Emergency agency called a disaster
Critics charge Bush political patronage, focus on terror hurt FEMA's effectivenessBy ALAN FREEMAN
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 Page A17
WASHINGTON -- Michael Lindell knew things were going downhill at the Federal Emergency Management Agency when President George W. Bush appointed Joe Allbaugh as head of the U.S. federal agency responsible for disaster management in 2001.
"It was a political patronage job" for Mr. Allbaugh, who had no experience in emergency management but had been Mr. Bush's chief of staff when he was governor of Texas, said Mr. Lindell, senior scholar at Texas A&M University's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center.
Soon afterward, Mr. Allbaugh hired his former college roommate, Republican lawyer Michael Brown, to be FEMA's general counsel. His experience in organizing the response to hurricanes and earthquakes? He ran the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' group that organized horse shows.
Mr. Brown, who succeeded Mr. Allbaugh at FEMA in 2003, now finds himself at the centre of a storm of controversy over Washington's slow response to hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on New Orleans.
"Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially," said The Times-Picayune, the leading New Orleans newspaper, in an open letter to Mr. Bush published on Sunday.
Critics allege that the Bush administration has undermined the effectiveness of the agency by turning it into a second-rate department run by political hacks.
"I think it's clear that they did drop the ball," said Susan Cutter, a professor of geography and director at the Hazards Research Lab at the University of South Carolina. "FEMA should have come in much, much sooner. . . . There is something wrong with emergency management that needs to be fixed."
Mr. Lindell said that unlike an earthquake or a terrorist attack, which arrives without warning, hurricane forecasters predicted at least 24 hours before landfall that Katrina was going to pack a devastating punch.
Anticipating Katrina's impact, Mr. Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on Sunday, a day before the storm hit. "Then, there was a black hole for five days. I don't understand it," Mr. Lindell said, noting that until last Friday, the federal response seemed scattered and unfocused.
Prof. Cutter said the problem is that FEMA, which used to have cabinet-level representation, was downgraded when it was forced to merge with the Department of Homeland Security. The emphasis was placed on responding to terrorism at the expense of natural disasters.
"They gave FEMA a backwater position," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "They didn't think it was important."
As for Mr. Brown, 50, his light has not exactly shone in the harsh atmosphere of post-Katrina New Orleans. On CNN last Thursday, he admitted he had been unaware that thousands of storm victims were marooned in horrific conditions at the convention centre.
Mr. Brown's performance has been harshly criticized even by Bush loyalist Senator Trent Lott, who lost his own coastal home in Pascagoula, Miss., in the hurricane. "If he doesn't solve a couple of problems that we've got right now he ain't going to be able to hold the job, because what I'm going to do to him ain't going to be pretty."
Mr. Bush has been loyal to Mr. Brown, an Oklahoma Republican, declaring on Friday during a visit to the hurricane-hit region, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Although FEMA owns no helicopters and no trucks, it is at the heart of the response to Katrina, co-ordinating the response to the disaster with local and state authorities. FEMA is spending about $750-million (U.S.) a day on disaster relief. Estimates are that the recovery and relief operations could end up costing more than $150-billion.
The U.S. government's involvement in disaster relief co-ordination began in the early 19th century when Congress passed an act providing assistance to a New Hampshire town that had been hit by a catastrophic fire.
Over the next century, ad hoc legislation was passed more than 100 times in response to earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and other disasters. The federal involvement became more institutionalized in the 1930s, but it was only a series of disasters in the 1960s and 1970s, including hurricane Camille's ravaging of the Gulf Coast in 1969, that prompted the creation of FEMA in 1979 as a central agency responsible for federal response to disasters.
After criticism of the handling of hurricane Andrew, which ravaged southern Florida in 1992, then-president Bill Clinton named a professional emergency manager, James Witt, to run the agency. But Mr. Witt was shunted aside after Mr. Bush was elected President. The agency has an annual budget of $5-billion.
theglobeandmail.com |
