Here come the storms as FEMA rushes reforms

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

BELLE CHASSE, La. — With his Mississippi Delta parish still in tatters from Hurricane Katrina, Benny Rousselle gathers his key people for an exercise to prepare for the fast approaching 2006 hurricane season. Beneath an image of the Gulf Coast projected on the wall, the Plaquemines Parish president is flanked by his emergency adviser, the sheriff, a civil engineer, medics, a school bus coordinator and a representative of local oil and gas interests. It is a scene being repeated in counties across the region.

The group is testy. They are exhausted from nine months of recovery efforts that remain far from finished. Dark humor punctuates the silence as they wait for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start the disaster response exercise by conference call.

Finally, FEMA announces the scenario: A hypothetical storm dubbed Hurricane Alicia -- a Category 2 storm at this point –- is heading toward southwest Louisiana and expected to make landfall by the following day.

In Belle Chasse, eyes roll and muttering fills the room. Given Alicia’s size and location, the entire parish would already be evacuated and the oil and gas industry shut down. From this vantage point, it’s just one more example of how FEMA always seems to be chronically behind the curve.

“It's always like this. It looks like they forgot us,” Rousselle quips darkly.

In the aftermath of an epic storm that exposed epic problems at FEMA, the exercise frames the question that is on everyone’s lips: Is FEMA prepared to help in a future disaster?

Can FEMA patch the leaks?
Taking its cues from a tidal wave of damning reports by Congress and the agency’s own inspector general that chronicled what went wrong in the response to Katrina, FEMA has rushed to reform its communication, logistics, transportation and procurement systems and replenish its depleted staff. But critics question whether the changes may prove too incremental to make up for gaps in leadership and expertise and an organizational structure that many seasoned emergency professionals say is fundamentally flawed.

FEMA is racing the clock to prove it is up to the task, and not only because hurricane season begins on Thursday. In May, after reviewing the response to Katrina, a bipartisan Senate panel called for elimination of the agency that for 27 years has been tasked with coordinating the federal response to disasters that overwhelm the resources of local and state government.

John Brecher / MSNBC.com Claudette Reddick sits in front of a moving van filled with her possessions at a FEMA group site in Buras, La. Reddick is moving her possessions inland because of the approaching hurricane season.

"We are going to make sure that we don't have another response like we had in Katrina,” new FEMA chief David Paulison promised lawmakers. Paulison, who took over on an interim basis from a bewildered Michael Brown, a political appointee, a few weeks after Katrina hit, was finally confirmed to the post last week by the Senate.

The changes made by Paulison, the former Miami-Dade fire chief, are drawn straight from the pages of the reports. In Katrina, supplies bound for disaster victims — essentials like ice, generators, water and meals — were misdirected, rerouted and delayed by impassable roads. This year, FEMA has a global positioning system — like those widely used by shipping companies and retailers — to track emergency provisions.

In a scramble to distribute emergency money to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Katrina, FEMA lacked a reliable system to screen out fraudulent applications — resulting in millions of dollars of duplicate payments. This year, FEMA plans to use ChoicePoint, a company specializing in verifying identity, for all emergency aid applications, which it hopes will virtually eliminate the problem.

Monumental blunder, televised
FEMA’s single most-monumental blunder after Katrina was its inability to render prompt assistance when Louisiana officials asked for help evacuating residents stranded in New Orleans and other nearby areas.

While local and state government shared responsibility for the debacle – broadcast live through horrifying images of thousands of increasingly desperate people stuck in New Orleans – it was FEMA’s inept response that drew the most outrage.

It took the agency two days to make its first request for buses, and they arrived in large numbers only four days after Katrina hit the city. The evacuation wasn't complete for another two days.

"These efforts were too little, too late," said a Senate report issued in May. "Tens of thousands of people were forced to wait in unspeakably horrible conditions until as late as Saturday (five days after Katrina struck) to be evacuated."

Part of the problem was a lack of backup communication systems to use when the whole region's landlines and cell phones were knocked out.

FEMA officials said that problem had been addressed by modernizing equipment, including the purchase of some 300 satellite phones that were used to good effect when Hurricane Wilma clobbered Florida in October.

But critics note that the agency has not solved one particularly vexing problem: the lack of an “interoperable” emergency communications system that would allow officials from federal, state and local agencies to easily talk to one another.

Critics also say the agency has to repair weak links between local officials and FEMA, which have badly frayed since 2002 – the year FEMA was absorbed into the vast new Department of Homeland Security. These ties, veteran FEMA officials say, are at the heart of coordinating relief and recovery.

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