Hurricane’s Lesson: Prepare to Go It Alone : Response to Andrew shows aid may be slow in coming

What lessons can earthquake-leery Californians learn from the slow federal response to Hurricane Andrew in South Florida?

The killer winds--the most destructive hurricane of this century--demolished the homes of as many as 250,000 families, polluted drinking water, cut off electricity and made it difficult if not impossible to get cash, groceries or any other assistance.

As desperate and homeless Floridians struggle to find food and shelter, many are asking impatiently: Where was the federal government?

President Bush bolstered the federal response on Thursday. He mobilized thousands of federal troops to provide food and other assistance amid questions of what Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles specifically requested and precisely when he made that request. Without getting into the blame game, Californians need to remember one stunning fact: Hurricane Andrew struck before dawn on Monday; the federal troops arrived in South Florida on Friday.

There is a lesson in that four-day delay. Californians have been warned before to be prepared to depend on themselves for at least four days in the event of a major earthquake. Store enough water, food, medicine, clothing, fuel, flashlights, bedding, tents and other supplies to make do without help from anyone. Prepare as well to become Good Samaritans to any neighbors who don’t prepare.

Earthquakes strike without notice. That unpredictability requires, as California officials know, plenty of planning and preparation. Hurricanes, however, give plenty of notice. Meteorologists can predict generally when and where a hurricane will make landfall. More sophisticated equipment would improve the accuracy of those predictions and help authorities improve their preparation.

The federal response to Hurricane Andrew was complicated by the magnitude of the destruction. Hundreds of thousands of Floridians needed help fast. The relief efforts were also complicated by the location of destruction: the dense inland communities instead of the evacuated coastal areas as predicted.

Those complications further increased the strain on an already overtaxed and understaffed Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, the lead federal agency in disaster response, has been forced this year to respond to repeated disasters, both natural like the Chicago floods and man-made like the Los Angeles riots. These multiple disasters severely strained the resources of the small relief agency and could account for the sometimes tardy assistance.

The weaknesses in FEMA’s operations are not new. Congressional auditors found excessive delays in providing housing assistance to low-income victims of the Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area in 1989. Those criticisms, by the General Accounting Office, prompted FEMA to speed up its response.

Homeless Floridians can count on FEMA to provide government grants and low-interest loans within 7 to 10 days. That pace is admirably quick when compared to how long it takes to get a mortgage loan, for example. But, a week or two in a shelter or tripled up with relatives can seem like a lifetime to parents struggling with hungry children. Can’t the assistance arrive any faster?

Federal disaster officials have their hands full now. But there are lots of questions left to be answered, so Gov. Pete Wilson should quickly appoint a task force of state disaster officials to study the Florida response to see what California can learn.