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Hurricane Katrina Ethical Issues

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As the response to Hurricane Katrina and relevant recovery operations required ethical decision-making, due attention should be paid to assessment of the validity and effectiveness of ethical decisions. There are many resources, both videos and articles, that provide detailed description of the tragic situations created by the impact of the natural disaster and some ethical dilemmas faced by responders. In all cases, the concepts of ethics, justice, equity, equality, and professional competence played an important role in decision-making processes. The storm caused “more than 1,800 fatalities and more than $100 billion in damage” (American Society of Civil Engineers, 2015). Policy makers’ decisions caused harm and completely destroyed the …show more content…
There were some challenges that affected the selection of ethics-oriented response options. One decision described in the case study resources is providing deliberate injection to numerous critically ill patients with medications that hastened their deaths (Fink, 2014). Fink (2014) explores the details of the tragedy that took place when the hospital staff and 250 patients were trapped at Memorial Medical Center aftermath Hurricane Katrina and stayed there five days. There were no electricity and heat to sustain the lives of critical patients. As a result, many patients died. Hence, the ethical principles were violated because healthcare professionals failed to solve the problem. Drawing on the materials on ethics, the local authorities failed to handle the situation and the administrative failures associated with the work of FEMA led to negative outcomes in the health care industry. According to researchers, the decisions of the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board (OLB) were unethical as they led to the failure of the outfall drainage canals in New Orleans during the disaster (Rogers et al., …show more content…
The case of Hurricane Katrina shows that not only multiple engineering failures led to the collapse in the city, but also administrative and health care decisions contributed to negative outcomes. The key reason for poor decision-making was the absence of preparedness of the New Orleans levee system to protect the city and its residents. In general, it is necessary to take into consideration the failures identified in this case to avoid the recurrence of

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