California Burning
22 January 2008
Federal, state and local authorities strove to respond more proactively to the California wildfires than they did to Hurricane Katrina.
FEMA abandoned its previous policy of ‘sequential failure’, in which federal intervention is delayed until a disaster overwhelms state and local authorities, and responded as quickly as possible.
Differences in the scale of the disaster, the resources available to the local communities and other factors make comparisons with Katrina inappropriate.