Transcript for Aug. 27

MR. RUSSERT: And here in Washington is the director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Director David Paulison is with us.

Ernesto. Are we ready for another hurricane in the Gulf region?

MR. DAVID PAULISON: We are ready for a hurricane, regardless of where it’s going to hit, whether it’s the Gulf Region or the Atlantic or the west coast of Florida where it seems to be heading right now.

MR. RUSSERT: You think Florida?

MR. PAULISON: That’s—the hurricane center’s predicting right now that Ernesto is probably going to make a right-hand turn as it gets past Tampa and move into—it’s somewhere between Tampa and the panhandle. That’s—of course there’s a wide spread there. That’s where the middle line is, but don’t forget there’s a lot of area of uncertainty there that this hurricane could go. So anybody in the Gulf Coast right now needs to be prepared for a hurricane and watch this thing very closely.

MR. RUSSERT: As you know, the American people are very doubtful. This is The Washington Post from Monday: “The country is in the heart of hurricane season again, and many Americans are not persuaded by federal assurances that the government is ready for the next big storm, according to the national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Fewer than half said they thought the government is ‘very prepared’ to deal with this year’s hurricane season. Only half agreed that the federal government had ‘learned a lesson from Hurricane Katrina.’” Did you learn a lesson from Katrina?

MR. PAULISON: We learned a very, very significant lessons from Hurricane Katrina. We broke those things down, and I’ve looked at that just like I’ve done my whole career, whether it was the Mariel boat lift or Hurricane Andrew or flooding in, in Dade County or the ValuJet crash or civil disturbances we had. After every major event, you always go back and do after-action reports and look very carefully at what worked and what did not work, and then very quickly get on top of those things to fix them for the next time. And that’s all we did with Katrina. Communications, logistics, victim registration, having more contracts in place to make sure that we are going to be ready.  And this, this agency, this agency is going to respond in a proper manner.

MR. RUSSERT: What’s the single most important change you’ve made for Ernesto that was not in place for Katrina?

MR. PAULISON: I think if I had to pick one thing—now, there were several, but if I had to pick one thing, it was communications. And I mean communications by information sharing. Setting up a joint field office, setting up a unified command system where, no matter where information comes in, whether it comes in from the first responder or comes in from a senator calling the president, we all share that same information. I see that as the number one failure in, in what, what happened in Katrina. Having stove pipes, not sharing information, not knowing what was going on, a major breakdown in communications between the local community and the state, between the state and the federal government, and quite frankly, inside the federal government itself, between our agencies. We have been working for the last several months very hard to fix that issue, and I’m, I’m convinced we have done that.

MR. RUSSERT: You have 2400 people in your agency. You have 400 vacancies.  How can you possibly deal with hurricane season with so many unfilled positions?

MR. PAULISON: We have right close to 2,000 people on board right now. Those are full-time positions that we have authorized by Congress. But we have several thousand disaster assistance employees we bring on board. And right now, we have 6,000 or 7,000 of those working for us. What I’ve done mainly, I’ve focused on hiring the right people to bring in to run the agency.  Everyone we’ve brought in, our regional directors, our operations director, our response director, are all people with 30 and 35 years of emergency management experience. That’s very important. We’ve also focused on hiring people at the bottom, and we’ve started to do that. It’s been a slower process than I thought. It’s more difficult to get people on board in the federal government than at the local level, but we are doing it and we are going to fill this agency up. And I’m also looking to increase the size of this agency. I’m looking forward to working with Congress to, to increase the size of the—of FEMA to do the things they expect us to do.

MR. RUSSERT: What do you—how do you respond to the mayor’s suggestion that the response by the federal government was different for New Orleans than it would have been if a hurricane hit Orange County, California, or South Beach, Florida?

MR. PAULISON: With all due respect to the mayor—and I do have a lot of respect for him—that is simply not accurate. Those are American citizens, that we will respond regardless of what the race is, regardless of what the income is. We don’t know what that is when we set up our, our stuff to, to respond to these types of things. So to blame it on race or to blame it on class is simply not accurate. This agency will respond anywhere in this country regardless of what the disaster is, regardless or what type of people we’re responding to.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Director, as you know, there’s been a lot of postmortems about Katrina, particularly the federal response, and frankly, the corruption.  Here’s a piece from The New York Times, and let me read it to you and our viewers.

Headline: “Breathtaking Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid.” “Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion. ...

“The waste ranged from excessive loads of ice to higher-than-necessary costs on the multibillion dollar debris removal effort. Some examples are particularly stark.

“[There was] $7.9 million spent to renovate the former Fort McClellan Army base in Anniston, Alabama, ... but when the doors finally opened, only about 10 people showed up each night, leading FEMA”—your agency—“to shut down the shelter within one month.

“The mobile homes, costing $34,500 each, supposed to provide temporary housing to hurricane victims. But after Louisiana officials balked at installing them inland, FEMA had no use for them. Nearly half, or about 10,000, of the” mobile homes, of the “$860 million worth of units now sit at an airfield in Arkansas, where FEMA is paying $250,000 a month to store them.

“The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which estimated that perhaps as much as 21 percent of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been improperly distributed.”

Taxpayers watching that are outraged by the bungling.

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