A draft of the city of Los Angeles’ pandemic after action report that was “perhaps” suppressed has made it to the light of day. The report was done by an outside consultant. You can read the L.A. Times article here: “Communication problems hindered L.A.’s emergency COVID-19 response, report finds.”
Reading the article, I’d call it a failure of leadership and direction and control. This smacks of politicians thinking that “this is too important to leave it to the professionals” and setting up a shadow response in the mayor’s office.
This part of the article was very interesting: “While the EMD was tasked with leading the pandemic response, Garcetti also took a lead role, which was within his rights, but not anticipated by the EMD.
“‘When the mayor and his office assumed that role for the COVID-19 pandemic, not surprisingly, the emergency operation was uncoordinated and inefficient,’ the report found. ‘One could not have expected the mayor’s office staff to understand how to integrate into the city’s emergency operations since they had never been exposed to that role; especially when those experienced in the city’s emergency operations did not foresee that possibility prior to the pandemic nor properly react to it when it was playing out,’ the report found.”
Let me summarize this for you. The mayor and his office were waaay to busy before the pandemic to concern themselves with what their role would be in a disaster. Thus, they didn’t understand what their role was, so they stepped in and tried to coordinate their own response to the pandemic, ignoring what was going on down at the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
California is way overdue for an earthquake. I hope they get it all straightened out before the mayor starts directing search and rescue teams from his office.
