FEMA report details failures
WASHINGTON – An internal FEMA report that calls for urgent reform after Hurricane Katrina outlines old failures the disaster response agency was warned about five months before the storm struck.
A Feb. 13 report assessing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the storm concludes FEMA suffered from confusing leadership roles, outdated or inadequate response plans and inexperienced or under-trained staff during Katrina. It also details problems in tracking supplies to disaster sites.
All of those findings were highlighted in a March 2005 consultant’s analysis, titled “A Vision for the Future,” on how to revamp FEMA before the next disaster hit.
“For years FEMA has approached disasters almost timidly,” the agency’s post-Katrina report found. “FEMA should be attacking with sledgehammers, not fly swatters. Specific changes in logistics need immediate attention.”
FEMA’s internal review is the latest to surface in a series of studies about the government’s sluggish response to Katrina, and how to fix it before the 2006 hurricane season starts on June 1. Katrina struck last Aug. 29.
Senate investigators are wrapping up their own inquiry of the Katrina response, after findings by the House and the White House that concluded FEMA failed to learn from earlier disasters.
FEMA acting director R. David Paulison said the agency is looking carefully at all post-Katrina reports, and he described them as “helpful in rebuilding FEMA.”
But Paulison, a former Miami-Dade County fire chief in Florida, acknowledged the government is often slow to revamp itself, comparing the recommendations made after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to Katrina more than a decade later.
He added: “FEMA was a four-letter word when I was a fire chief during Hurricane Andrew, and that’s why I’m determined to make (changes) happen.”
Many reforms following disasters are never enacted because of financial costs and power struggles, said University of Pennsylvania scholar Donald F. Kettl, co-author of “On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.”
“The big crises like Sept. 11 and Katrina challenge us and punish us for failing to adapt,” said Kettl, a political science professor. “But these reports call for really dramatic, radical change in ways that disrupt the patterns of political power and standard operating procedure. So it’s a lot easier to let the day-to-day pressures rule instead of confronting the issues that we know we have to deal with.”
Former FEMA director Michael Brown said the two documents, taken together, raise concerns that few of the lessons learned from Katrina will be heeded. Brown, who left the agency under fire days after Katrina hit, is a top critic of the Homeland Security Department, FEMA’s parent agency.
The new FEMA report was posted on the agency’s Web site earlier this year. The agency pulled it from the site after a reporter’s inquiry. The 2005 analysis by the Mitre Corp., obtained by the Associated Press, examined FEMA’s performance during the 2004 Florida hurricanes.
Both reports describe FEMA’s blunders in trying to communicate and coordinate with onsite disaster responders, and get much-needed supplies like food, water and ice to victims.
“There are a lot of things we can do between now and hurricane season,” Paulison said. “But there’s stuff that’s just going to take a couple of years to get in place.”