I was not on the ground there; I was safely at home near Washington, D.C., glued to the television set. Just when it had seemed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was finally finding its footing, now FEMA was incompetently floundering.
The response of the New Orleans authorities was also a stark contrast to the strength shown by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And it contrasted again two years later in 2007 when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger confronted massive wildfires in his state. Schwarzenegger responded swiftly, appeared at every fire site and refugee camp, gave nonstop press conferences and comforted the weary.
The response of elected officials makes a difference in disasters. When they’re strong and competent, they can lead recoveries and inspire devastated, discouraged and displaced people to struggle on and begin recovering. When they fail, response is hindered, recovery delayed, and the pain of a disaster is prolonged even further.
When it comes to emergency preparation, training and education, there are plenty of options for operational professionals. First responders and emergency managers know their business. In addition to their daily duties, they train and exercise constantly, can draw on experience and are usually familiar with all relevant parties in the surrounding jurisdictions.
That’s not the case with elected officials. For them, there’s a constant churn based on electoral terms, preparation is spotty and uncoordinated, training is haphazard at best and exercising is optional. Because these officials are usually sovereign in their jurisdictions, no one can force them to attend exercises or classes. They’re also influenced by political rivalries and ideological differences that emergency managers lack.
Across the country, the range of preparation for elected officials varies widely. Probably the best state program is in California, which faces a wide variety of potential natural disasters.
After 9/11, California upgraded its emergency capabilities and began the Golden Guardian training exercise program. When exercises revealed a lack of knowledge and confusion on the part of elected officials, the California Emergency Management Agency worked with the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation to develop a new training curriculum. The result was the California Public Officials Communications Training Initiative, which launched in 2007.
The initiative uses seminars and exercises to prepare elected officials to communicate during a disaster, as well as teaching them their responsibilities and the basics of the emergency management system. Trainers bring the classes to the officials, conducting sessions all over the state, including small towns.
Additionally California developed and distributed the Elected Officials’ Guide to Emergency Management [PDF], a 12-page guide that encourages officials to prepare, explains their roles, lays out the state’s emergency management system, and discusses the types of disaster declarations, assistance available and different recovery programs.
Contrast this effort with the level of preparation in Florida, a state where hurricanes are an annual occurrence and the Florida Division of Emergency Management is widely seen as the nation’s best such agency. Here, the role of elected officials is an afterthought — as it is in much of the rest of the country.
Training for Florida elected officials largely consists of a brief guide [PDF] and an eight-minute video. Introduced by Gov. Rick Scott, the video urges elected officials to get to know their emergency management team, plan and train for emergencies, and apply for aid and support once disaster strikes. If local officials need support, they can contact the division’s Intergovernmental Relations Team, which also handles what training they get.
The advice in the video is sound, but aside from a 30-second introduction showing swirling storms and scenes of destruction, it can hardly prepare a newly elected mayor for the overwhelming devastation of a major hurricane or other disaster.
In addition to government programs, some private entities have stepped in.
In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored creation of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a joint program by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health. Every year NPLI conducts an initial, mandatory one-week session for students and then concludes with a two-and-a-half-day seminar. Though not exclusively for elected officials, it provides courses in disaster management and leadership, and concentrates on decision-making during difficult or pressured situations.
According to its brochure, “The applicant must have strategic planning or operational leadership responsibility or be on a career track leading to such a position.” It costs $9,800 to attend, well beyond the reach of many smaller localities.
The National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) issues an eight-page guide for elected officials, called Are You Ready?, covering many of the same topics in the California guide but without the state focus. It urges officials to be prepared and especially to fulfill their communications role once disaster strikes.
NEMA also sponsors an annual Emergency Management Policy and Leadership Forum where matters related to disaster leadership and decision-making are discussed and which welcomes elected officials.
These programs are helpful but to benefit from them, an elected official must make preparedness a priority, be aware of them and actively seek them out. That’s a lot to do amid the everyday demands of office.
Kathleen Koch was a CNN correspondent who covered Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But she had also grown up in Bay St. Louis, a Mississippi coastal town that was nearly wiped out by that storm. Koch didn’t just cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she stayed on the story for years afterward, chronicling the slow and painful struggle of Gulf residents to rebuild their lives, homes and futures.
After some discussions among nonprofit and humanitarian activists and executives regarding an immediate response to Sandy, the interest and commitment to the longer-term effort gradually petered out.
Nonetheless, Koch persisted in her peer-to-peer efforts. The mayors she knew from the Gulf were willing to talk to their New Jersey counterparts. She made this willingness known to a local New Jersey news website, MoreMonmouthMusings.net, which spread the word. New Jersey official Serena DiMaso saw the posting, and the two women began working to bring the officials together.
In May of this year, after numerous contacts between Mississippi and New Jersey mayors, a Mississippi delegation, consisting of former mayors Brent Warr of Gulfport and Eddie Favre of Bay St. Louis, as well as Gene Taylor, a former member of the House of Representatives, traveled to New Jersey to meet with about 20 elected officials.
“The reception was very warm, and they were very appreciative,” Warr said. The meeting occurred in a restaurant and as the Mississippians provided their presentation, non-elected residents joined the audience to listen. “It was everyone’s storm. These mayors, first responders and council members were engaged, and I think they benefited from it. The people appreciated seeing their elected officials working on a weekend evening, trying to help them.”
Other mayors traveled individually. Mayor Matt Doherty of Belmar, N.J., traveled to Pass Christian, Miss., to meet with his counterpart, Mayor Leo McDermott, to learn about Pass Christian’s travails and recovery.
Another former mayor, Tommy Longo of Waveland, Miss., who was unable to accompany the initial delegation, traveled north.
In 2005, Waveland had been almost completely destroyed by Katrina, and Longo thought he had some wisdom to convey. People around him in Mississippi were skeptical about the trip and he had his doubts too. “I was a little bit hesitant about some Southern boy coming north, because, what do I know?” he said.
“After a disaster, people are shocked; they’ve lost a lot of hope and their lives are being disrupted. Being able to talk to them about a city of 110,000 people where we lost 98 percent of our buildings gave them some perspective. For the first time in the history of the United States, we had to completely rebuild a city that was 150 years old. I was shocked by what I saw [in New Jersey]. I addressed a room full of people, and just telling my story lifted people’s spirits.”
During his visit, the initial disaster grants began to arrive in New Jersey and despite the money, Longo warned the mayors that rebuilding was not going to happen overnight — and that it was the mayors and elected officials who would bear the brunt of the anger, frustration and despair as residents tried to cope.
“Some of the mayors are finding out that it’s not the same thing as 9/11. It’s not like the mayor became a hero,” he said. “I’ve told people that you are the hero today, but people are going to point a finger at you and blame you as time goes on because they have no one else to point a finger at. We saw a lot of mayors not run again because of that.”
Longo particularly connected with Mayor Dina Long of Sea Bright, another 150-year-old shoreside town that was especially hard hit, being battered by 10-foot storm surges and mountains of sand that tossed boats and buildings. From a 10-hour-a-week volunteer job as mayor, Long began working 80-hour weeks to help residents and restore the town while also dealing with her own wrecked home, a full-time job as a community college English teacher, her husband and a 9-year-old son and fighting with her insurance company.
“She was dealing with all these things in her personal life and also making all these meetings with the people who had been hit, and she was really taking it on the chin,” Longo said.
Longo helped coach Long and other Jersey shore mayors about maneuvering through the maze of bureaucracy, grants and recovery requirements. Longo understood just how important that support is after a disaster. “We’re very appreciative of the help we got after Katrina,” he said. “We want to pay it forward.”
Despite the lessons of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the increase in severe weather and billions of dollars in losses in the United States to natural disasters, preparation, training and education for elected officials remains inconsistent.
“Any elected official who doesn’t understand his role in an emergency is really doing himself and the public a disservice,” said Jim Madaffer, a former San Diego city councilman. “The public expects an elected official to have all the answers — certainly the media does.”
Absent a national standard for training elected officials, either in guide form as California has done or through academic or professional institutions, the kind of ad hoc peer-to-peer network set up by Koch after Hurricane Sandy could prove priceless.
“What is so apparent to anyone who has been in one of these events is that the disaster is just the beginning,” Koch said. “You’re going to need counsel for months and years to come. Having a trusted mentor who you can turn to at any time of the day or night, where no question is stupid or ignored, who has been through it before, is worth its weight in gold.”
An academic or institutional setting would allow the collective wisdom gained by elected officials to be passed on to their colleagues and successors regardless of political party or ideological background. More importantly, it would allow preparedness to become proactive, building resilience and a body of knowledge before the next disaster strikes.
Until government, academia and nonprofit institutions see the value of that kind of preparedness, the initiative of individuals like Koch and the mayors of the Mississippi coast will have to do.
David Silverberg was founding editor of Homeland Security Today and had a long career as a Washington-based journalist.
