Naval Postgraduate School

Contingency Contracting in Support of Conus Disasters: a Case Study of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, 2005 Hurricane Katrine and 2012 Hurricane Sandy Naval Postgraduate School

The purpose of this book is to research and provide a comprehensive overview of contingency contracting practices within the United States as they apply during major disaster response scenarios. To do this, we analyzed three major disasters that occurred within the last twenty years. These are the Northridge, CA earthquake of 1994, Hurricane Katrina in LA in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy, impacting much of the northeast in 2012. We specifically picked these events for several reasons. They are large disasters with a voluminous amount of data available, they are geographically dispersed around the country, and there was sufficient time between each disaster to allow changes to contingency contracting plans and policy to change and be implemented. Our research and analysis focused on the events of the disaster itself, what contingency contracting preparations were in place prior to the disaster occurring, what types of contracts were awarded during the recovery phases, and what types of contingency contracting policy and procedure changes were made in in the aftermath of the disaster to make the system work more effectively and efficiently. Lastly, during each disaster we highlight what worked well and what did not and recommend changes to contingency contracting policy to avoid committing the same mistakes again.