Out of the ashes: another failure? That government failed the rescue, recover and cleanup workers of Sept. 11 is doubtless. Whether all levels of government can learn from their mistakes before the next catastrophe is the real "if."

Risk & Insurance, Nov, 2007 by Peter Rousmaniere

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Workers cannot be expected to bear the brunt of a local politician's hesitancy to call a hazard for what it is. Nor should they endure the misery of a workers' compensation system that is designed to frustrate the resolution of claims.

Future disease exposures will likely create hazardous environments for rescue and recovery. Healthcare centers may likely serve as transmission points for spread of a flu pandemic. Subways in which terrorists release deadly chemicals may become death chambers until cleaned.

The White House and U.S. Congress should convene a national commission to correct serious flaws in the protection of disaster rescue and recovery workers. Reforms in crisis management and in workers'compensation systems are desperately called for.

These reforms must include the legal authority of the federal government to assume direct control over workers' compensation administration.

Federal legislation is required to adjust federal participation in disasters to embrace these reforms. This means amending the Stafford Act of 1974, the principal guide to federal disaster assistance.

Reformed policies will do more than protect workers. They will diminish the need to create special mechanisms to deliver healthcare to workers. And they will reduce the urge for mass-tort and class-action litigation.

Liability suits were inevitable given the safety record of ground zero. How much they have been fueled by the inadequacies of New York's workers' compensation system to deliver timely benefits is difficult to assess.

The nation's national disaster response program has improved since Sept. 11. But reforms have not gone far enough to prevent safety and medical monitoring failures at ground zero, which is discussed further below. The federal government has already demonstrated the failure of state workers' compensation systems by creating a program to replace them for a group of 600,000 workers. (See "Consider the Possibilities".)

The legislative effort behind the enactment of federal regulation of work safety--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created in 1970--uncovered numerous criticisms of state workers' compensation systems, some of which had not been significantly improved since the 1920s.

A national commission needs to look simultaneously at worker safety and workers' compensation for these workers. This will set it apart from the Nixon-era National Commission on State Workmen's Compensation Laws, which did not address worker safety, and many national task forces on worker safety, which rarely address workers' compensation.

The federal government will pay for the great majority of rescue and recovery costs for future disasters of national significance.

In "When All Else Fails," a study of risk management in America by Harvard Business School professor David Moss, a proposal is made that the party in the best position to solve a risk problem should be the party with the most financial incentive to solve it.

If Washington is paying, it needs to use the power of the purse.

INCIDENT COMMAND

The federal government needs to make its local disaster assistance contingent on local governments agreeing in the earliest feasible hour to allow incident command to escalate upward if warranted to the federal emergency management level. In an event of national significance, local and state governments should be required to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency should not take over.

FEMA has had crisis management policies in place for years. Since Sept. 11, the federal government has introduced two policies that strengthen these policies. One is the National Incident Management System, which went into effect in 2003. NIMS is a blueprint for unified incident command, logistics and other essential elements of managing crisis. The federal government today requires state and local governments to adhere to NIMS, even for local crises, as a condition for receiving disaster planning funds.

The Bush administration also issued a National Response Plan in 2004. The NRP is designed to improve the coordination of disaster intervention by multiple federal agencies.

A lynchpin to both policies is the concept of coordinating bureaucracies at all levels of government under rapidly changing crisis conditions.

Expectations at ground zero moved within days from rescue, demanding local public safety leadership, to recovery, for which other resources were required and made available. They came with the promise of federal financial support.

The administration of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani fought successfully to retain control. The mayor assigned it to his Department of Design and Construction, which had no experience in dealing with a major hazardous site. Perhaps more ominous, it was not experienced in managing major crises of initially unforeseeable dimensions.

Federal personnel, on the other hand, took control of the Fresh Kills disposal site on Staten Island and the Pentagon site in the capital. There is no evidence of major safety lapses at these sites. Admittedly, ground zero was more charged with grief, anger and--initially--desperation to locate survivors. The Giuliani administration was never able to establish an effective safety regime at the site with respect to disease risk.