14 Quotes by Kathleen Tierney

The plan was simply to get some people out and the rest to the Superdome, ... A network of shelters was never part of the plan, even though it was recognized that the city is a bowl and would be filled with water, that there would be no electricity.

More than 80 percent of the housing was destroyed. It's an island; there was nowhere to go. They didn't know when help was going to come. Law enforcement was rendered ineffective. They didn't know when they'd see another meal.

If we weren't prepared, and we didn't do our part, no amount of work by FEMA could overcome the lack of preparation.

Organizational improvisation ... Research on jazz musicians shows that people don't just pull stuff out of the air when they're improvising. These are people with an extremely wide knowledge of musical genres. They have always practiced and practiced and practiced. Similarly, improvising involves a deep understanding of the resources you have at hand in your community.

It is extremely important that a commission independent of the executive and legislative branches analyzes the Katrina disaster and the events leading up to it.

We need a panel of qualified experts that is knowledgeable and objective and has all the investigative and subpoena powers necessary,

The question is not whether we need something like the Red Cross, but whether its capacity is scalable to true catastrophes and multiple disaster events, ... Now we're talking about a pandemic. Where would the Red Cross be?

We've been on this trajectory for about 15 years. We're seeing increasingly bigger disasters and increasingly higher losses. Now just about any place a hurricane is going to come in, it's going to hit a developed area. This is the way it's going to be from now on.

There are a lot more people on the ground. Boots on the ground, yes. Effectiveness of what's going on? We're not sure. New Orleans is still deeply in a state of emergency. I don't think we're anywhere near in a state of recovery.