``Frankly, we just have not in this country put the premium on our level of catastrophe planning that is necessary to be ready for those wide-scale events," Homeland Security Undersecretary George Foresman told reporters.
City and state plans for emergencies such as fires, floods, and tornadoes ``are good, they're robust," Foresman said, but plans for catastrophes ``are not going to support us as they should."
President Bush ordered the review of emergency-response plans in a visit to New Orleans on Sept. 15, weeks after Katrina ravaged the city. The review is based on a complicated scorecard for each of the 50 states, 75 major cities, and six US territories that rates plans for evacuations, medical care, sheltering of victims, public alerts, and other emergency priorities.
The tepid ratings gave fodder to state and local officials who have hammered Homeland Security for cutting their emergency-response funding. And the ratings may oversimplify security gaps that can't be measured in a one-size-fits-all formula.
``You really have to look at each state individually and how they're prepared for the emergencies that their experts anticipate," said Jeff Welsh, spokesman for Maryland's emergency management agency. ``It's a snapshot of the country as a whole, and to have an honest, realistic assessment of a single state, you have to look at that single state."
Foresman said the results highlight disparate and disconnected emergency plans in the absence of national preparedness standards. ``This is not something that is a grand surprise; it has simply put documented numbers on what we intuitively knew in the post-9/11 era," he said.
Bright spots in the analysis were 10 states with response plans that Homeland Security deemed ``sufficient," the highest rating. Those states are: Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont.
The analysis also found 18 hurricane-prone states, from Maine to Texas, appeared to be better prepared for disasters than the rest of the country.
Florida, accustomed to being whipped with hurricane winds, was the only state assessed as ready in all nine categories of catastrophe planning.
By comparison, Louisiana's plans were deemed ``insufficient" as the state continues to grapple with the devastation from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Similarly, New Orleans's plan received the lowest ranking possible .
