Understanding communication and coordination among government and service organisations after a disaster

The purpose of this study is to discover how coordination and communication between the government and service organisations responsible for the relief effort following Hurricane Katrina contributed to the poor outcomes for the communities impacted by the storm. Two hypotheses were tested in this study: communication was positively correlated with the degree of coordination immediately following Katrina; and miscommunication was negatively correlated with the degree of coordination after the storm. Quantitative content analysis of media reports was used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses. Both communication and miscommunication were found to be positively correlated with coordination. The results of this study suggest that increasing interorganisational communication and establishing clearly defined roles for organisations must be a high priority in revamping organisational protocol on disaster response if any new approach is to be successful.