Relevant bits excerpted from a longer article...


AAN EXCLUSIVE: Disaster in the Making

"Here's a story we ran in Oct. 7, 2004, questioning whether federal policy and budget changes�and homeland security concerns�are trumping protection from natural diasters. We're pulling it back to the top of the site due to Hurricane Katrina...

...Fridays don't get much busier than this. It's the morning of Sept. 3, and Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., is running at a full clip, having mobilized a cadre of disaster-response specialists in its National Emergency Operations Center the day before. 'This is our 'war room,' a FEMA employee explains.

'Right now we're in 24-hours-a-day activation,' he says. 'It's a double-whammy.' Indeed, the agency is still busy helping Florida recover from Hurricane Charley's punishing winds and rain when satellite images show that an even greater storm, Hurricane Frances, will soon make landfall. It appears so threatening that most of FEMA's personnel on the ground, along with 2.5 million Floridians, have evacuated from the storm's projected path.

Inside the op center, scores of personnel from FEMA and a host of other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Health and Human Services, buzz around in what appears to be a state of controlled chaos. They work the phones, hover over computer screens and trade the latest weather forecasts. Using a time-tested system of disaster management, they've split their tasks into 12 "emergency support functions" designed to bring in food, water, medical care, electricity, housing, transportation and other desperately needed resources as soon as Frances moves on.

John Crowe, a Department of Homeland Security geospatial-mapping expert detailed to FEMA to help track such outbreaks of rough weather, steps outside the building for a quick cigarette.
'Everybody's really running into gear here,' he says between puffs. 'FEMA's ready, about as ready as they've ever been.'

FEMA's relatively quick response to the hurricanes has thus far won mostly high marks from Florida officials, who remember well a time when the disaster agency seemed the last party to show up after catastrophes. In addition, President Bush has paid multiple visits to assure victims they will get whatever help is needed, and he promptly secured more than $2 billion from Congress to fund Florida's recovery.

As storms continue to batter the Panhandle, no one would call Florida lucky. But with elections just around the corner, the hurricanes could scarcely have hit at a better time or place for obtaining federal disaster assistance. 'They're doing a good job,' one former FEMA executive says of the Bush administration's response efforts. 'And the reason why they're doing that job is because it's so close to the election, and they can't f*ck it up, otherwise they lose Florida�and if they lose Florida, they might lose the election.'

Such political considerations may indeed make this round of recoveries go better than most. But long before this hurricane season, some emergency managers inside and outside of government started sounding an alarm that still rings loudly. Bush administration policy changes and budget cuts, they say, are sapping FEMA's long-term ability to cushion the blow of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornados, wildfires and other natural disasters.

Among emergency specialists, 'mitigation'�measures taken in advance to minimize damage caused by natural disasters�is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

As a result, some state and local emergency managers say, it's become more difficult to get the equipment and funds they need to most effectively deal with disasters. In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1999's Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer.

Consequently, the residents of these and other disaster-prone states will find the government less able to help them when help is needed most, and both states and the federal government will be forced to shoulder more costs after disasters strike.

In addition, the White House has pushed for privatization of essential government services, including disaster management, and merged FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, where natural disaster programs are often sidelined by counter-terrorism programs. Along the way, morale at FEMA has plummeted, and many of the agency's most experienced personnel have left for work in other agencies or private corporations.

In June, Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency's government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency's decay. 'Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded,' he wrote. 'Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.'...

...In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew assaulted Florida and other Southern states with 170-mile-an-hour winds, killing 23 people and leaving a trail of devastation. The severity of the storm caught FEMA off-guard, and the agency did too little, too late to help the state recover, enraging thousands of storm victims. Several days after Andrew dissipated, Dade County's emergency manager famously pleaded, 'Where the hell is the cavalry?'

Two months later, President George H.W. Bush paid a price of sorts at the polls when Bill Clinton shrunk the incumbent's once-sizable lead and came within two percentage points of beating Bush in Florida. It was an important lesson learned for both the politicians and the emergency agency.

In 1993, President Clinton's new FEMA director, James Lee Witt, set the agency on a corrective course. Witt, who had served under then-Gov. Clinton as director of Arkansas emergency management, embarked on an ambitious campaign to bulk up the agency's natural disaster programs while staying prepared for "all hazards." Witt's changes reversed FEMA's reputation for being unfocused and ineffective. The agency drew praise from Democrats and Republicans for improving coordination with state and local emergency offices and turning attention and resources to the benefits of disaster mitigation.

'Mitigation is the cornerstone of emergency management,' a FEMA Web site explains today.

'It's the ongoing effort to lessen the impact disasters have on people's lives and property.' Under mitigation plans, houses in flood plains are moved or raised above the flood-line, buildings are designed to withstand hurricane winds and earthquakes, and communities are relocated away from likely wildfire zones. According to FEMA estimates, every dollar spent on mitigation saves roughly two dollars in disaster recovery costs.

The need for more systematic mitigation efforts was driven home by 1996's Hurricane Fran, which killed 37 people and caused tens of billions of dollars in damages. In 1997, Witt established Project Impact, which would become the agency's most high-profile mitigation program.

Under the project, FEMA fostered partnerships between federal, state and local emergency workers, along with local businesses, to prepare individual communities for natural disasters. Impact partnerships sprang up in all 50 states. In Seattle, Wash., for example, the grants were used to retrofit schools, bridges and houses at risk from earthquakes. In Pascagoula, Miss., the project funded the creation of a database of structures in the local flood plain�crucial information for preparing mitigation plans. In several eastern North Carolina communities, it helped fund and coordinate buyouts of houses in flood-prone areas.

By the time the Bush administration entered office in January 2001, some 250 communities had signed up for Project Impact. FEMA seemed sturdy, having found its role and proved itself capable of fulfilling it. But in the field of emergency management, some things can change as quickly as the weather...

...At the same time, Allbaugh gave contradictory signals on the value of mitigation, on one occasion chastising a community for doing too little to prepare in advance for disaster. In April 2001, he caused a stir when he asked Iowans, then in the midst of massive flood recovery efforts, 'How many times will the American taxpayer have to step in and take care of this flooding, which could be easily prevented by building levees and dikes?'

A month later, The Washington Post reported that Bush�s moves against mitigation programs were causing worries in disaster-prone states. 'Statehouse critics of the proposed cuts contend that in the long run they would cost the government more because many communities will be unable to afford preventative measures and as a result will require more relief money when disasters strike,' the newspaper noted.

By ignoring the logic of fully-funded mitigation and other preparedness programs, Bush's first FEMA director earned some scorn among emergency specialists. 'Allbaugh? He was inept,' says Claire Rubin, a researcher at George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. 'He was chief of staff for Bush in Texas�that was his credential. He didn't have an emergency management background, other than the disasters he ran into in Texas, and he wasn't a very open guy. He didn't want to learn anything.'

Allbaugh's tenure at the agency would be a relatively short one. In December 2002, he announced he would leave his post. While political observers expected Allbaugh to join the Bush re-election effort, instead he set about creating a string of lobbying firms, including New Bridge Strategies (which grew out of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers), which helps U.S. companies win reconstruction contracts in Iraq. This summer, he started another consulting company with Andrew Lundquist, the former director of Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive energy policy task force. The firm's first client was Lockheed Martin, one of the country's largest defense contractors...

...But Bush's proposal won out, and a shift in priorities from natural disasters to counter-terrorism immediately took hold. In its 2002 budget, the White House doubled FEMA's budget to $6.6 billion, but of that sum, $3.5 billion was earmarked for equipment and training to help states and localities respond to terrorist attacks.

Michael Brown, a college friend of Allbaugh's who had served as FEMA's general counsel, was recruited to head the agency, which would now be part of the DHS's Emergency and Response Directorate. When the reorganization took effect on March 1, 2003, Brown assured skeptics that under the new arrangement, the country would be served by 'FEMA on steroids'�a faster, more effective agency...

...In 2003, Congress approved a White House proposal to cut FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) in half. Previously, the federal government was committed to invest 15 percent of the recovery costs of a given disaster in mitigating future problems. Under the Bush formula, the feds now cough up only 7.5 percent.

Such post-disaster mitigation efforts, specialists say, are crucial to minimizing future losses. It's after a disaster strikes, they argue, that the government can best take the steps necessary to avoid repeat problems, because that's when officials and victims are most receptive to mitigation plans.

Larry Larson is executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, an organization that keeps a close eye on mitigation matters. The Bush administration, he says, is 'being penny-wise and pound foolish' by cutting the HMGP formula. His group has pressed Congress to restore the federal investment to 15 percent of disaster costs, and he expects that some legislators will soon take up the cause on their own. 'Florida's going to be looking for mitigation money so that they can rebuild in a safer fashion,' he says. 'I'm sure that the Florida delegation is going to be thinking now about how the state can't do what's needed with the recent cuts in post-disaster mitigation�how they can't do today what they could have done before.'

Pressed on this issue, Bush administration officials have said that the formula puts more of the mitigation burden on state governments, where it belongs. But the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) points out that, now more than ever, cash-strapped states cannot afford to pick up the balance. 'The federal focus on terrorism preparedness has left states with an increased responsibility to provide support for natural disasters and emergencies,' noted a report by the association this summer. 'State budget shortfalls have given emergency management programs less to work with, at a time when more is expected of them. In fiscal year 2004, the average budget for a state emergency management agency was $40.8 million, a 23 percent reduction from fiscal year 2003.'

The administration also argues that its new pre-disaster mitigation grants, which are awarded on a competitive basis, will help states pick up the slack. But again, emergency managers say it's not enough. In recent congressional testimony, a NEMA representative noted that 'in a purely competitive grant program, lower income communities, those most often at risk to natural disaster, will not effectively compete with more prosperous cities.... The prevention of repetitive damages caused by disasters would go largely unprepared in less-affluent and smaller communities.'

Indeed, some in-need areas just have been left out of the program. 'In a sense, Louisiana is the flood plain of the nation,' noted a 2002 FEMA report. 'Louisiana waterways drain two-thirds of the continental United States. Precipitation in New York, the Dakotas, even Idaho and the Province of Alberta, finds its way to Louisiana's coastline.' As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have been repeatedly damaged by flood waters�the highest number of any state. And yet, this summer FEMA denied Louisiana communities' pre-disaster mitigation funding requests.

In Jefferson Parish, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue is baffled by the development. 'You would think we would get maximum consideration' for the funds, he says. 'This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.'...

...In case Congress hasn't gotten the message, former FEMA director James Lee Witt recently restated it in strong terms. 'I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded,' he testified at a March 24, 2004, hearing on Capitol Hill. 'I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.'"...

...'This is an exposed nerve in the emergency management community, in the sense that resources have been shifted away from hurricanes, tornados and other kinds of disasters--the kind of disasters that are more likely to occur than terrorism.'"

The rest of the article here...

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