From New Orleans to Port-au-Prince

National Journal's James Kitfield (a frequent GovExec contributor) scored an interview with Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen about the recovery efforts in Haiti, which he was kind enough to share with us. The comparisons and contrasts with Katrina recovery are fascinating. Some key points here, but really do check the whole thing out:

NJ: Do you see similarities to the challenges presented by the Haitian disaster response?

Allen: I see similarities as well as significant differences. Haiti was orders of magnitude bigger, with over 100,000 casualties versus roughly 3,000 during Katrina. On the other hand, the displaced population from each disaster was roughly 1.5 million. Another similarity is the problem that, once those people were displaced, they really didn't have anything to go back to. In Haiti, of course, there was much less of an ability to absorb that population elsewhere.

NJ: Do you see similarities in the command-and-control challenges?

Allen: Yes. From the very start, everything the U.S. government did had to be in support of the leaders of a sovereign Haiti. The U.S. official directly responsible for supporting the government of Haiti is Ambassador Ken Merten, as the chief of the U.S. mission there. Since ambassadors aren't necessarily experts in disaster response, resources flowed in under the auspices of USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development]. USAID has the statutory authorities for coordinating help to foreign countries, and it immediately dispatched a senior leader to coordinate civilian U.S. support on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

Because of the scope of the disaster, the response also required a lot of capabilities that only reside in the U.S. military, to include command-and-control systems, communications, logistics, security and transport. So a Joint Task Force Haiti was established, led by the deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, and including components of all the armed forces, maritime, land and air. So you very quickly had a command structure take shape, led on the ground by Ambassador Merten as U.S. chief of mission, who was supported on the civilian side by USAID and on the military side by Joint Task Force Haiti, both of which are also on the ground in Port-au-Prince.