FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate Reflects on His First Year

Craig Fugate has served as FEMA administrator since May 2009, after serving 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, Government Technology's sister publication, to discuss the Haiti earthquake, ethics in emergency management and technology issues.


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 have 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.

 

Read Emergency Management magazine's full interview with FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate here.