Penny wise, pound foolish
Homeland Security's disaster funding formula is, well, a disaster. According to the National Emergency Managers Association’s 2006 Biennial Report, the department’s current policy of spending less money on mitigation means spending much more money on response and recovery.
NEMA found that the amount of money spent on mitigation – which can reduce the impact of future disasters – has decreased sharply over the last six years, while more has gone towards responding to and recovering from an emergency. The report says that since 1999, state spending on mitigation has decreased 75% — from $498 million in fiscal 1999 to $122 million in fiscal 2005. The most drastic decline begins in 2003 – the year the Department of Homeland Security takes over FEMA.
From 2003 to 2005, spending on mitigation projects plummeted by nearly 61%. The drop also coincides with to a reduction in the funding formula beginning in FY2003 when Congress cut state hazard mitigation funds from 15% to 7.5% of disaster costs. The findings concern NEMA because mitigation and save lives and money.
A 2005 report by the Multihazard Mitigation Council found that every $1 spent on mitigation saved more than $3 in recovery.
“The decline in resources dedicated to mitigation, pre and post, has been a disturbing and counterproductive trend,” Jim Mullen, director of Washington’s State Emergency Management Division and chair of NEMA’s Mitigation Committee, said in a Dec. 12 press release. “Damage that can be averted is a significant accomplishment. There simply must be a rededication of emphasis on this critical element of emergency management.”



DHS catches the "All-Hazzard" bug
After years of looking at terrorism as the greatest threat facing America, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to telling the public to be ready for anything.
According to an article on Govex.com, DHS has rolled out a new crop of commercials designed make families aware of the need to prepare for any catastrophic emergencies, naturally-occurring or man-made. Unlike the old commercials, terrorism is never mentioned.
The announcements direct viewers to the government disaster preparedness Web site Ready.gov. While the Web site's focus was explicitly on terrorism when it was launched in 2003, Homeland Security officials said the agency is now moving toward an "all hazards" campaign.
The first group of preparedness announcements featured former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, warning America that they had to be ready for another 9-11 style attack. "The next attack could happen to any community at any time," Ridge said then. "Terrorists force us to make a choice: We can be afraid or we can be ready. American's aren't afraid, and we will be ready."
The Department admits that the new announcements represent a shift in the thinking brought about by lessons learned from Katrina.

Read more

FEMA's paradigm shift?
A careful parsing of FEMA director David Paulison's speech to the National Press Club last week indicates that the agency under DHS is prepared to take a more active role jumping into disasters than ever before. No longer willing to wait to be asked by a state for help, Paulison indicated that FEMA was going to step in when it had to.
The federal government could no longer afford to wait until state and local emergency responders are overwhelmed before acting, he said. “Responding to all disasters, catastrophic or otherwise, must now be viewed from the perspective of ‘all for one and one for all,’ ” Paulison said.
Many southern governors however, not least Republican Rick Perry of Texas, has come out hard against FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security leaning too far forward in times of crisis that they stomp on state rights and abilities to manage a situation better than Big Brother. But such views have always been viewed dimly by DHS under Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Paulison said the key to making the one for all and all for one policy work was more cooperation and preparation between FEMA, the states and all levels of government. It though remains to be seen how this will play out in reality.

FEMA Director asks for end to Katrina probes
Federal Emergency Management Director R. David Paulison, speaking on Nov. 30, the last day of the 2006 hurricane season, swore that FEMA was making big improvements and called for an end to the myriad investigations and recommendations about Hurricane Katrina.
"We must resist the call for additional investigations unless they are based on new evidence or allegations,” he said. “Rather than conduct additional studies, inquiries and analyses that look backward to tell us what we already know, we should continue to focus our energy on correcting the problems.”
He said that the Department’s efforts to remake the much maligned agency, including implementing changes called for by Congress, was in the country’s best interest. “It’s just an opportunity to step back and revamp this organization to make it much more nimble and much more agile and less bureaucratic,” Paulison said. “So we’re going to go through this carefully and methodically to make sure we get it right, because it’s going to be very well the last opportunity we have to rebuild this organization, to reorganize it so that it provides the service America expects to provide.”
The department has until the end of March to enact most of the changes Congress called for in the DHS 2007 Appropriations bill, such as transferring the office of Grants and Training to FEMA.
State and local emergency management organizations have been slowly acknowledging that Homeland Security and FEMA have made progress in fixing many of the systematic problems that turned the response to Hurricane Katrina into a fiasco.
National Emergency Management Association President Albert Ashwood applauded the department’s on-going revisions to the National Response Plan — the blueprint for disaster response — which proved to be misunderstood, and in some cases ignored, during the Hurricane Katrina response in 2005.
Undersecretary for Preparedness George W. Foresman and Paulison said they were working together in overseeing the revisions, and state and local officials are included in the process — a step state and local officials have said was omitted in the past. Foresmen suggested the department might even change the name of “National Response Plan” because it conjures up images of jumping on fire trucks and heading to the scene of the disaster.
“This is about how the local, state and the federal governments, how the public sector and the private sector are going to be structured to be interoperable — in the governance sense of the word — to be able to deal with the full range of risks that we face in the 21st century,” Foresman said.

Tennessee EMA implements Katrina's lessons
Slowly but surely states, especially southern states, are applying the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. An Associated Press story has Tennessee “on a short path” to meeting national standards for disaster response, with the state emergency management agency winning conditional accreditation from the Emergency Management Accreditation Program.
Tennessee has nine months to complete the accreditation process and possibly join only nine other states to have full accreditation. The accreditation program vigorously assesses a state's abilities to respond to disasters. "By achieving compliance, they are really at the forefront and can show they have a viable system in place to deal with disasters," Nicole Ishmael, executive director of the accreditation program, told the AP.
A team of emergency management officials from other states has been poring over TEMA's strategic plans since last October. The team reviewed 15 standards of disaster response ranging from hazard identification and warning systems to public education and training. Tennessee EMA spokesman Jeremy Heidt, said that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita taught TEMA how to quickly prepare shelters and provide long-term housing for a flood of disaster victims.
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A Disaster in the Making?
More homeland security duties are being loaded on state disaster offices with insufficient funds to cover the costs, a new report concludes.
The National Emergency Management Association, which represents state disaster offices, says in its 2006 Biennial Report from that the federal emergency management performance grant program, which it calls “the only federal funding available to state and local governments for all-hazards planning, training and exercises as well as some personnel costs,” is short by $287 million.
According to the NEMA, the responsibility for carrying out three national priorities identified by the Department of Homeland Security --the National Response Plan (the blueprint for how the country responds to disasters), the National Incident Management System (a command-and-control system during disasters), and the National Preparedness Goal (to make states more resistant to natural disasters and acts of terrorism) – is assigned most frequently to state and local emergency management offices.
“Unfortunately, these growing responsibilities that are mandated by the federal government are not supported by adequate funding,” the report concludes. The fear is that as the responsibilities increase but the funding dies not “the nation’s ability to respond to disasters of all types is seriously compromised.”
Moreover, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency is reorganizing to apply lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, the states are losing experienced emergency managers and have few plans to recruit new talent. Currently, 43 state emergency management directors have been in their jobs three years or less, according to the report. This presents a challenge to agencies as the federal government tries to implement lessons learned, because if states can’t retain their knowledge bases, it will be difficult to apply the lessons to prepare for future disasters.
Visit the NEMA Website

Disaster response and recovery still a big DHS challenge
Responding to and recovering from a catastrophic disaster is one of the Department of Homeland Security’s top management challenges in the coming year, according to the department’s inspector general.
“Particular attention will be given to the U. S. Coast Guard’s (USCG’s) non-homeland mission, as mandated by the Homeland Security Act, and to disaster response and recovery activities,” the IG said in its fiscal 2007 annual performance plan. The IG also plans to audit the effectiveness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s logistics tracking system, a new ability that FEMA initiated after the Katrina debacle.
Other challenges the IG outlined include consolidating the department’s many components and managing contracts and grants. The IG will also evaluate the effectiveness of Customs and Border Protection’s system for cargo screening. In addition, investigators will determine how the department is progressing with security clearances and evaluate how the Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center is operating.
“These programs and functions are not an all-inclusive inventory of DHS’s activities. Rather, they represent those activities that are the core of DHS’s mission and strategic objectives. By answering certain fundamental questions within each of these program and functional areas, the OIG will determine how well DHS is performing and will be able to recommend ways to improve the efficacy of DHS’s programs and operations.”
Read the IG report

Special needs cases need a database
The post-Katrina obsession with emergency evacuation is producing some good ideas that promise to help responders when disaster next strikes. For example, the city of Surprise Arizona, is seeking a $25,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security for a Fire and Life Safety Program and to create a central database for special-needs populations.
DHS is accepting proposals to help identify special-needs families and assisted-care homes within cities that would need help during a major emergency. Information gathered via the program would be entered into a database and used as a component of the city's Emergency Operation Plan if a disaster occurs. If the city's grant request is approved, home safety inspections will be offered to families with special-needs members. The intent is to help those families with emergency evacuation plans and to find possible hazards that could delay an evacuation. Specialized training also would be developed and provided to staff members in assisted-care homes and special-needs families.
The only question is will people too poor to evacuate themselves be considered special needs or just unlucky in the next catastrophe?

Watch out: Denver nuke response team's got FEMA trouble
FEMA is scrambling to sort out problems with Denver's 90-man federal counterterrorism team charged with saving lives after nerve gas, nuclear or dirty-bomb attacks. According to a story in today's Denver Post, the team of doctors, nurses and paramedics is supposed to mobilize, then fly into chaos and work through the crucial first few days after an attack to contain casualties. "If getting there early is going to save lives, we are not going to save as many lives," said Dr. Charles Goldstein, commander of the unit. Members blame poor FEMA oversight of the National Disaster Medical System of which the Denver team is a part. FEMA took over the system after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It includes teams with specialized capabilities ranging from handling heaps of dead bodies to helping distressed animals. Congress gives the program $34 million a year but overspending has forced cuts that are limiting the system's effectiveness. Now - on orders from the White House - the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to take back the system as part of a post-Katrina reorganization.
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LA settles with and then sues FEMA
More than year after the storm, Louisiana has wired $319 million to FEMA , a large portion of what the federal agency billed the state for hurricane recovery effort reimbursement, and filed a lawsuit in federal court disputing the remaining $61 million bill.
The state's actions were based on the advice of the legislative auditor, who disputed some of the spending done by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and said some dollars weren't spent properly or couldn't be documented. Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc, the governor's top financial adviser, said the state attorney general's office filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon, and the disputed dollars will be deposited into a registry of the court until a judge decides whether the state owes FEMA the money.
Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot, the chief investigator for the Louisiana Legislature, said he could only account for 88% of the spending, but the state is objecting to a portion of that spending as well - money FEMA gave to people for generators, an item Theriot said it doesn't appear the state ever backed as a type of disaster aid.
In the remaining disputed funds, Theriot said in some instances, people with invalid addresses or duplicate homes received FEMA benefits who shouldn't have.
"FEMA officials have said they welcome any information from the legislative auditor's office about improper spending and will investigate it. In a letter to the state, FEMA Director David Paulison said the agency will give Louisiana credit for any dollars recovered because of mistakes.


Read the AP story

I'll take DHS grants for 10.3 million, Alex
The Associated Press carries an interesting little story perfect for Jeopardy. The answer: Alabama. And the question: What state has been getting more federal Homeland Security money for fire departments than any other?
According to AP, 89 Alabama fire departments and emergency rescue units gobbled up $10.3 million dollars in the first round of 2006 DHS grants, some $3 million more than the next most granted state, Pennsylvania. No reason for DHS’ southern generosity was offered but the story did note that Alabama was the first state to create a its own Department of Homeland Security following the 9-11 attacks.

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President adds FEMA to his Defiance of Congressional Control
One of the defining ideas of the Bush Administration has been the "Unitary Executive Doctrine", which holds that Congress can't command executive branch officials other than the president, and even then only on certain matters. It is a separation of powers issue that has often come up. Now the doctrine has been extended to cover the selection of a FEMA director.
Last week, President Bush asserted that he has the executive authority to disobey Congress’s establishment of minimum qualifications for future heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A new law requires the president to nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership." But in setting aside dozens of provisions when he signed the $34.8 billion homeland security spending bill into law, the president asserted that the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions. The law, Bush wrote, ``purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."
He also claimed the right to edit or withhold reports to Congress by a watchdog agency within the Department of Homeland Security that is responsible for protecting Americans' personal privacy.
The American Bar Association and members of Congress have said Bush uses signing statements excessively as a way to expand his power and to reinterpret or repudiate measures approved by lawmakers instead of exercising a formal veto. In at least 110 statements, the President has challenged about 750 statutes passed by Congress. They include documents revising or disregarding parts of legislation to ban torture of detainees and to renew the Patriot Act.
Until now critics have accused Mr. Bush of only seeking to subvert lawmakers' ability to accurately monitor activities of the executive branch of government. Now lawmakers in both parties said he was neglecting lessons of the bungled response to Katrina.

National Guard gear in Iraq remains a problem
Before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Louisiana National Guard leaders complained that trucks and water tankers their troops had been forced to leave behind in Iraq undermined their readiness to handle a disaster at home. After the storm they denied that equipment shortages hindered them, but the issue remains a concern. Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen told the Chattanooga Times Free Press this week that he is "very concerned" that the Tennessee National Guard doesn’t have enough equipment to mobilize during an emergency because troops have left hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in Iraq for other units. "It’s trucks and humvees and bulldozers, all this stuff you need to keep an army going. It’s all in Iraq right now," the governor said. He said equipment shortages are a problem for Guard units nationwide but are worse in Tennessee because the state has a large number of engineering units with the kind of equipment needed in Iraq. He said he is worried about a shortage of equipment, not manpower, if the state has to deploy the Guard during a natural disaster. In particular, he is concerned about deploying the Guard if an earthquake hit along the New Madrid fault line in West Tennessee. "If that happened, that’s exactly the kind of equipment you want to have," he said.
Read the full story

Money won't buy you security
Homeland Security grants, aimed at improving the security and preparedness of the country, have long been faulted for failing to achieve their aims. Often state and local responders have used the funds to buy equipment ill-suited to the real risks faced by their communities. This view got another shot in the arm with a recent auditors report in Arizona that showed the state doled out $175 million in federal homeland security grants since 9-11 without doing enough to ensure that it was properly awarded and spent.
The cash, distributed to 200 state agencies and local governments between 2003-2005, was spent on a wide array of items, ranging from protective gear for first responders to installation of video surveillance equipment for government facilities. However, the special audit conducted by the state legislature's Auditor General's Office said the Department of Emergency Management and the Office of Homeland Security in many cases either didn't document why projects received funding or if the money actually was spent for the approved purposes.
Read the AP story

Thar She blows! And this is what She's gonna do!
Experts at Kent State University have come up with a method to forecast the post-landfall impact of a storm to motivate citizens living in the path of an event to get out of harm's way while helping help emergency managers plan for the potential damage.

The proposed Hurricane Classification System would assess potential property damage and human injury based on past hurricanes, the open-water storm surge, rainfall, duration of hurricane force winds, maximum sustained winds, gust score and minimum central pressure.

Experts currently use the Saffir-Simpson scale to predict the force of developing hurricanes. The Hurricane Classification System would go one step further and predict the impact. “A system is needed to reflect the changing emphasis of hurricane damage,” Kent State researchers Jason Carl Senkbeil and Scott Christopher Sheridan wrote in their report.

“The HCS provides a clearer picture of hurricane intensity than prelandfall warning scales,” they wrote. “The HCS accounts for maximum sustained winds and storm surge, similar to the SS scale, and adds precipitation, the duration of hurricane force winds, a gust score and air pressure to categorize hurricanes into types.”
Read Kent State's report

Pet evacuation bill set to be law
Congress passed a bill on Wednesday requiring the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that state and local emergency preparedness plans include procedures for evacuating pets and service animals.
The bill -- now on its way to the White House for President Bush’s signature -- was inspired by the gut-wrenching scenes of Hurricane Katrina evacuees forced to leave their pets behind.
“When asked to choose between abandoning their pets and their own personal safety, many pet owners chose to remain with their pets, and some of them perished,” said Christopher Shays, (R, Conn).
However, many states face problems in finding adequate shelter space for animals and resistance from relief agencies like the Red Cross to allow pets and people to shelter together.
But public sentiment appears to have won the day. An October 2005 Zogby International poll found that a 54% of Americans disagreed with FEMA and American Red Cross policies that excluded pets from rescue efforts.
The original bill, sponsored by Tom Lantos (D, Ca.), was amended by the Senate recently to allow FEMA to fund the procurement, construction, leasing or renovation of emergency shelters that would accommodate people with pets. The House supported the change.


A New Deal for FEMA
Congressional negotiators have reached an agreement to overhaul FEMA. Under the deal hammered out late on Friday between Senate staff and representatives of several House committees, FEMA would be strengthened and become an independent entity within the Department of Homeland Security with the same protections currently provided to the U.S. Coast Guard and the Secret Service. It proposes increasing FEMA's $2.4 billion budget by 10% annually for three years. It would also raise emergency planning grants -- now at $185 million -- and boost funds for emergency medical and search-and-rescue teams. The deal now moves to a House-Senate panel that is hammering out a must-pass $33 billion Homeland Security spending bill. But the committee is under no obligation to include the extra money.The deal was fiercely opposed by DHS officials on the grounds that it would collapse some of the department’s new structure created by Secretary Michael Chertoff. Of particular concern: the pact would fold the Directorate for Preparedness, headed by undersecretary George Foresman, into FEMA. The directorate handles virtually all of DHS’s grant machinery and works with state, local, and private sector partners to identify threats and determine vulnerabilities of infrastructure to terrorist attack, as well as natural disasters. The directorate also works closely with police and state law enforcement officials.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AGREEMENT:
• The Administrator of FEMA is the principal advisor to the President for emergency management. The language is modeled after the Joint Chiefs of Staff language.
• Reunites Preparedness and Response with FEMA so that the Administrator is responsible for all phases of emergency management: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation.
• Stricter qualification requirements for Administrator of FEMA.
• Stronger Regional focus whereby FEMA would work closely and consistently with appropriate state and local governments, as well as private sector and non-governmental entities for planning emergency operations.
• Creates a system for ensuring that FEMA is engaged in appropriate planning, training and exercise programs with its counterparts at the federal, state and local levels. It also requires that FEMA establish specific performance measurements against which to measure progress in planning, training and exercises towards establishing readiness.
• Establishes a national disaster recovery strategy to assist with the recovery from future catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina.
• Establishes within the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children a center for locating children separated from their families after a disaster, as well as a voluntary registry to help reunite families separated by a disaster.


The Name Game
Once again, what to call FEMA is absorbing lawmakers and the White House. After agreeing only a few months ago that the name FEMA should stay, the administration's latest position is to scrap the moniker but keep “what-ever-you-want-to-call-it” in the Department of Homeland Security.
The see-sawing is part of the ongoing debate about how to restructure and improve the nation’s premier emergency management agency. Some have argued that after Hurricane Katrina, the name “FEMA” has come to stand for failure and should be dropped, while others insist that it's the performance of the agency that counts and that changing the name could cost a lot of money.
But the administration now believes calling a new and improved organization “FEMA” will cause confusion for employees who work in agencies that would be merged in to the new organization. For instance, an agency called FEMA should not be carrying out cyber security-related missions, because cyber security is not a traditional emergency management function, according to an administration critique of legislative proposals made public today by Congressional Quarterly.
Lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, House Homeland Security and the House Transportation and Infrastructure committees are currently negotiating language for a substitute amendment to the Homeland Security appropriations bill. But whatever it gets called, rest assured it will be referred to in the media as “the agency formerly known as FEMA”.


Disaster Plans are good for business come rain or shine

Congressional Quarterly's Homeland Security daily newsletter today carries a small item on how a Florida State University study found that disaster plans can help companies even if hurricanes, floods and earthquakes don't occur. How? According to the study, developing disaster preparedness plans at the workplace can improve employee morale. Florida State University Management Professor Wayne A. Hochwarter found that businesses with hurricane plans generally had employees with higher job satisfaction; employees were more willing to go beyond what management expects; and employees felt more support from their organization where they work. “There is a misperception that planning for a hurricane has value only if one hits,” Hochwarter said. “Certainly nobody wants a hurricane, but I think it’s important for companies to know the benefits to planning beyond simply dealing with the traumatic event.”

After Katrina, DoD Gets New Satellite Image Truck For U.S.
Great story from a Dow Jones colleague:
By Rebecca Christie
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON _ As the 2006 hurricane season gets underway, the Pentagon has a new way to get U.S. satellite imagery to emergency services workers quickly.
A new custom-built truck has been designed specifically for U.S. disaster zones. The new truck is a first for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a Defense Department agency that has traditionally delivered classified satellite data to commanders in overseas combat zones.
The truck made its debut this week, heading straight into the path of Tropical Storm Ernesto. The so-called Domestic Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System took about a year to develop and build, government officials said.
"We did a ribbon cutting on the fly. It departed South and is sitting in Jacksonville, Florida," said J.P. Patten, operations chief in NGA's office of global support.
The new truck cost about $4.5 million to design and build, including the first year of maintenance costs. It is based on a fire truck chassis from Wisconsin-based Pierce Manufacturing Inc. General Dynamics Corp. coordinated the computer systems, antennas and workstations that handle the satellite data. BAE Systems PLC provided software for making sense of the image data.
Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast last year, was the direct impetus for the new truck. When that storm hit, NGA didn't have any equipment designed for U.S. operations, nor was it used to working with publicly available data. In Katrina's aftermath, the imaging agency drew criticism for failing to get information to rescuers. "Disaster," a new book by Washington-based Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, says the agency's top-secret images weren't much help to workers outside a federal command post in Washington.
Patten said classified images weren't the problem. The best U.S. data is available from commercial sources, he said, but NGA didn't have procedures in place to take advantage of it and work with local officials.
Over the last year, the imaging agency has worked closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to learn how to work with state officials. With the new equipment, NGA analysts can work directly with local law enforcement once they get a green light from federal coordinators.
The new truck will be able to access new commercial data quickly and compare it to archival data that is already in hand. Satellite imaging involves very big computer files that are very unwieldy to handle and process. During Hurricane Katrina, commercial providers were unable to transmit a big portion of the urgently sought satellite pictures to emergency workers in the region.
"We actually had to use FedEx," said Rick Racine, a BAE Systems engineering specialist who works on the company's image-processing software.
During Katrina, NGA was able to provide some help using military equipment that happened not to be in Iraq at the time. Going forward, the agency will use its new U.S.-dedicated truck to get updated information out immediately after a storm.
"The trick here is to get fresh commercial imagery as soon as the clouds pass over," Patten said. "We are able, through our existing contracts, to access that very quickly."


Not Ready for Prime Time
On the eve of the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and with Tropical Storm
Ernesto bearing down on Florida and the Gulf Coast, a government watchdog
said specialized government rescue teams that search out and save people
trapped in damaged buildings are badly underfunded, understaffed and largely
unprepared for responding to catastrophes.

The findings, published in a 23-page report by Department of Homeland
Security Inspector General Richard Skinner, appear to contradict assurances
by senior administration officials that the federal government has learned
the lessons of its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and is prepared to
deal with major storms this year.

The National Urban Search and Rescue Response System was created 18 years
ago to save people trapped in collapsed or damaged buildings after
earthquakes, but has evolved into a national effort to quickly respond to
terrorist acts, hurricanes and other national disasters. The system relies
on 28 task forces in 19 states made up of local emergency responders. The
teams have responded to over 20 events including the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing and the 9/11 terror attacks. All 28 task forces deployed to the Gulf
Coast area in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year.

But despite the teams practical experience, Mr. Skinners's investigators
found that the task forces are often far from ready to perform their tasks.
"The task forces did not achieve (urban) system objectives and standards
because of delays in their hiring of full time staff to administer
day-to-day activities, budget constraints, and system management staff
shortages," the report said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is charged with coordinating and
monitoring the program. Of seven task forces the inspector general studied,
six fell below 50% of the urban system standards for operational readiness.
The report also accused FEMA of awarding equal funding to each task force
without evaluating their individual readiness or financial needs. It also
didn't clearly define program goals.

FEMA officials said they are still reviewing the report findings. FEMA
director R. David Paulison told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that "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."
Read the DHS IG Report

The nasty truth about evacuations?
Ever since Hurricane Katrina, much has been made about the need for mass evacuations before and after calamitous events. But not all events, like earthquakes and terrorist attacks, come with warnings. And not all evacuations depend on government appeals. Emergency managers have long known that people choose to flee or shelter in place based on their own perceptions of danger. Nonetheless, Homeland Security has put much energy in trying to make states draw up "mandatory" evacuations plans, sometimes over the objections of local officials. The limits of those plans in the face of panic is the subject of debate after a new study by the University of West Virginia. According to the survey carried by the Associated Press, suburban Washington, D.C., residents likely would jump in their cars and drive through the Eastern Panhandle, Maryland and Virginia in the event of a terror attacks. West Virginia officials say the survey underscores the need for a regional plan to handle an exodus of between 6 million and 7 million people. The WVU survey of 800 residents of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia also shows many believe an attack is likely, Gerber said. "This is a very real issue that should be addressed," Gerber said. "There's going to be some sort of large-scale self evacuation." However, Homeland security officials disputed the WVU study's findings, although they acknowledged that they had not reviewed it. They said a study conducted by the University of Virginia last year found that most residents would comply with "shelter in place" directives if there were a terror attack.
Read more

Brownie says FEMA still can't do a heckuva job
FEMA Director David Paulison and other senior DHS officials have been stressing the department’s readiness to deal with disaster, especially hurricanes. This is in spite of the fact that FEMA stands at only 84% of its authorized staffing level. Now Paulison's predecessor, Michael Brown, is saying that the staffing levels are representative of the problems that have dogged the agency since being folded into DHS. Speaking to Reuters news agency, Brown said that the Bush administration has failed to learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. "Rather than address the systemic problems that existed within the Department of Homeland Security, we're now addressing superficial things," Brown said. "As long as you have those inequities in terms of budget and response and everything else, FEMA will always be the stepchild," said Brown, who is now a private consultant specializing in disaster management.
Read Reuters

As the storm season slips by NOLA and the Feds almost ready...
With the most active period of the annual hurricane season just starting, federal and city officials in New Orleans say they are finally "close" to nailing down evacuation and sheltering plans for the city's poorest and most needy residents. Officials are now asking residents who lack the resources to get out of harm's way to begin using public transit to head to three main gathering centers no later than 50 hours before a Category 3 storm, or higher, is predicted to reach the Louisiana coast. Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security director, told the Times Picayune that he realizes it might seem premature to ask people to begin moving out more than two days before the wind starts whipping, especially because a storm's course could shift dramatically. But for a mass evacuation to succeed, city officials and residents must start early, he said. The early action will be necessary, Ebbert added, because New Orleans does not intend to operate a shelter during a storm of Category 3 or stronger.
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Guard Unable to Deal With 2 Hurricanes
A month before Hurricane Katrina came ashore last year, Louisiana National Guard officials told local television stations in New Orleans that troops and equipment needed to deal with hurricanes were stuck in Iraq. After Katrina, officials backed away from those remarks. Now once again National Guard officials are highlighting their manpower and equipment shortfalls. An Associated Press story, quoting force leaders, today reports how the Guard, strapped by war and equipment shortages, will find it difficult to deal with two or more major hurricanes if they sweep ashore in different regions around the same time. To counter equipment shortfalls caused largely by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Guard has borrowed more than $500 million worth of equipment from the active duty military to restock its units. Thousands of trucks, Humvees and other supplies have been shifted mostly from inland states' Guard units closer to where storms are more likely to strike. But that may be too little, too late, for some states. If a hurricane hits North Carolina and another one spins toward Texas, "we would have to make some very difficult decisions," Col. Pat Tennis, the National Guard's director of operations, told the Associated Press.
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Governors Oppose National Guard Proposal
The nation’s governors have called on lawmakers to reject a House proposal that would give the president broader authority over the National Guard in disaster relief. “This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors as commanders and chief of the Guard to the federal government,” governors from 51 U.S. states and territories said in a letter to House and Senate leaders. The governors urged lawmakers to strip out language in the House-passed 2007 defense authorization bill to allow the president to take control of the Guard during “a serious natural or manmade disaster, accident or catastrophe that occurs in the United States, its territories and possessions or Puerto Rico.” Currently, the National Guard remains under state control for natural disasters. In effect, the move would allow the federal government to take over a state’s National Guard as part of relief efforts. The Pentagon floated the idea last year after Hurricane Katrina.
Read the letter

Whom do you believe?
Eileen Sullivan of Congressional Quarterly's daily Homeland Security bulletin has found a great story about how an intern working for the Federation of American Scientists is fixing the preparedness message of the Department of Homeland Security. The story follows:

CQ WEEKLY – VANTAGE POINT
Aug. 14, 2006

Intern Seeks to One-Up DHS Web Site
By Eileen Sullivan, CQ Staff
Whom do you trust for advice in an emergency, the Department of Homeland Security — or a 20-year-old college intern?

That’s the choice the Federation of American Scientists laid out this month, when it posted a Web page offering corrections and updates to the department’s emergency preparedness Web site, Ready.gov.

The scientists’ countersite, www.Reallyready.org, is the handiwork of Emily Hesaltine, who’s about to start her junior year at the University of Virginia as a systems engineering and economics major. Hesaltine has found some genuinely suspect advice on the Homeland Security page, including a diagram that directs readers to merely walk onward and hide behind the next corner should they find themselves 100 feet from the center of a nuclear blast. As Hesaltine and the FAS point out, pretty much the last thing you want to do under such circumstances is to walk toward the detonation site.

Many of the other alterations Hesaltine made to the government’s site are more stylistic. “The Web site really isn’t that useful if you’re trying to prepare yourself for a terrorist attack,” she says. “The way that it’s written is useful if it’s written in print,” she says — noting that most Web surfers lightly skim material until some key word or phrase jumps out at them.

So the scientific group set out to trim some of the content and put some eye-catching words in bolder fonts. “We used the same information but made it easier to use,” she says. “Our goal wasn’t really to shame them or embarrass them.”

Still, the FAS’s collection of changes isn’t making anyone at Homeland Security jump for joy. "They misrepresent in some areas, they mislead in others," spokesman Russ Knocke says of his department’s self-appointed watchdogs. For example, he notes, the scientists call out the government site for its “generic advice, unnecessarily lengthy descriptions and verbatim repetition of details on multiple pages.” How, Knocke asks, can something be both generic — i.e., tossed-off boilerplate language — and much too long to be useful?

As for verbatim repetition, Knocke says that’s one of the site’s virtues: “In emergency communications that, quite frankly, is the name of the game. Think of ‘Stop, Drop and Roll.’ ”

Other security experts agree that the FAS site is something of a cheap shot. Preparedness consultant Jerry Hauer says he’s had plenty of reason in the past to unload on DHS. This time, though, he demurs: “Anytime that the government does something, it tends to take longer, it tends to cost more money. You get a summer intern, you can usually do it quickly, if you get the right intern.”

The department’s Knocke adds that the new site “could be counterproductive. There are now dual Web sites that are out there attempting to provide assistance and helpful guidance.” Some sorts of repetition are more objectionable than others.

Source: CQ Weekly

DHS reaction to terror plot wins cautious praise
After months of having his leadership skills questioned, Secretary Michael Chertoff has emerged as the undisputed public face and voice of the U.S. government response to the alleged London-based plot to blow up transatlantic flights over the Atlantic Ocean. And where Homeland Security officials in the past have received widespread ridicule for issuing vague, nationwide terrorism alerts that put the public and state and local governments unduly on edge, the department on Thursday calibrated its advisories to focus on what Chertoff said was a "precaution against any members of the plot who may still be at large" and on preventing "any would-be copycats." But critics say that it would be a mistake to read too much into the response. Responding to aviation threats is perhaps the best developed ability of the department. Moreover, the response was purely reactive. For years, aviation security experts have known of the danger that liquid explosives and incendiaries have represented to commercial aviation, but DHS only decided to close that loophole after the latest threat emerged.
Read The Washington Post Story

And the beef goes on
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has decreased the number of hurricanes it expects this season to seven to nine storms. But FEMA Director David Paulison said, “This is not a time to be complacent. It only takes one storm.” Yet battles over how to prepare for that one storm rage in Louisiana between state emergency workers and federal officials. The Times-Picayune reports that the differences are over how many beds they need to shelter coastal residents fleeing a killer storm. FEMA and its overseer, the Department of Homeland Security, say there is enough potential shelter space in Louisiana to house 150,000 people. But Col. Jeff Smith, the acting director of the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he doesn't believe there are enough suitable buildings or personnel, even with federal assistance, to reach that level. Smith told the paper that a three-hour meeting with federal officials on Monday to resolve the matter ended in an impasse.
Read the Times-Picayune story

The more things change...
Robert Block reports in the Wall Street Journal today that since Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has made strides in improving everything from its logistics office to phone operators. Under R. David Paulison, the former Miami fire chief who took over in April as FEMA's director, the agency has streamlined its operations; hired hundreds more employees; outfitted delivery trucks with satellite tracking systems; purchased record amounts of ice and water; and signed forward contracts worth billions of dollars with big engineering firms and the U.S. military for emergency supplies and services that could be activated during a disaster. Yet doubts still remain about what impact those changes will have on the agency's ability to handle another major crisis. In particular, critics worry that FEMA is being micromanaged by its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, question whether the technology that FEMA has deployed to track relief supplies will work as advertised, and say there is confusion over changes in the National Response Plan, the country's blueprint for handling emergencies. Most hyped of all the changes, insiders say, is the agency's much touted new ability to track FEMA supplies en route to the disaster zone. In reality FEMA is equipped to track only trucks delivering its own pre-positioned supplies. It can't monitor the shipments of private contractors, upon whom the federal government relies heavily during emergencies. There also is some confusion about whether FEMA can communicate directly with drivers should they get lost or if FEMA needs to divert them. "Without the ability to communicate with a driver, all we have is a dot moving aimlessly around a computer screen. What's the value in that?" says one senior FEMA official in Mississippi.
Read The Wall Street Journal Story

Relief for terrorist heat wave?
Some states have run response efforts to last week's killer heat wave through their emergency management departments, using strategies that resemble those reserved for terrorist attacks or other natural disasters. "It's strange that we don't usually think of heat waves as serious health hazards or catastrophic disasters, because in typical years heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined," Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University told the Christian Science Monitor.
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Chertoff sets the record straight...er, well, kinda...
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Friday told La. Gov Kathleen Blanco that, despite what Louisiana thinks, it's not the feds job to whisk Katrina victims living in federal trailers to safety if a new storm strikes. Chertoff was responding to Blanco’s 18-page letter in July cataloging what she saw as multiple shortcomings in DHS’s plans to deal with the 2006 hurricane season. Blanco questioned whether Washington was doing enough to guarantee enough shelter space for future hurricane evacuees. Chertoff rejected the criticism, saying it’s the state’s duty to evacuate and shelter its people. "I must disagree with the assertion that the federal government has primary or exclusive responsibility for evacuation of travel trailer mobile homes and group site residents," he wrote. "These residents are entitled to the same service from the state and local governments as all other Louisiana citizens." He added that DHS would help expand shelters in Louisiana for evacuees who don't have any place to go when a hurricane threatens coastal parishes. But rather than clear up the misunderstandings, Mr. Chertoff underscored how dangerously confused the situation in Louisiana is so late in the hurricane season. For instance, his letter did not address Blanco’s criticism that federal officials were introducing untested ideas into emergency plans without consulting the state; moves, that Blanco warned, "will only serve to confuse the response".
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Read the Letter [1.4MB PDF]

Texas move 'em
The Texas divisions of homeland security and emergency management are among the best in the country, adept at both preparing for disasters and implementing their emergency plans. They are also good at learning from past mistakes. A good example of this came last weekend when highway crews installed blue contraflow signs on Interstates 45 and 10, U.S. 59 and U.S. 290. The high-tech signs (they flash during an evacuation to notify motorists of the lanes that are open for contraflow traffic) are part of a $1.35 million package the state set up to prevent another chaotic evacuation like the one prompted by Hurricane Rita last September. In that evacuation, about 60 people, including 23 nursing home patients, died along the state's traffic-clogged highways. Thousands of motorists were trapped on roadways, and some ended up stranded as their cars broke down or ran out of gas.
See the AP story

The Politics of Disaster
Federal officials say they did all they could to help Katrina victims once the extent of the disaster became clear, but a story in today's Times-Picayune casts more doubt on this assertion. The article flags a fresh report from the Government Accountability Office, blasting the Small Business Administration for slow-rolling disaster loans along the Gulf Coast in the weeks and months after the disaster.

The GAO compares the SBA's Katrina performance to the agency's response following the 1994 Northridge earthquake. But it didn't need to go that far back to find a ready comparison. In 2004, during the height of the presidential election season, Hurricane Charley barreled through Florida, an key electoral state. The federal response was swift and sure: within two days, the feds had moved 2 million meals and 8.1 million pounds of ice to Florida, and opened twelve disaster recovery centers. And within days of landfall, the SBA had disbursed $4.4 million in loans to residents and businesses there.

Compare this to Katrina: four days after the storm hit: 1.9 million meals and 1.7 million pounds of ice disbursed and only one FEMA disaster center opened. And the SBA? after nearly six weeks, the agency disbursed a paltry $533,000 in loans to disaster victims.

A Congressional investigation into the federal response to Katrina noted that Washington's disaster efforts in recent years have seemed curiously pegged to the national political cycle. "FEMA appears to have responded in a timely and effective manner three months before an election in Florida, a state governed by Jeb Bush, the president's brother,'' the Republican-controlled House investigative committee said. "We cannot ignore the disparities between the lavish treatment by FEMA of survivors of Hurricane Charley'' and the fed response following Katrina, in an off-year for national elections.
Read the Picayune story
Read the GAO report [2MB PDF]

JULY 28, 2006

FEMA by any other name
A proposed rebranding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency died today in the Senate. Maine’s powerful Republican senator, Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee wanted to rename FEMA in an effort to rid the agency of its old baggage. The name change proposal, embedded in an emergency management overhaul bill, which would have changed FEMA's name to the U.S. Emergency Management Authority, didn't survive the final markup. Sen. Tom Coburn, (R-Okla) said the name change would cost millions in relabeling costs and do little to rehabilitate the troubled agency. "I don't think changing the name is going to make one bit of difference in terms of performance," he said.

JULY 28, 2006

DHS talk is still cheap, Gov Blanco says
In a sharply worded letter, La. Gov. Kathleen Blanco this week told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that she's still not convinced the feds are putting their assets where their mouth is. "For the first time in history, the primary federal focus has been on pre-storm evacuation as opposed to post storm response," Ms. Blanco wrote in the 18-page missive cataloging what she saw as multiple shortcomings in what Mr. Chertoff has promised to devote to evacuating and sheltering up to 150,000 Louisiana residents. "We have received no indication from you that staffing, logistics and security for additional shelters have been addressed," she wrote in the letter, which was first reported in The New York Times.
Read the Letter   [5MB PDF]

JULY 26, 2006

You are your own first responder!
Echoing a key finding of our book, USA Today says that after the panicked evacuation of Houston last year, many Texans felt a "cry wolf" hysteria had infected the news media and public officials. But the paper points out the hurricane lessons should be unmistakable to us all by now: When in doubt, get out. It quotes Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's new mantra that all government plans "begin with the presumption that individuals take personal responsibility." In other words, count only on yourself.
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JULY 25, 2006

Feds blasted for using cookie-cutter approach
The News Tribune in Tacoma, WA, carries a great article highlighting the problem of the one-size-fits-all disaster response approach that the Department of Homeland Security has been pushing since Hurricane Katrina. Fighting last year's war, so to speak, DHS has been demanding that state and local officials develop plans and training programs to prepare them to respond to an event with a few days advance warning, like a killer storm. But as the article points out, the most likely disaster in the Northwest, a severe earthquake or tsunami, would come without warning. 'We're being asked to develop a plan that we will probably never use," said Steve Bailey, director of emergency services for Pierce County. "It would seem to be a waste of time and money. We have many more pressing problems.'"

Check out the article to learn how Washington is pushing back. At stake are millions of dollars in federal disaster grants and loans, not to mention effective, pragmatic emergency planning.
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JULY 24, 2006

Ready for disaster? Feds, locals disagree
Along similar lines, the Sacramento Bee has another story about DHS and local responders not seeing eye to eye on how prepared the country is to handle disaster. According to the report, the results of a $5 million attempt by Homeland Security to determine whether states and cities have adequate emergency plans shows significant disagreements between feds and locals over how prepared the nation is for another catastrophe. The differing assessments reflect continuing confusion over how states and cities need to handle a catastrophe and what types of disasters they should be prepared to handle. That, in turn, threatens to undermine the federal government's $18 billion effort to help them prepare for disasters and terrorist attacks.

"There's a substantial gap between our understanding of preparedness and that of Homeland Security's," said Jim Mullen, the director of Washington state's emergency management division, which rated itself less prepared than federal officials did. "There is not a recognition of the full thrust of what has to be accomplished at the state and local level, and that's because there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what we do and what we need."
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JULY 23, 2006

U.S. Government Plans Overhaul in Disaster Aid
The New York Times breaks news that after enduring months of criticism and ridicule, FEMA is revamping several of its core disaster relief programs, enacting changes that will include sharply cutting emergency cash assistance for victims of major disasters, and more control over access to free hotel rooms for evacuees. The new rules trim cash stipends from $2,000 to $500 and require stringent identification and residency checks. Such precautions were not taken consistently last year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, an oversight auditors said led to $1.4 billion in fraudulent aid claims. It seems FEMA is responding purely to political criteria once again. Whereas immediately after the storm the agency was under pressure to sling hash, serve beer and run a bar tab later, in the aftermath of fraud accusations, the agency is now swinging in the other direction.
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JULY 21, 2006

DHS builds database to ID first responders
Nearly five years after 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security still has no national terrorist watchlist. But it's now building one to vet the thousands of police, firefighters and other emergency personnel across the nation. Called the National Emergency Responder Credentialing System, DHS says this database, operational next year, will determine who gets access to disaster sites. Alice Lipowicz of Government Computer News writes that the little-publicized credentialing system will help prohibit unauthorized entry of volunteers who may not be qualified to assist. Given how many volunteers saved lives in New Orleans and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, and that access to such a system in catastrophe may not be possible, the wisdom of such a system is questionable.
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JULY 21, 2006

Debate Over Keeping FEMA in DHS Comes to a Head
Congressional Quarterly reports that the congressional battle over the future FEMA is far from over. Although the Senate has agreed that the agency should be strengthened but remain in the department of Homeland Security, many legislators in the House still want to see the agency restored to a stand-alone cabinet agency far from DHS.
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