Last year, outside my office window and 23 floors below, the old Chicago Sun-Times building was dismantled floor by floor and beam by beam. In its place, Trump Tower's 86-plus stories of glass and concrete will block the morning sunshine and our view of Lake Michigan. The Department of Homeland Security reminds me of the new Trump Tower. Grandiose plans, built on a fairly limited base; both are all-encompassing structures reaching for the sky like the Tower of Babel.

While the building next door is being constructed by competent architects and construction professionals, the fire and emergency services have been sitting on the sidelines watching DHS be built by politicians and bureaucrats. With a base of five divisions or directorates, each level of the DHS, understandably, is still a massive work in process, defining and establishing its responsibilities. Just like the caisson shafts being drilled into the bedrock for Trump's tower, the core of DHS must built on solid ground. While many Washington insiders felt qualified to have a hand in drawing up the blueprints for this new segment of the government, the fire and emergency services were treated as inconsequential. Their lack of input in the DHS construction and subsequent burial in the organizational charts has been a sore point.

Fast-forward to the past several weeks. While not quite comparable in scope, there was enough of a contrast in the two recent hurricanes to see different levels of competence. The stark reality is that in Katrina, errors were committed and compounded at every level of emergency response — local, county, state and federal levels. In Rita, Texas had the attention of its coastal communities to come away when called and immediate disaster management.

With Katrina, everything nasty or ugly that could have happened did — before and after. Over the past four years, the message from DHS has been that local first responders would need to be prepared to respond and hold the fort for up to 48 hours until federal assistance could arrive. When you live near a volcano, an earthquake or a levee, your disaster plan better be top-notch.

In 1961, Dr. Laurence J. Peter created the Peter Principle, which states that the governing principle of bureaucracy is that employees inevitably “rise to their level of incompetence.” Competent people within organizations tend to get promoted until they reach a job they can't do anymore. This can be exacerbated when politics gets involved.

The recent double-whammy of hurricanes proved the drastic difference between incompetence and competence. The fire and emergency services have come a long way in professionalism: higher education, certification programs, and more advanced leadership and management training. But book-smart doesn't unanimously mean people-smart. Certificates and initials after your name do not guarantee competence. Stephen R. Covey in First Things First says, “Character is what we are; competence is what we can do. And both are necessary to create trustworthiness.”

Incompetence has been with us since the beginning of time, in every profession and in every facet of life. We work around it, accept it, or bite the bullet and fight it.

When a fire chief or chief officer rises to his or her level of incompetence and through intimidation or dumb luck remains in a position of leadership, what's a department to do? Ride it out till the chief retires? Wait until the morale gets low enough to attract some attention? What does it take for an incompetent officer or chief to be exposed or disposed? Something goes wrong? Somebody dies or gets hurt?

Do politics fuel incompetence? Politics certainly reveal the truth in the old saying “it's who you know and what they can do for you.” Political appointments make me wince. Why do we eliminate good, qualified professionals because they are from one political party versus another?

When will we reach a point when qualifications and experience dictate getting a position rather than political affiliations, donations or who you know? Especially when the lives and safety of your community are at stake.