When the next hurricane threatens to strike, how will you get the news? For that matter, will you survive? Some want to give the Federal Emergency Management Agency even more authority over disaster response than it already has, even while it struggles to modernize the country’s emergency alert system.
FEMA has gotten a virtual free pass for the last two years; since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans down in August 2005, there have been no hurricanes or other disasters of any comparable size.
Yet some claim that FEMA’s failures in responding to Katrina derive from it not having enough power under the law to accomplish its mission. Senate lawmakers are currently drafting legislation to update the Stafford Act of 1988, under which FEMA has responsibility for disaster response, which Senate staffers say does not cover catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina.
Mitchell Moss, the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University and an investigator at the center, said of the Stafford Act, “Despite good intentions, it doesn’t work. Congress is always having to work around its limits.”
Among the limitations Moss cited, the law caps federal loans to state and local governments to offset lost tax revenue following a disaster at $5 million — a wholly inadequate figure. In 2002 and 2003, for example, New York City lost nearly $3 billion in tax revenues following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After Katrina struck, New Orleans had to lay off almost half of its workforce — about 3,000 employees — because the city didn’t have enough cash to pay them (the law allowed the federal government to reimburse the city for employee overtime, but not for the salaries themselves).
Not only did the city face overwhelming devastation, but with its tax base destroyed it had no way to pay employees when it needed them most, Moss said.
In addition, the law prohibits federal assistance to utilities except if those utilities are publicly owned or nonprofit. This was an impediment to New Orleans regaining phone service after Katrina because in the lawless interlude that followed, BellSouth could not provide security for employees needed to maintain service, and the federal government was prohibited from assisting, Moss said. Utility workers should be considered “emergency responders” in the aftermath of a disaster or catastrophic event, he added. — Government Executive
Nowhere in the discussions, unfortunately, is any mention made of the real reason why so many people suffered and died in New Orleans. FEMA forced them to suffer and allowed them to die by, among other things, keeping out rescue workers and relief supplies, not knowing what they’re doing, and tying victims up in red tape. Oh, did I mention wasting taxpayer money?
It gets better. President Bush in 2006 ordered the Department of Homeland Security to modernize the nation’s emergency alert system, and DHS gave the task over to FEMA. Two years later we’ve seen nothing but the occasional prototype and pilot project and a whole lot of talk, but the so-called Integrated Public Alert and Warning System is no closer to reality.
The House Homeland Security subcommittee on emergency communications, preparedness and response held hearings Wednesday on the state of the IPAWS system, with subcommittee chairman Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) calling for FEMA to explain why it hasn’t fully implemented the executive order.
“We cannot do everything at once so later this year we are rolling out the first increment to support digital alerts,” FEMA assistant administrator Martha Rainville said in written testimony. “Later on, we will roll out additional increments to support risk-based alerts, non-English language alerts and alerts for special-needs communities.”
The country’s existing Emergency Alert System is an audio and text only broadcast distributed over television and radio networks. The IPAWS system would “support audio, video, text and data messages sent to residential telephones, to Web sites, to pagers, to e-mail accounts and to cellphones,” Rainville said.
Of course, if you think those alerts are coming to your cell phone any time soon, think again. Rainville said that FEMA doesn’t have statutory authority to implement parts of the system.
In a Feb. 19 filing with the FCC, less than two months before the commission adopted technical rules for the commercial mobile alert system, Rainville said FEMA lacked statutory authority during non-emergency periods to be involved with critical components of the commercial mobile alert system, including aggregator and gateway functions as well as the trust model, when warnings are issued by non-federal agencies.
In the FCC’s commercial mobile alert ruling on April 9, Chairman Kevin Martin said it would have been better if a federal entity were in place to oversee alert aggregator and gateway functions. Commissioner Michael Copps was more critical of FEMA in his statement, triggering an angry response the following day.
“It is unfortunate that Commissioner Copps chose to question FEMA’s role and responsibility without first talking with the agency’s administrator before making his provocative comments,” said FEMA in a statement. The statement said Copps mischaracterized FEMA as an unwilling partner in the process to reform the nation’s public warning system. FEMA also accused Copps of failing to mention the FEMA’s apparent lack of clear legal authority during non-emergency periods to manage the commercial mobile alert system. — RCR Wireless News
The system uses the standards-based Common Alerting Protocol internally, but no provision has yet been made to provide the data to the public.
FEMA is the agency, some people think, that somehow needs more power and authority in order to respond effectively to disasters. It seems that they’ve misused the power and authority they already had. Giving them more power and control simply will mean more misuse of power, more widespread impact of erroneous emergency messages, and more disaster victims needlessly suffering and dying.
The bitter irony of Hurricane Katrina is that fewer people would have died and New Orleans would have recovered more quickly if the federal government had not responded in any way.
Don’t you feel safe now? You shouldn’t. Forget about Homeland Security and get yourself and your family really ready for the next disaster. And stay tuned to Homeland Stupidity where storm information is posted in the sidebar each hurricane season.
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Ray
May 19, 2008
The authority someone should be given to prevent a repeat of this is the authority to shut down New Orleans. Lets face it, New Orleans in already almost an island with water on almost all sides. Because of erosion the coast is fact approaching. Couple this with the fact that most of New Orleans is below sea level and you have a recipe for unavoidable disaster.
We forget that Katrina actually missed New Orleans. Had a storm like Katrina hit dead on, even the new proposed dike system would not have stopped the storm. In fact it would have been much worse. The French Quarter, which survived the last time because it is actually slightly above sea level, would be under 15 foot of water. The dome where everyone was evacuated to, would have been so badly hit that the people who took refuge there would have all died.
Why in the world are we allowing this to be rebuilt?
Just another victim
May 22, 2008
It gets worse, with regard to IPAWS, FEMA delegated the design and deployment of the program to Sandia National Laboratories who promptly wasted over half the money they spent on internal bureaucracy. All they really did was to spend a tremendous amount of money on their own project management and planning while they purchased, more or less, of the shelf technology from five smaller companies which did the vast amount of the work that was actually done on the system.
Despite the lack of scoping and requirements definition from FEMA and confusion at SNL there was actually a Spiral 0 program deployed and an expanded Spiral 1 program ready to be deployed in January 2008 that would have greatly enhanced the safety of the citizens of the hurricane belt. It was capable of notifying affected populations by phone and cell phone, SMS text messaging, email, traditional EAS alerts, TTY/TTD and by using a unique video interpretation service offered by a company named Deaf Link. The system also had the ability to securely and rapidly integrate with other alerting software to provide for an easy and secure way for various federal, state and local jurisdictions to share information. In addition, FEMA was working with the FCC to help put a system in place to enable the cell phone system to reliably broadcast messages to the population by cell phone in a disaster, which doesn’t work too well now for a variety of complex technical reasons. At the time it was shutdown IPAWS was already partially installed, the security and interoperability pieces were all but finished, and a unique geo-spatial routing capability to ensure everyone that needed an alert would get one was ready to go. Sandia National Laboratories repeatedly asked FEMA to meet to discuss approving Spiral 1 and to release the funding necessary to support the deployment but FEMA refused to meet with them. The political infighting got so bad that FEMA cancelled meetings that had been scheduled in Washington at the last minute despite the fact that the Sandia personnel had come in from New Mexico specifically for the meeting on more than one occasion.
Despite Sandia’s continuing efforts, the program manager, Lance Craver, stonewalled the SNL folks and eventually got around to cancelling the Sandia agreement. He unilaterally ordered the system turned off denying this vital capability to the American people. Over a month after he had cancelled the existing efforts the Director of FEMA, David Paulison, and the Secretary of DHS, Michael Chertoff, were going around telling the people around the country including Alabama and Mississippi, how great IPAWS was, how successful it was going to be and used it as a premier example of how they were helping the citizens of the region. They got away with this for a while because the small companies that had contracted to do the work thought it was immoral to turn the system off. For as long as each of them could sustain it they kept employees on staff that were dedicated to the IPAWS effort and kept the system running at their own expense. Eventually they have had to cease their valiant efforts one by one as they teetered toward bankruptcy trying to do the right thing for the nation.
The visionary leadership of two FEMA employees, David Webb and Kevin Briggs has been destroyed by petty bureaucratic infighting and revenge seeking by Lance Craver and Martha Rainville. The leaders of DHS and FEMA continue making idiots out of themselves talking about how great IPAWS will be even though it doesn’t exist anymore as an actual capability. Evidently they still have not even been told about FEMA shutting IPAWS down given Secretary Chertoff’s comments of May 20th, 2008. http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/speeches/sp_1211396127538.shtm The result, the country has flushed another $17 million down the toilet and FEMA has given the state and local emergency managers in the hurricane states proof that FEMA could care less about the lives of their citizens and that it puts the political aspirations of people like Lance Craver and Martha Rainville ahead of public safety, the will of congress and the direct orders of the president. As a sidebar, Martha Rainville may have committed perjury in front of a congressional sub-committee last week when she said that there was a sudden last minute ruling that FEMA didn’t have the authority to proceed with IPAWS in February. Lance Craver was publicly talking about his theory that they didn’t have the appropriate authority in the spring of the previous year, in plenty of time to seek clarification, direction or changed legislation to correct any problems that might have really existed with their authority to act.
Oh, one more thought, if he had this theory, backed up by FEMA counsel didn’t Lance Craver have the legal responsibility to shut IPAWS spiral 0 down on the spot? When he and Martha chose to bide their time did they break the law and violate their respective legal and fiduciary responsibilities? As Former Senator Howard Baker once asked, “What did he know and when did he know it?” This whole debacle is a disgrace, and the mouthpieces for FEMA get up in front of congress and continue to lie and mislead and in the meantime citizens along the gulf and Atlantic coasts wait for another storm.
Chris
May 24, 2008
Giving FEMA more power would be a huge mistake. They have been empowered for the past 30 years by one executive order after another. They have such a huge budget and yet it is never implemented. People need to start looking at the bigger picture. Why does the president think he should have sole control over the national guard? Why does FEMA, need more emergency powers? Why are Americans giving up more and more freedoms for more supposed “security”? Why are we allowing this to happen??
Ray
May 24, 2008
Chris:
If we expect the federal government to come in and bail us out then we have to give them the power to do so. Of course that is a BIG IF.
I say drop some of the power of FEMA. At the same time lets get it out of the department of homeland security. But then lets tell New Orleans they are totally on their own next time around. No federal disaster aid PERIOD.
Ray
May 25, 2008
By the way I love it trying to come up with a reliable system based on cell phones. In any disaster the one thing you can pretty much count on not working is the cell phone system.
#1 It is designed to work with normal loads and even if it is working, it is automatically overloaded by the traffic generated by people checking on each other and the like in a disaster. Heck I live near a University, and we can count on all of the cell systems being down from overload for the weekends of student move in and move out. An actual disaster is ten times that bad.
#2 Plus the cell system is dependent upon to many individual items all of which are easily damaged in about any disaster.
#3 The media uses cell phones and other services from the cell companies and they get priority. So as soon as they show up, even if the system is up, and nobody is overloading it, they will.
Dec 18, 2008
Securing the homeland, one liberty at a time - Homeland Stupidity