Seeking to avoid another Katrina

Some at Penn are taking the University's response to Hurricane Katrina beyond charity work.

The University of Pennsylvania Press released a book yesterday of compiled articles on how the nation could more effectively respond to disasters like Katrina in the future.

The book, entitled On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina -- is the result of months of work by Penn professors. It examines the balance between government and private responsibility in dealing with disasters.

Relief organizations and the federal government were criticized after Katrina in the belief that cumbersome responses to the emergency had made a bad situation worse.

Provost Ron Daniels spearheaded the effort by hosting a conference last month in Washington, at which professors from Penn and other universities, as well as government and insurance industry officials, discussed issues including risk management and social responsibility.

The book is based on lectures and research presented at the conference, which drew hundreds of academics from around the nation.

And Daniels hopes to maintain the momentum from that event.

A second conference, Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster, has already been scheduled to take place at Penn Feb. 2 and 3. It will focus on topics that were only briefly discussed in the first, such as how to rebuild New Orleans.

"We were very concerned with challenges faced by the local, state and federal governments in not only dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, but in trying to avoid Katrina-like disasters in the future," said Howard Kunreuther, co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center in the Wharton School and a co-editor of the book.

But although the conference was intended to help guide public policy, most attendees were from the insurance industry, according to bioengineering professor and conference speaker Kenneth Foster.

He said that this might mean the conferences will have little influence on public policy, although book co-editor Donald Kettl, director of Penn's Fels Institute of Government, said he hoped to get a copy of the book to every member of Congress.

But Wharton professor Robert Meyer -- who also helps run Wharton's Risk Management Center and was a conference speaker -- thought the organizers achieved their goals.

"Experts at the conference were academic. Their job is to inform policy, not set it," he said. The purpose of the book "is to inform and spark debate, rather than provide a specific set of suggestions."

Conference organizers are optimistic that the book will be influential, citing its interdisciplinary approach to solving societal problems.

"We really have a collection of people who are looking at this issue from a variety of perspectives," Kunreuther said.

Kettl added that it is important for Penn professors to be studying the questions raised by Katrina's destruction.

"It's unacceptable that people died because institutions didn't respond quickly enough," he said.

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