02-Sep-2005

Press coverage requested - What was FEMA doing?

Press Opportunity
Hurricane Katrina is an opportunity for the organized news services to show that they can do something useful that is beyond the resources of most bloggers. To wit, investigate FEMA's entire participation before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Background: The country's preparedness for Katrina appears not to meet expectations.
The comments in the press about how slow the Bush administration was to respond to the Hurricane Katrina disaster have the sound of Monday morning quarterbacking, but most people would likely have expected a higher level of readiness and quicker response than was demonstrated by the 02 Sep 2005 arrival of National Guard troops and FEMA resources in New Orleans.

• This was five days after Katrina came ashore at Mobile, Gulfport, Pascagoula, Biloxi, and New Orleans with winds up to 140 mph.
  
• This was six days after it had become obvious that Katrina, then a Cat 5 storm, was on a northward path to hit the Gulf Coast, at or not far from New Orleans.
  
• This was years after there was general knowledge that New Orleans, below sea level and with deteriorated coastal marshlands, would certainly flood if it was hit by a Cat 5 hurricane and would probably flood when (not if) it was hit by a Cat 4. Among many warnings about the danger to New Orleans was the October 2004 National Geographic article "Gone with the Water". (The Drudge Report provided a link to this article today.)

We've also known since 9/11 that the U.S. needs a systematic plan and response for disasters, whether such disasters are man-made or natural. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is nearly four years old and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now a DHS agency, has been around for a generation or two with roots practically back to the founding of the nation.

Katrina is the first large real-event exercise for DHS/FEMA since 9/11. It appears that FEMA requires about four days after a predicted disaster to begin to provide the predictable human and social necessities such as food, water, shelter, and security. It may be that it takes that long to begin the rescue of a city, even with long-range planning. That would be sobering if true, because we can hardly expect a terrorist attack to be as clearly defined before the fact as a hurricane.

What the press can do
So here's a useful topic for the news services: What are our emergency agencies, particularly DHS and FEMA, prepared to do? More specifically, what does FEMA think its job is, does FEMA think it's prepared to do that job, is FEMA actually prepared to do that job, and in the specific case of Katrina, did FEMA fail in the execution of that job?

Some starting points
• Both the National Geographic article above and today's Le Monde say that a hurricane in New Orleans is one of FEMA's three "most dire threats", the other two being a California earthquake and a New York City terrorist attack.
  
• The same Le Monde article (in French*), "L'administration Bush aurait ignoré les prédictions des experts" ("The Bush administration was ignorant of the predictions of the experts"), claims that Bush's Iraq operations led to underfunding FEMA.
  
• Slate has a 01 Sep 2005 opinion piece, "Department of Homeland Screw-Up", that expresses the same concerns I've outlined here, but in much greater detail.
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  * For English translation, copy the link to AltaVista Babel Fish Translation

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