“In 2006, Congress called the response to Katrina ‘a failure of government, a failure of initiative, a failure

of leadership’…The American system of emergency management is based on the premise that all

disasters are local.”(161)

These two chapters cover two massive disasters: the 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami and

Hurricane Katrina. Do you think that disasters are fundamentally local problems (as Grover Cleveland

noted in response to the 1927 floods), or are disasters now global in reach? Support your opinion with

evidence from the reading.