available on the university's Web site."