The front page of this morning's
Chicago Tribune had a story that could have been written here, outlining the absolute mess that Bush and his administration has made out of FEMA, and how this is impacting the relief efforts
Note: There aren't any huge surprises in this article, to someone who has been obsessively reading everything in the blogosphere over the last week. This article will come as a shock to the less information-obsessed.
This story appeared in the September 3
Chicago Tribune, front page below the fold.
Ex-officials say weakened FEMA botched response
The headline pulls no punches. Most of the people interviewed for ths story are Clinton-era FEMA executives, who must be furious at what's become of their agency.
Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise."
[...]
Still, Castleman found it hard to square the lessons he and others learned from the exercise with the frustratingly slow response to the disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Katrina. From the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane survivors have decried the lack of water, food and security and the slowness of the federal relief efforts.
Castleman is one of the few Republicans interviewed for this story. This practice scenario also puts the lie to Bush's "nobody expected the levees to fail", since overtopping and widespread flooding were part of the setup. In other words, last year's practice excercise was a perfect rehearsal for the real thing, and they're
still messing up the real thing.
But many suspected that FEMA's apparent problems in getting life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from New Orleans--delays even Bush called "not acceptable"--stemmed partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have long warned that the moves would weaken the agency's ability to effectively respond to natural disasters.
Less clout, experience
FEMA's chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department, which is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All that has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say.
The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for seemingly mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This is the core of the problem. Bush took an agency headed by professional emergency managers and turned it over to political hacks. At the same time, he stuck it in the middle of an enormous bureaucracy with a very different set of priorities. The combination of the two causes the people with Clue to get disgusted and leave. Only an idiot (or a Bush official, but I repeat myself (apologies to M. Twain)) would think that this wouldn't impact response time and such.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) called on Bush to immediately appoint a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response.
"There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," Landrieu said. "Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach."
I guess Landrieu is done kissing up to Bush, at least for now. Basically, she's saying "This agency used to work, you broke it, please undo what you've done". Fat chance of Bush doing that, of course.
John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said he was bewildered by the agency's slow response this time.
It had been standard practice for FEMA to position supplies ahead of time, and the agency did preposition drinking water and tarps to cover damaged roofs near where they would be needed. In addition, FEMA has coordinated its plans with state and local officials and let the Defense Department know beforehand what type of military assistance would be needed.
"I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.
They had three days notice. Per other diaries posted here, Louisiana officially asked for help before landfall; I'd be shocked if Mississippi didn't also ask.
It's a safe bet that FEMA didn't preposition supplies for a relief operation; if they had, Brown would have been bragging about it non-stop during his bazillionTV interviews.
And there isn't an experienced disaster-response expert at the top of the agency as there was when James Lee Witt ran it during the 1990s. Before Michael Brown, the current head, joined the agency as its legal counsel, he was with the International Arabian Horse Association.
The Horse Association thing has been discussed here extensively. The important thing, though, is that FEMA is being run by a political appointee, not a professional like it was in the Clinton administration.
That loss of experienced personnel might explain in part why FEMA was not able to secure buses sooner for the evacuation of New Orleans, a step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation last year.
Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, said, "I have a hard time believing there is any game plan in place when it comes to coordinating or pulling together this volume of business," referring to FEMA's effort to obtain hundreds of buses to move tens of thousands of evacuees from New Orleans. "And what happens in two or three weeks down the road when all of these people are moved again?"
This bit is new, to me anyway. You'd think that knowing where to find several hundred buses would be high on the priority list for the evacuation and relief plan of
any urban area. If FEMA is having trouble doing that, how the hell can we trust them to do anything right?
"After Sept. 11 they got so focused on terrorism they effectively marginalized the capability of FEMA," said George Haddow, a former FEMA official during the Clinton administration. "It's no surprise that they're not capable of managing the federal government's response to this kind of disaster."
If anyone says that this is just a natural disaster and Bush deserves no blame, quotes like this should be shoved in their face. Bush and the administration helped make this mess, and this is increasingly being pointed out.
-dms