Disaster

“Disaster is likely the best in-depth contemporary analysis we are going to get—and it does that job quite admirably. Given that future catastrophes are inevitable, this book is a call to arms to demand a far more competent federal emergency response than Washington has been willing to provide.”—Stephen Flynn, The Washington Post

"A clear, coherent, weirdly compelling narrative . . . Cooper and Block have provided a considerable public service in tracing the institutional failures of the Department of Homeland Security."—Susan Larson, The Times Picayune (New Orleans)

"The authors of this work explore the unusual division of responsibilities for maintaining New Orleans' levees, finding that the approach contributed to the lack of adequate levee protection for the city. The authors also examine the DHS-administered National Response Plan . . . Katrina provided two very important lessons for security professionals engaged in business continuity or crisis management planning. First, make sure your decision makers can receive information directly from the field with as little filtering as possible. Second, make sure you can trust your partners—public or private—to deliver what they have promised in a crisis . . . Those lessons, and others, make this well-written book a valuable resource for security officials in all sectors. The authors clearly demonstrate why U.S. government planning and response to Katrina was a disaster in itself."—Lloyd F. Reese, Security Management

"The authors' exhaustively researched account slogs through the intricacies of this bureaucratic nightmare and goes beyond the usual pillorying of FEMA head Michael Brown to criticize higher officials in the White House and, especially, DHS. Cooper and Block manage to thread a readable, coherent story through the morass of detail and acronyms, with disquieting implications about the government's ability to cope with catastrophe."—Publishers Weekly