The Gathering Storm

One year after Hurricane Katrina, what if it’s not just once in a lifetime? Making sense of our disaster-prone future.

The lingering anger in New Orleans over the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina is such that you can buy a T-shirt that reads “FEMA: Federal Employees Missing in Action.” By now, one year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, most people are familiar with the catalogue of missteps by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the days after the storm first hit. They read like recollections from a bureaucratic nightmare. FEMA denied local officials’ requests for rubber rafts needed to rescue victims because it was afraid the polluted waters would ruin them. It issued a press release telling first responders in neighboring states not to respond to the hurricane without being requested and lawfully dispatched by state and local authorities. It turned away trucks filled with water and refused to accept much-needed generators. It wouldn’t allow food to be delivered to New Orleans by the Red Cross. It ignored Amtrak’s offer of trains to evacuate victims. It tied up valuable offers of foreign aid in the form of water-purification systems and rescue ships. And it left 20,000 trailers, desperately needed for temporary housing, sitting in Atlanta.

Why was the response to Katrina so inadequate, and can FEMA be fixed? On the surface, the outlines of the problem are clear enough: By placing FEMA, formerly an independent agency, into a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Bush Administration severely weakened FEMA, causing problems that can only be fixed by restoring its independence. But, beyond this reshuffling of boxes on the federal government’s organization chart, FEMA’s response points to a deeper and more serious problem. Hurricane Katrina may not be the once-in-a-century storm it was thought to be. Rather, in all likelihood it is a harbinger for what is likely to come in an era of global warming. Just as the attacks of September 11 served as a wake-up call for what could be decades of catastrophic terrorism, Katrina must be seen as a wake-up call for an era of potentially new and explosively expensive natural disasters.

Taken together, we can expect a future where today’s “emergencies,” both natural and man-made, are more common–and more deadly. Yet our federal government–the only institution that can coordinate and pay for disaster response–is woefully unprepared to respond to, and pay for, these emergencies. Three major problems loom: The local-state-federal arrangements that have governed emergency response may no longer work in an era where disasters are so large that they overwhelm first responders; our system of emergency supplemental budgeting risks creating a fiscal emergency in which successive disasters push the nation into deeper and deeper fiscal trouble; and our seriousness about preventing disasters in the first place involves a level of political commitment previously unheard of in the United States. In other words, reforming FEMA is just a first step. Ultimately, the federal government must rethink its entire approach to disaster prevention and response.

FEMA’s Failed Past

Created in 1979, FEMA was, throughout the 1980s, the dumping ground for political appointees; one report in the early ‘90s showed that it had 10 times the number of appointees as other agencies. The low point for the agency prior to Katrina came in 1992, with its failure to respond effectively to Hurricane Andrew, which left 250,000 homeless. FEMA’s response to Andrew was similar to that during Katrina, perhaps because the director at the time was a man who–like Michael Brown, the director during Katrina–had no prior disaster experience. Instead of preparing his agency to handle disasters, Director Wallace Stickney’s major claim to fame had been forcing an openly gay employee of FEMA to reveal the identities of other gay employees.

This began to change in 1993, when President Bill Clinton appointed James Lee Witt, who had been his head of emergency response in Arkansas, to run FEMA. At the time, there were calls in Congress to abolish the agency because of its poor performance during Andrew. Witt, however, performed the government equivalent of a corporate turnaround, slashing tiers of bureaucracy and draining the patronage swamp. Witt reorganized FEMA around an “all-hazards response” approach and improved the agency’s performance so much that during the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, FEMA was applauded for its timely payments and assistance to victims. FEMA’s re-organization and subsequent performance was so good that it became the poster child for Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government initiative. FEMA continued to perform well in the first year of the Bush Administration, particularly after September 11. In those days, many of Witt’s reforms were still in place, and the agency was headed by Joe Allbaugh, a man who, like Witt, was a close confidante of the sitting president.

The re-deterioration of FEMA began in the third year of the Bush Administration, when it was placed in the Department of Homeland Security. Including FEMA in DHS blurred its mission and focus, a not-unusual occurrence when an independent agency is folded into an enormous new department. Prior to Katrina, warnings were issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as well as a host of state and local emergency preparedness planners, that FEMA’s preparedness mission was getting lost in layers of bureaucracy; it was likewise unclear how terrorism fit into the all-hazards paradigm. When FEMA’s state-grant-making process got rolled into an overall departmental grant-making process, states found that they could get grants to buy protective gear against a biochemical attack, but they could not get grants for more traditional and probable threats like flooding. And, predictably, as FEMA’s mission was blurred and its autonomy stripped away, it began to lose its longtime executives. The first to go was Allbaugh, whose departure meant the loss of direct access to the president, a feature of emergency response that is nearly as important as prior experience.

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