Bennici ’07 to Address Federal Response Failure Following Hurricane Katrina Disaster

Holy Cross junior Jared Bennici has been selected by the College’s Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies as the 2005 fall semester’s Maurizio Vannicelli Washington Semester Away program award winner. He will present his thesis, "9/11, Hurricane Katrina & The Missing Link: Why the Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina Failed," on March 27 at 4 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event is free and open to the public.

The Vannicelli Prize is awarded each semester in honor of the late Holy Cross political science professor and Washington Program director, Maurizio Vannicelli, for the best research paper produced in the Washington Semester Away program. The recipient of the prize is accorded the opportunity to give a public lecture at the College on his or her thesis. In addition, the winner receives a bound copy of the thesis and is presented with a book award during Commencement exercises.

Bennici’s presentation will provide an assessment of the federal government’s failures in its immediate response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The analysis will examine the forces that contributed to the degradation of the Federal Emergency Management’s catastrophic natural disaster capabilities before, during and immediately following landfall of Hurricane Katrina.

While in Washington, Bennici interned for Senator Joseph I. Lieberman on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, assisting senior staffers and senior Committee attorneys in conducting investigations into the failed state, local, and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina. In particular, the team to which he was assigned focused on comparatively analyzing FEMA’s and DHS’s natural disaster and terrorism response protocols, contingency plans, and statutory obligations and limitations regarding the ability of the federal government to override state sovereignty in catastrophic natural disasters and major, multi-state terrorist attacks.

"I explored the doctrinal, budgetary, and cultural histories of FEMA and DHS and examined how the placement of FEMA under DHS control in March of 2003 constrained and controlled the Agency, limited its ability to exercise sovereign control over its mission, and in the end retrogressed FEMA’s capabilities because DHS overwhelmingly focused on issues directly related to terrorism at the expense of other important issues, such as catastrophic natural disasters," he said. "I also examined the speed at which life-sustaining and life-saving federal relief and aid reached the affected regions of the Gulf Coast."

Bennici says his research exposed major flaws in the federal government’s preparedness, partly because of its strong focus on terrorism.

"As September 11th sent reverberating shockwaves throughout the nation, it exposed the very real need to improve state, local, and federal terrorism-related emergency preparedness and response capabilities," he said. "However, four years after that fateful fall day, the chaos, disorder, and confusion that marked the federal government’s immediate response to Hurricane Katrina chillingly revealed that the post-September 11th shift in the federal government’s emergency management focus to a terrorism-related agenda came at the expense of catastrophic natural disaster preparedness. Washington developed a myopic focus on terrorism, a culture of counterterrorism that pervaded the mindset of many politicians, including many in Congress, the Secretary of DHS, and President Bush himself.  The development of Washington’s overwhelming focus on terrorism eroded FEMA’s mid- and late-1990s catastrophic natural disaster preparedness achievements and the Agency’s related capabilities regressed to pre-mid 1990s levels."

Bennici, from Marlborough, Conn., is a political science major with a minor in Middle Eastern studies and a peace and conflicts concentration. Bennici is on the men’s varsity crew team, volunteers at Saint Paul’s Food Pantry and as an overnight host for prospective students in the Office of Admissions at Holy Cross and contributes political op-eds to The Crusader. He plans on pursuing studies in international relations and law, with a focus on national security policy, international terrorism and crisis diplomacy.