Craig Fugate has served as FEMA administrator since May 2009, after having served as the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management since 2001.
Fugate sat down for a rare one-on-one interview with Emergency Management magazine and discussed the Haiti earthquake, ethics in emergency management and technology issues.
We all watched in horror at what happened in Haiti and everyone wanted to help. You put out a reminder to the emergency response community that the State Department has the lead on foreign disaster assistance, and U.S. assets should deploy only if tasked to do so. What will it take to avoid the well meaning responders deploying to disaster sites when not requested?
Self-deployments are the bane of any incident commander. When you have people showing up, they’re adding to your problems, not to the solutions. That's why we always go back to incident command, mutual aid, pre-existing arrangements and training.
It's no different in Haiti. We had a lead agency; we had an international response; we had finite transport capability; we had one runway to get in for initial response. And while many people would like to be there and help, you have to rely on the people on the ground to determine the priorities.
It’s no different from any other disaster we’ve seen. It’s oftentimes easy when you're not there to make decisions. In reality, it becomes counterproductive.
The beauty of the Obama administration’s direction is that even though this was USAID [United States Agency for International Development], the president put the entire federal family behind that response, which is really how it operates if we have a disaster in the United States where FEMA has that coordination role.
It's the ability of the president to say, “This is not your typical international incident. This is a country we have a lot of history with. It's a country whose proximity says we can get there quickly, and we have a lot of resources.” But we need to use our mechanisms, in this case USAID.
If you truly believe in the Incident Command System, if you truly believe in planning and managing emergencies, you must understand that if you go without coordination, if you just show up, you may actually impede the response and cause more damage.
You were noted for having delivered FEMA employees a service message on ethics. Can you elaborate on what you told them and why? Is this part of changing the organization’s culture?
I don’t think it’s a culture change, but I guess it helps to hear from the top that it’s very difficult to be a public servant and accept the fact that people may be using their jobs for personal gain. If you’re a public servant, it’s a high responsibility and there are so many opportunities for people when dealing with large contracts and the private sector, that even the appearance of impropriety can damage our reputation and we lose trust in each other.
I hold myself to a very high standard and hold my managers to a very high standard. If you’re in this for personal gain, to make a profit or steal stuff, people say, “Well, everybody kind of fudges on their time sheets, rounds out their travel.” I don’t. We have a duty to the taxpayers, and if we cannot hold ourselves to that standard, how can we expect the public to trust us in very complex disaster responses where we're making decisions and our ethical motives are called into question?
You’ve spoken about the positive qualities of emergency managers; can you share some of those?
People who get into this business and think that our job is to take charge, lead the response and tell everybody how to do their jobs get very frustrated and don't last very long.
We facilitate, we coordinate and we build teams. Probably the best analogy is we’re like the general manager or the coach of the team in that there are people who are part of the team who are experts in what they do.
For example, if everybody tried to determine how to get fuel for their generators, that would take away from their mission, which may have been search and rescue, law enforcement or public health. But if you have one member of the team that everyone knew was going to take care of the fuel, that’s one less issue tying your time up, and you can focus on your primary mission.
But that’s not something that people are used to doing. In a disaster, we’re oftentimes bringing people together on a day-to-day basis who don’t usually work together. The challenge is to build that trust and environment where people work as a team, give up some autonomy and understand that they’re going to be empowered to do what they do best with the team supporting them.
So I look at emergency managers and say, “If you think you’re going to be looking out over the room barking orders and telling everybody what to do, you’re going to have a very short run.”
But if you’re a person who likes to build teams, get people to succeed and have the ability to deal with a variety of situations, then you’re going to enjoy your job.
How do you judge how good an emergency operations center (EOC) is? Can you set two, say New York City and Los Angeles, side by side and determine which is better?
I’ve been around and seen a lot of them. If you look at five, some of them are bigger, some of them have different technologies, some of them operate differently. But it’s almost as if you could do a show on all of these big EOCs and actually show the different ways people approach it.
You see the big screens, and you have all the technology pieces in there. So I ask, “Where do people sit? How do you make the decision that those people sit together?” Sometimes it’s based upon the organizational structure of the government. I ask, “Does this fit the organization?”
The other thing that I look at is how many external players are in that EOC? Using something like social networking analysis to take that program and ask, “How many different contacts do they have outside of their organization?”
In a disaster, you must work with many different groups. If you go into the EOC and all you see is that jurisdiction’s people — you don’t see the utilities, Red Cross or Salvation Army — I have to ask, “Are there established [situations] where they have that connection set up?” They may not have the utilities there, but they have someone there who is the utility rep. whose job is to communicate with all those guys.
So you can look at EOCs and depending upon their size say, “This is very much a government-centric operation and probably will work well as long as [the response] is just going to include government.” When it starts getting out from there, how well they’ve incorporated the other teams, particularly state and federal agencies, that may be present [becomes an issue].
In terms of what has happened technologically over the last few years, how does an agency or jurisdiction keep up when it has a product already installed that it’s paid a lot of money for?
You’ve got to step back and say, “Am I basing my response and organization around the capabilities of the technology I’m using? Or do I have a well established process and I use technology to augment that?” If I’m using it to augment my team, then I am pretty flexible and can adjust as new technologies come on board. But whenever I have to conform my process and organization to what the technology allows, that makes it very difficult.
You look at software and the cycles of how fast things are changing. It’s almost as if you’re better off today if you are a smaller organization that didn’t have the money to buy the legacy package. A lot of the tools that are available at little or no cost are actually very capable of doing many of those things. It used to be that you needed a sophisticated GIS lab to do good mapping, incorporate satellite imagery and all that other stuff. Now you have so many products out there for the average person that you’re putting tools in the hands of responders that in many cases they never had access to. They can bring in data layers and real-time data from various sources and look at it in a GIS environment without needing a GIS shop to produce that.
What are your priorities at FEMA over the next three years?
Well let’s talk about the next year. We asked our senior management to look at our current plans of where we’re going and our challenges in the next year: Where do we need to get improvements and get things going? This was a consensus decision. We started out with 12 areas and now we’re down to about three.
First we need to establish and propagate the doctrine of FEMA. We spend a lot of time trying to do things by the process, procedures and guidelines. We don’t really spend a lot of time discussing why we do what we do. So we get the unintended consequences of people trying to decide issues based upon procedures, but not really understanding what was behind that to make a better decision.
We wanted the power to make better decisions. We’re not just telling them how to do something, we’re telling them why we do it to give them more flexibility to get to the outcome. We need to have a better foundation of our doctrine of why we do what we do, why we’re structured the way we are, and what outcomes we’re trying to achieve.
We are putting a lot of emphasis on building the work force and empowering our team. We really have to reach out, and we can’t just wait for people to show up anymore. We have to go out and recruit.
When you look at our diversity, you look at many factors. I can go out and say, “I have a lot of military, Coast Guard and responders. I have a lot of people from other backgrounds or disciplines.” But geographically, hiring is done where my offices are. So that’s very limited. The only time I get much diversity is when I have a disaster, and I do local hires in that area. We’re putting a big emphasis on how we recruit and build that work force. For example, how do we start addressing the issue that about half of FEMA's work force will be hitting the ability to enter into retirement in the next five or six years? How do we build a work force that’s preparing for that transition?
Another area is focusing on the catastrophic disaster response. We have earthquakes, other natural hazards and terrorist threats that we need to model our plans against. If you’re only looking at a government-centric approach then that’s where you’re stuck. But if you look at the private sector and the public as a part of that team, how do I leverage all of that in the complicated events where it’s not solely based on what government can do, but how we empower the public, communicate and make them more effective and incorporate the private sector? We need to prepare the public. We need to do a better job of looking at the public as a resource, not a liability.
In the case of catastrophic disasters — particularly an earthquake where it’s so difficult to get in areas because of the infrastructure damage — oftentimes the closest response will be neighbor helping neighbor. How do we build upon that so that when we can get into a damaged area, we’re focused on the most vulnerable citizens and getting to those who can’t take care of themselves and don’t have supplies on hand? This is the idea of shared partnership and shared responsibility.
In three years when you look back, what would you like to have accomplished?
As much as FEMA has been maligned at times, it’s amazing how many people want to work for FEMA. They want to serve.
In three years when I leave, I want to be able to say that I did not tarnish FEMA’s reputation through my own fallacies or actions, but that it was a stronger team — a team that was successful not based on what I did, but what the employees of FEMA were allowed to do.
It really goes back to the idea that if I tell people why we do something but not dictate to them how, I will build an environment where we reward people who take risks for the right reasons, but don’t hold people to an absolute standard so there could be no failure and then paralyze the process. If I leave three years from now and people at FEMA continue to go forward and do what they do best, then I will have considered it a success.
