The world saw anarchy and chaos unfold after Hurricane Katrina crippled the city of New Orleans.

Those who were there describe the scene as a "walk through hell."

Those who were not shook their heads in wonder at how citizens in a country as seemingly civilized as the United States could suddenly find themselves living in Third World conditions.

After the hurricane, thousands of Gulf Coast residents found themselves without the amenities we all take for granted; scavenging for food and water, and robbing and stealing from one another to survive.

This is the nightmare police officers in the areas hardest hit found themselves in, and it was in the wake of this catastrophe that the thin blue line began to unravel.

Soon the media flooded the world with reports of looting and violence, officers abandoning their posts, and officers committing suicide. Monday-morning quarterbacking played out on the news each day, but could these events have been prevented? What can agencies really do to prepare for a natural disaster of such magnitude?

"This was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck; you cannot fully prepare for a storm like that," says John Molenda, president of Safety Solutions Inc., a Boynton Beach, Florida, firm that specializes in emergency response training and consulting.

At the same time, Molenda, who responded to the Mississippi area in the wake of the disaster, stresses there are things that law enforcement agencies can do to minimize the problems they encounter following such an emergency.

"You need the basics down," he emphasizes. "You have to cover the ground bases so when everything is wiped out, and you have to start over from zero, the foundation is already built."

Take care of your own
Law enforcement officers have a tall order to fill; they are expected to enter the danger zone as everyone else is exiting. They must leave their families behind and tend to the business of saving lives and maintaining law and order.

In New Orleans many officers face a special tribunal for abandoning their posts during Hurricane Katrina and the storm's chaotic aftermath. A witch hunt has ensued to sort out the outright deserters from those with legitimate reasons for failing to answer the call of duty. In all, 240 New Orleans officers were reportedly absent without permission.

Just as every police department expects a certain number of employees to call in sick on any given day and plans accordingly, Molenda says an agency should also construct strategies for dealing with fewer officers than expected after a major disaster.

"You'll have people who will call in sick. You'll have those who were affected by the storm," he says. "Officers near retirement may decide they are going to retire early, and this is the one they don't want to report to."

Mitigating this situation requires a good forecast of the organization. Know how each individual officer works and survey them in advance, asking questions such as: Will you be able to make it in? How will you make sure your family is provided for so that you can come in?

Many federal agencies position help in place before the storm. Molenda questions whether law enforcement shouldn't do the same.

"It's a money game," he says. "We don't want to pay people to sit around and do nothing. But if law enforcement doesn't do that, they are rolling the dice. It is necessary to get officers into the places they'll be needed ahead of time. Once the roads are impassable, your officers may not make it in."

The advantage of giving officers a heads-up is there's time for them to look after their families. "If they know they have to come in early, they will take care of their families and make sure they're safe," Molenda says. "If they don't know whether they'll be called in, they won't take the time to do these things; they'll figure they'll have time later. So when they get called in, they have to make a decision; either they are going to stay and take care of their families or they are going to report for duty."

The director of the Center for Criminal Justice Research and Training at the University of Texas-Arlington says most officers would respond effectively when confronted with a riot or a strike. But they may not respond appropriately when faced with a monstrous disaster or a monumental task while their family is stranded somewhere. "They might look at their own families and say, 'I am a father first. I am a husband first. I am a law enforcement officer second,' " says Alejandro Del Carmen, also an associate professor of criminology at the university.

Putting officers in a position where they must choose between work and the well-being of their families is a lose-lose situation. But more often than not, this is exactly the circumstance many officers find themselves in after a catastrophe. Rarely is anything done to ensure officers' families are cared for during their absence, and afterward the family suffers.

"Officers feel like they left their families when they needed them," Molenda says, "and their families tend to feel like someone else was more important than them."

Crisis plans should incorporate supporting officers' families during an emergency, he adds.

In a 300-officer department, let's say 200 officers will be on duty during the storm and 100 will be off. Molenda recommends providing the families of the 200 on-duty officers with the names of the 100 off-duty officers, stressing they can call on these individuals should they require assistance.

"Every officer is working, only some are working for the community and some are working for the officers' families," Molenda says. "The public may feel like this is favoritism - and to some degree it may be - but without officers knowing their own homes and families are taken care of, it will be very hard for them to work. One of our primary responsibilities should be giving officers peace of mind so they can perform the work that will be expected of them."

Save the community
The New Orleans blue line began to fray shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall for the second time as a Category 4 storm along the central Gulf Coast.

Several days before the tempest journeyed into the Gulf of Mexico, the National Weather Service predicted the storm would hit the panhandle of Florida as a minimal hurricane. It wasn't until late August 26 that forecasters reported a change in the storm's track. Capt. Patrick Yoes, who heads the Special Services Division at the St. Charles Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff's Office, says this created a unique challenge, since typically authorities receive more than 50 hours notice. "A lot of citizens didn't realize we had a storm coming until Saturday morning, and that's when we started evacuations," he says. "We had less than a 48-hour window to evacuate 1.4 million people."

Typically law enforcement aids citizens who plan to weather out the storm in hunkering down and assists those in harm's way in leaving. Departments position resources where they can be readily retrieved after the hurricane. They set up shelters for employees in order to locate officers in the areas that will be worst hit.

Not all of this happened with Katrina - there simply wasn't time, Yoes says.

The Louisiana State Evacuation Plan declares the primary means of hurricane evacuation as personal vehicles but notes school and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and volunteers' cars also will be made available to assist evacuation efforts. Unfortunately, this also did not occur.

Roughly 150,000 people were unable to evacuate, partially because hundreds of available New Orleans school buses were not used in the evacuation, though a FEMA emergency plan clearly called for 400 buses to evacuate victims. The problem was those buses were left in Katrina's path.

"Clearly the presence of buses, boats, airplanes, whatever is necessary to evacuate a population of that size within 24 to 48 hours is a challenge that must be addressed," says Del Carmen.

Emergency plans should concentrate on transportation issues, answering questions such as: What means of transportation will be available? Where will this transportation be located? Who will transfer the modes of transportation into these key positions? When will they be distributed? Any strategies must consider all city (buses, commuter rails), state (National Guard) and federal (boats, airplanes, trains) resources that can be tapped into and plot how they can be rapidly deployed.

It is also crucial to communicate this information to the public. "The training doesn't stop with law enforcement," Del Carmen emphasizes. "It also must trickle down to citizens in order for them to understand what to do in an emergency."

Del Carmen advises agencies to communicate with the public via citizens police academies. Here they can provide training to citizens on evacuation routes and designate academy grads to lead evacuation efforts in specific neighborhoods.

"In Arlington, Texas, we have 550 officers and the population of the city is 350,000," he says. "Clearly officers will not be able to evacuate all 350,000 people by themselves, but if they have ambassadors throughout their neighborhoods, we may experience a higher survival rate among those who need to be evacuated."

Know your community, Molenda stresses. This is where community policing comes into play. Preplanning includes keeping tabs on where the elderly and infirm reside and planning for their evacuation.

Such planning ensures everyone has access to evacuation efforts. Too often when issuing a mandatory evacuation order, it is assumed everyone has the means to leave the city. "But in reality, as we saw with Katrina, this is not the case," says Del Carmen. "There are people who are very ill or very poor, and they cannot get to a bus station or hop on a bus, even if the fare on the bus is free."

Can you hear me now?
Communications were one of many casualties knocked out in Katrina's first round. As the hurricane swept through, 185-mph winds eviscerated law enforcement's main communications system.

"We could not get phones to work at all," says Yoes. "Not only could officers not communicate with their own department to get direction in a larger sense, but they also couldn't get in touch with their families."

Miscommunications further compounded the communications issue. There were major communications breaches between local, state and federal authorities. Even something as simple as which frequency local law enforcement would use remained a question. "No one knew what page to turn to in order to follow that protocol," Del Carmen says. "Only a few people were in the loop."

As a result, Molenda indicates many deployed to the area operated without critical information. In Mississippi, he recalls, no one seemed to possess the information officials needed. "We were hearing about officers shooting themselves and getting shot, and we didn't know whether the information was accurate," he says. "Lack of information breeds problems."

Communication must be a top line concern when preparing for a natural disaster. It begins with enlisting the support of government officials and public safety in advance. With cooperative agreements in place, many communications issues can be ironed out quickly when disaster strikes.

Nothing elaborate may be needed, adds Del Carmen. Simply being on the same frequency or being familiar with who will be on what frequency and discussing in advance how communication will occur if radio frequencies are jammed or cell towers are down, can help a lot. Perhaps plans to rely on satellite communications during an emergency are also in order. Nearly 10,000 satellite-based wireless phones helped coordinate relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, but it took four days for these life-saving communication systems to arrive because they were not in place before the storm.

Who's the boss?
When interviewed on several network morning news shows, Michael Brown, then-FEMA director, blamed assistance delivery problems after Katrina on lack of communication and the inability to have good intelligence on the ground.

"There was a significant breakdown of command and control," admits a 26-year veteran officer from a neighboring parish.

To better handle such situations in the future, more emphasis must be placed on the incident command system, a pool law enforcement agencies are just beginning to wade into.

"In larger circumstances, where you are involving a command staff, logistics, operations and planning to coordinate resources for a widespread area, there are many details that must be considered to avoid duplication of effort," Molenda explains.

The incident command method establishes a clear chain of command. Typically the city manager or mayor acts as the primary point of contact and then each city department, be it fire, police, EMS or public utilities, has an appointed leader to supervise its employees. This chain of command provides a clear line of authority and connects all lower levels of the organization to higher levels, leading back to the incident commander.

Since 9/11, many police departments have proactively sought incident command training for their officers. But because it's not a frequently practiced skill, it can be difficult to implement. Molenda advocates ongoing tabletop and full-scale exercises as well as additional training from basic to intermediate and advanced. This training, he says, should include local, state and federal authorities, begin with inter-agency gatherings and be followed by regional and state meetings. Here agencies should discuss what resources are available and develop mutual-aid agreements for resource distribution. Later public safety agencies can pool their experts; select a location where a hurricane, terrorist event, chemical spill, etc. will hit; and each entity can determine their specific response. Emergency plans spell out these mutual agreements in greater detail and if implemented properly will help agencies coordinate their efforts.

"Far too often, a lot of people show up immediately with resources, food, water, etc. but nothing can get done because of a lack of coordination," Molenda says. "But if agencies prepare and preplan what they should do and where resources should go, things will already be coordinated."

Breaking the rules
"The storm created a whole set of challenges that were very unique," says Yoes. "After the hurricane, structures were intact for the most part; they had weathered quite well when you consider the winds we were dealing with." The scenario turned bleak rather quickly, however, when the storm surge breached the levee system that protected New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the lake's waters flooded most of the city.

Amidst a sea of waist-high, bacteria-ridden water filled with thousands of residents and tourists, who lacked food, water and shelter, law enforcement's challenges began in earnest.

Focusing police officers on search and rescue in the early hours and days trailing the storm generated many problems, notes Loyola Law School professor and New Orleans resident Dane Ciolino. The citizenry, he says, quickly learned of law enforcement's reduced emphasis on command and control, and lawlessness ensued.

"Once you allow any lawlessness, it begins to spiral out of control," he stresses. "Even if there are search and rescue missions that must be handled, law enforcement cannot completely abandon the mission of keeping order because that leads to other problems that put property and life at risk."

Later, Ciolino says New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reassigned police to preserving order. But at that point, he notes it was no longer a question of preservation but a matter of restoration. "They allowed things to degenerate first and then they had to recover them. But law enforcement should never take its eyes off the need to preserve order."

Molenda says it all comes back to preplanning. When planning for a possible catastrophe, consider how you might put the comforts of home in place to help disaster victims. Can portable restrooms be installed prior to the storm? Can alternate means of transportation be in place in case roads become impassable? How might food and water be delivered to those who need it most? What shelters can be made immediately available to those who've lost their homes? Answering such questions can prevent problems before they start.

"The things that we take for granted - water, food and clothing, restroom and bathing facilities - are vital," he says. "When you get into a situation where everything is taken away from you, you regress back into survival mode, and that's an animal instinct. Unfortunately, some people become more extreme than others."

Learn from your mistakes
No location is safe from a disaster, be it a hurricane, tornado, terrorist event or bombing, and when disaster strikes, Molenda stresses first responders will be held responsible.

Yet, many communities and the organizations within lack emergency plans. "There's a separate entity, a special operations issue, that's not being addressed," Molenda points out. "Law enforcement handles the day-to-day events without a problem, but how do we handle the out-of-the-ordinary calamity? We think because it hasn't happened, we don't need to do anything. It's not addressed because it hasn't occurred."

While most municipalities and states posses emergency plans, Del Carmen says there is a difference between having a plan and actually implementing it.

"We learned from Katrina that the implementation of the plan was not exactly as the plan detailed it out to be," he says.

But implementing a plan is where the rubber meets the road. If first responders are to be better coordinated in the future, all future planning must begin here. While it's impossible to prepare for every possibility, Del Carmen says it's critical to ask: What were we prepared for? Could we have been more prepared? Might we have made better decisions, relocated resources, performed more interactive drills or hired a consultant? Of the things we did, what worked and what didn't work?

With that information in hand, the lessons we learn from our missteps today, may be what prevents such "walks through hell" in the future.