When trying to access blame, sometimes it’s best to look back to the past - a year in this case. When this was written it was probably blown off as liberal spin. This is crazy accurate on FEMA and the Bush administration leadership.
The whole article is rather long but I pulled some highlights to post.
A Disaster Waiting to Happen
Sept 28 2004
As FEMA weathers Bush administration policy changes, some insiders fear that concerns over terrorism are trumping protection from hurricanes and other natural hazards.
As storms continue to batter the Panhandle, no one would call Florida lucky. But with national elections just around the corner, the hurricanes could scarcely have hit at a better time or place for obtaining federal disaster assistance. “They’re doing a good job,” one former FEMA executive says of the Bush administration’s response efforts. “And the reason why they’re doing that job is because it’s so close to the election, and they can’t f–k it up, otherwise they lose Florida – and if they lose Florida, they might lose the election.”
Such political considerations may indeed make this round of recoveries go better than most. But long before this hurricane season, some emergency managers inside and outside of government started sounding an alarm that still rings loudly. Bush administration policy changes and budget cuts, they say, are sapping FEMA’s long-term ability to cushion the blow of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornados, wildfires and other natural disasters.
-In Louisiana, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer.
-In June, Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency’s government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency’s decay. “Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation’s emergency management capability is being eroded,” he wrote. “Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.”
-But the merger into DHS has compounded the agency’s problems, says FEMA employee and union president Pleasant Mann. “Before, we reported straight to the White House, and now we’ve got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of us, and a lot of this bureaucracy doesn’t think what we’re doing is that important, because terrorism isn’t our number one,” he says. “The biggest frustration here is that we at FEMA have responded to disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11, and here are people who haven’t responded to a kitchen fire telling us how to deal with terrorism. You know, there were a lot of people who fell down on the job on 9/11, but it wasn’t us.”
-And indeed, some in-need areas have been inexplicably left out of the program. “In a sense, Louisiana is the floodplain of the nation,” noted a 2002 FEMA report. “Louisiana waterways drain two thirds of the continental United States. Precipitation in New York, the Dakotas, even Idaho and the Province of Alberta, finds its way to Louisiana’s coastline.” As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have been repeatedly been damaged by flood waters – the highest number of any state. And yet, this summer FEMA denied Louisiana communities’ pre-disaster mitigation funding requests.
In Jefferson Parish, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue is baffled by the development. “You would think we would get maximum consideration” for the funds, he says. “This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.”
-In fact, disaster professionals are leaving many parts of FEMA in droves, compromising the agency’s ability to do its job. “Since last year, so many people have left who had developed most of our basic programs,” Mann says. “A lot of the institutional knowledge is gone. Everyone who was able to retire has left, and then a lot of people have moved to other agencies.”
There are at least two reasons for the exodus. On the one hand, FEMA, like the rest of the federal government’s civil service, is hitting a demographic brick wall. Its staff of veteran managers, most of them baby boomers, is reaching retirement age. But another factor is at work: disillusionment at the agency’s new direction under the Bush administration.
-“An Exposed Nerve”
Waugh, the Georgia State University expert, says that the recent hurricanes could serve as a wake-up call to highlight FEMA’s drift in priorities.
“If you talk to FEMA people and emergency management people around the country, people have almost been hoping for a major natural disaster like a hurricane, just to remind DHS and the administration that there are other big things – even bigger things than al Qaeda,” Waugh says. “This is an exposed nerve in the emergency management community, in the sense that resources have been shifted away from hurricanes, tornados and other kinds of disasters – the kind of disasters that are more likely to occur than terrorism.”
In case Congress hasn’t gotten the message, former FEMA director James Lee Witt recently restated it in strong terms. “I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded”, he testified at a March 24, 2004, hearing on Capitol Hill. “I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.”
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-09-28/cover_story.html