The titles of two congressional reports on the response to Hurricane Katrina give a good idea of what you'll find wading through the hundreds of pages that follow.
The postmortem on the inadequate nature of both local and federal emergency response efforts began before floodwater receded in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast communities of Mississippi.
Journalists, academics, Congress and the Bush administration launched investigations, which found plenty of blame to go around. But by far the sharpest criticism was reserved for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and its new parent, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Though many agree on FEMA's flaws in the response to Hurricane Katrina, the troubled agency's future is a topic of debate in the emergency management community.
Lacking Experience
A 749-page U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee report on Katrina released in May 2006, found "systemic and leadership failures, displayed in both the preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina, at both the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA." The report added that, "The causes of many failures were known long prior to Katrina, and had been brought repeatedly to the attention of both DHS and FEMA leadership. Despite warnings, leadership failed to make vital changes."
The House Select Committee on Katrina found that "DHS and FEMA lacked adequate trained and experienced staff for the Katrina response," and that "the readiness of FEMA's national emergency response teams was inadequate and reduced the effectiveness of the federal response."
Among the serious flaws the congressional reports agree on are: lack of emergency response experience among top political appointees, too great an emphasis on terrorism over natural disasters, and the decision by DHS officials to separate emergency preparation from response.
But if congressional leaders reached many of the same conclusions about FEMA's failure during Katrina, the agreement ends there.
Most legislators are keen on making structural changes to the agency -- and they are proposing vastly different solutions. Indeed, after the reports were issued this spring, FEMA became something of a political football, with groups of legislators reaching across the aisle to find unlikely teammates with whom to kick proposals around.
"FEMA was steadily bled to death by its siblings and a parent organization focused on terrorism," said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., at a May 2006 press conference introducing legislation that would make FEMA an independent agency again.
The RESPOND (Restoring Emergency Services to Protect Our Nation from Disasters) Act has 74 co-sponsors in the House and is backed by eight of the 11 members of the Select Katrina Committee, which Davis chaired. Another House bill, backed by Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., seeks to strengthen FEMA but leave it in the DHS.
In the Senate, Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., introduced legislation to pull FEMA out of the DHS and restore it to Cabinet-level status. "I believe that the lesson learned from hurricanes Katrina and Rita is that DHS is ill-equipped to oversee FEMA and its responsibilities," Clinton said in May, adding that, "Consolidating these duties within an independent FEMA is the best way to ensure the efficient and effective handling of our federal disaster efforts."
The Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., took an even more radical approach, proposing to eliminate FEMA altogether. They found FEMA so flawed that they want to start from scratch with a new agency called the National Preparedness and Response Authority (NPRA).
Yet Collins and Lieberman insist the NPRA should remain within the DHS. In May they issued a statement that said, "Removing FEMA from DHS would needlessly sever its ties with key department assets such as the Coast Guard, law enforcement officers and communications capabilities, and create confusion for state and local officials who rely on DHS for support."
They contend that if FEMA were removed from the DHS, the department would have to create its own internal "FEMA" to deal with terror attacks, duplicating functions that already exist.
Alphabet Soup
Emergency management directors countrywide seem less concerned with where FEMA sits on an organizational chart than with making sure the agency gets preparedness back in its portfolio, and that the top executives have emergency management experience.
The focus on changing the structure is reactionary to Katrina, said Ellis Stanley, Sr., general manager of the Emergency Preparedness Department for Los Angeles. Stanley, who's worked with FEMA for more than 30 years, agrees the agency was most effective when its director had direct access to the president on the Cabinet level.
"Where you stand depends on where you sit," he said. "When FEMA worked well, the director of FEMA sat at the table."
Nevertheless, he believes removing FEMA from the DHS is the last question we should be asking. "The task is to get all of DHS focused on a clear mission, and that's how it relates to all hazards."
Stanley and other regional officials say that when the DHS was created, the focus shifted too much to terrorism. "They left earthquake and flood preparedness to take care of itself, and every morsel of resources went into terrorism," he said. "The DHS response to Katrina seemed to be that it was somebody else's job to respond."
He said it's a mistake to separate the DHS funds for terrorism threats from money that would go to mitigate and respond to disasters.
"The fact is that we'd use that funding to prepare to respond no matter what causes the incident," Stanley said. "The money shouldn't be designated that way."
Eric Holdeman, director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management, singled out the DHS's move to separate preparedness from response as perhaps its biggest mistake. With preparedness taken away from FEMA, he said, there was no planning. "It meant there was no one outside the Beltway working on preparedness, because DHS had no regional offices." The planning, training and exercises agencies do beforehand is the foundation of disaster response, he added.
Holdeman sees the Collins-Lieberman proposal to create a new agency as counterproductive. "We don't need a brand change; we need to fix the product," he said. "We don't need another alphabet soup that even emergency managers don't recognize. When I tell people I work in emergency management, they ask if I work for FEMA. It is a name they're familiar with."
Leadership Void
Stanley and Holdeman said the impact of having nonprofessionals in the top spot proved devastating. And the congressional investigations agreed with them. The Senate report stated that former FEMA Director Mike Brown and most of his front office staff "had little or no emergency-management experience prior to joining FEMA," and that several FEMA leaders came from campaign rather than emergency management backgrounds.
"It's not that you can't have political appointees, but you should have political appointees who have emergency management experience," Holdeman said. "It all rises and falls on leadership. There are good leaders and bad leaders, and the organizational chart can make it more difficult for a good leader to do his job. The question is who's between the good leader and the people he needs to talk to."
If the decision were up to Dan Summers, emergency management director for Collier County, Fla., he would pull FEMA out of the DHS -- but, he warned, it would have to be done in such a way that it does not lose the command and control leadership of other agencies that are now also part of the DHS. "Otherwise FEMA would be cut off at the waist, and it would not work."
Summers, whose career includes 19 years in coastal North Carolina, has extensive experience working with FEMA, including nine presidential disaster declarations. Like Holdeman, he dismisses the idea of renaming FEMA and starting over. "FEMA is a name the general public understands," he said.
Rather than rebranding, FEMA needs to continue to improve its business processes and information flow so it can respond faster, Summers said, noting that local agencies still fill out application forms for reimbursement on paper. "If there's another disaster down here, and local agencies need cost reimbursement, they could be financially wiped out while FEMA officials are twiddling their thumbs in Washington."
One of the editors of a new book on Katrina said removing FEMA from the DHS would be counterproductive. Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee May 8, 2006, Professor Donald Kettl of the University of Pennsylvania said FEMA has already gone through a long series of reorganizations. He noted that a Congressional Research Service study of the structure of federal emergency management has a chart of the function's structural evolution that stretches over five pages. "What has separated FEMA's past successes from its failures is leadership, not structure," said Kettl, co-editor of On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.
He said questions about command and control during an emergency, though important, are less vital than FEMA's role in coordinating the efforts of other agencies. Kettl stressed that FEMA's director "needs to act as the conductor of a well tuned orchestra, not as the commander of a hierarchy. In Katrina, there was an unseemly fight for the baton." For Kettl, another restructuring would "further destabilize an agency in desperate need of finding an even keel."
With the Bush administration cool to any suggestions of removing FEMA from the DHS or change its structure, many local emergency response officials are not counting on rapid improvement, and instead are beefing up regional partnerships and assessing their own strengths and weaknesses.
"Post 9/11 and Katrina, every administrator should have been asking if their emergency management team was prepared," said Stanley, adding that it's not just a question of funding. Local government should also look at standards for their emergency management personnel.
"If these are strictly political patronage or a part-time job with emergency management being the least important part of it," he said, "they should be doing something about it."
