Case study
Harvey, Irma and Maria — 2017
Almost every lesson on this page assumes one incident at a time. 2017 did not offer that. Harvey, Irma and Maria overlapped, across a mainland state, a peninsula and two island territories, and the coordination problem was not any one of them — it was all of them competing for the same finite people, aircraft, supplies and attention.
That is the situation a jurisdiction's mutual aid assumptions are least likely to survive.
FEMA conducted an after-action review of its preparations for, immediate response to, and initial recovery operations across the three hurricanes, and published it on 12 July 2018.
It is worth being precise about what this is not: there is no FEMA after-action report for Hurricane Harvey on its own. This covers the season, and that framing is deliberate.
This entry quotes no figures from the report. Its PDF would not yield reliable text, so rather than repeat numbers from second-hand summaries, the figures are left to the reader who opens it.
The value here is in reading a federal agency's account of where its own response was strained. Read it for the questions it raises about your jurisdiction.
Published 12 July 2018. Covers FEMA's preparations for, response to, and initial recovery from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
Why it matters
A federal agency's published account of its own performance across three simultaneous catastrophic incidents.
Nothing here is paid placement. Links are chosen because they are the clearest explanation we could find, and labeled so you know who wrote them.
