What a week. It’s hard to imagine how it must feel when you’re losing everything you owned except the shirt that you wear. I’ll leave that kind of commentary to the thousands of other bloggers, and focus on two other points related to technology and communication.

• Lawlessness Not Anticipated: No kidding. Watching the 24-7 news coverage on TV, it’s amazing that apparently few officials thought it necessary to have sufficient boots on the ground come Monday evening, before frustrated citizens took to the streets and started acting out, inflicting violence on everyone in sight, including rescue workers doing their heroic work. If Iraq serves as an example, the US government should have known that you need to have security personnel in place as soon as the hurrican has passed by. Here’s an AP story along the same lines:
  

  The head of the federal disaster relief agency said Friday it’s “heartbreaking and very, very frustrating” to witness the virtual anarchy in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and defended the Bush administration’s response.

  Interviewed on several network morning news shows, Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, blamed emergency assistance delivery problems on “the total lack of communications, the inability to hear and have good intelligence on the ground about what was actually occurring there.”

  Brown appeared the morning after the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, charged that administration officials “don’t have a clue” about what’s going on in the devastated city that long has been among the nation’s premier tourist attractions. (…)

  But Brown also acknowledged that little in the government’s preparedness plan took into account the likelihood of lawlessness in such dire straits.

  Just like in Iraq, I might add. Read the full AP article…

• Collapsing Communication, Collapsing Society: Especially after the events of September 11, I would think that the folks at FEMA would have updated their plans to foresee a disaster scenario like the one happening right now in New Orleans: no electricity for weeks on end, and no functioning cell phone towers. As it is amply clear from the news coverage, officials and citizens alike have a hard time figuring out what’s going on — ahh, the marvels of modern technology - that is, 21st century technology. Here’s an AP story along the same lines:
  

  When the phones don’t work, improvise. That’s what emergency responders and civilians were forced to do in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which trashed the telephone system on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi.

  Police in New Orleans, their main communications system knocked out, have been taking turns talking on a single radio channel with their walkie talkies. The Mississippi National Guard even resorted to ancient battlefield tactics, sending runners back and forth among commanders with information. (…)

  Though government officials have never before had to contemplate a communciations breakdown of this magnitude, it was not immediately clear — with $8.6 billion in federal money handed out to states since September 11 for emergency preparedness — why more satellite communciations systems were not in place. Read full AP article…

Common to both stories: Without means of communication for the broad population - cell phones and Internet access - our “technologically advanced” society is quickly returned to the ranks of a developing nation, with all its ugly side effects.