After Hurricane Katrina, we were told that FEMA's problems would be remedied, but they only got worse. Stephen's nickname at work was "Termite" because he was agile enough to crawl into pipes when he was younger. New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin is facing criticism over the evacuation of citizens before Hurricane Katrina struck. Dinged for a similarly slow response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the agency had improved during the Clinton years. Knowledge at Wharton Staff. It rains a lot in southern Louisiana. We worked through the night, and at 5:30 AM Saturday, August 27, we sent out our morning NSR to all the agency heads, including the heads of FEMA and DHS. By most accounts, Fugate has steered a seamless federal response to the Louisiana flood of 2016, earning Obama's plaudits but also praise from local officials and residents who say the agency has responded quickly to immediate needs. As mentioned earlier, FEMA staff levels had declined drastically since the DHS takeover of 2003. Thirteen people died. All you needed then would be top federal officials who knew how to make informed and unified decisions in a disaster. We will write a custom Research Paper on Incident Command System on Katrina Disaster specifically for you. Postal Service data shows that Lake Charles had the largest outward migration of any city in the United States last year, with about 7% of residents leaving. How did FEMA's approach during Hurricane Katrina differ fro m previous disasters and why? Even worse, FEMA was now operating under DHS, so instead of getting our orders from the seasoned disaster veterans like Witt or Lacy Suiter, who had run FEMA in the 1990s, our orders now came from managers at DHS who had no experience in disasters. The Speights were living on a fixed income, and they didn't have home insurance. After rescues were well underway, FEMA turned away offers of personnel and supplies from the Department of Interior and denied a request from the state Wildlife & Fisheries agency for 300 rubber boats. Yep, one night I came in for our shift and Phil was gone, just when his work had started to be fully productive. Fortunately for New Orleans, officials in Louisiana were able to . The whole thing was located inside FEMA Headquarters in Washington in a typically bland-looking office building a couple of blocks from the National Air and Space Museum. An interesting fact is that Hurricane Katrina remains the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, causing an estimated $161 billion in damage along the U.S. Gulf Coast. The NRCC itself was nothing fancy a couple of large, beige-colored rooms filled with desks, phones, computers and a few TV sets tuned in to various news stations. Two documents in particular-- an internal FEMA email sent a few days after Katrina, and a letter from the Department of the Interior-- highlight some of the chaos of the rescue efforts. As Republican leaders announced a joint House-Senate inquiry into failures surrounding the response to Hurricane Katrina, we take a look at why FEMA failed with Salon.com staff writer Farhad . Approximately 12,500 evacuees are being hosted at the Houston Astrodome. "If you're too poor, you get nothing," Dominique says. As one long-time FEMA executive remarked to me, If you have disaster experience at FEMA, it's the kiss of death for your career. In January, 2008, I finally called it quits and retired from FEMA after more than 28 years with the agency. Port Arthur is in a marshy bowl right on the Gulf of Mexico, and global warming has accelerated damage from hurricanes and floods. Truthout relies on reader donations to maintain this sanctuary for honest, justice-driven journalism. "I went through some hard times there with Steve," she says, sitting in her kitchen on a rainy May morning, the paper program from his funeral on the table in front of her and water pooling on the floor. "Because you ain't got the proper paperwork. A FEMA update e-mail sent 3 days after the storm says, "All assets have ceased operations until National Guard can assist (task forces) with security. Howell says it's likely that implicit bias is leading to disparities about whose damage is deemed "sufficient." That was pretty obvious," said Kevin Davis, former St. Tammany Parish President and director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness under Gov. FEMA Director Mike Brown was replaced by David Paulison, a former fire chief who many hoped would revitalize the agency. Neighborhoods where schoolteachers and factory workers passed down homes for generations are pockmarked with empty lots and dilapidated homes that people cannot afford to fix. The change is also evident in the push, learned during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, to gut homes quickly to reduce the need for temporary housing and preserve stricken communities. More recently, Black New Orleanians were disproportionately displaced after Hurricane Katrina. Daily and nightly, the NRCC sent out a lot of reports, many of them just short emails to update the bosses on anything ranging from spring flooding in New England to a chemical plant fire in the Midwest. 808 certified writers online. 41 Almost immediately following Hurricane Katrina's landfall, law and order began to deteriorate in New Orleans. I thanked Matt and told him I would be in at 7:00. Fugate seems sincere and knowledgeable and if he does not have the close-to-the-president kind of power that Witt had, I nonetheless believe he is clearly capable of leading the agency. "Let's not make it worse.". But the main event was the daily National Situation Report, or NSR for short. Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Irma4 of the costliest hurricanes in the U.S. since 2005caused damage totaling trillions of dollars. Fugate carried that fundamental understanding -- that states and local governments are best suited to be the first responders in a disaster -- with him when Obama hired him to run FEMA in May 2009. Neighborhoods where lower-income residents live are recovering more slowly than more affluent areas. No problem a young lady I'll call Melinda then walked up to me and introduced herself. The area was hit by two hurricanes last year as abnormally hot water fueled a record number of storms in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. (Photo: Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA). (Photo by Brett Duke, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune). Florida 1,400 Unfortunately, their heroic efforts were overshadowed by the delays and errors back in Washington. ) or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. One of FEMA's internal reports recommends that the agency investigate whether the agency's inspection process may be partly to blame. If it didn't, the Watch Officer's phone would soon start to ring with callers from Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other agencies asking: Where is the NSR? Out of that 2005 catastrophe, FEMA eventually emerged as a bright spot. "Our programs have been built on providing equal treatment to survivors, but that's not necessarily equal outcome.". And, candidly, we have work to do there," says Keith Turi, FEMA's assistant administrator for recovery. I had a number of them working for me during Katrina and by and large they were excellent employees. "We do understand our obligation to support disaster survivors in an equitable way; that is a responsibility that we have here at FEMA. Undercover Salting Isnt Just a Labor Strategy. Hurricane Katrina, and the subsequent flooding that devastated New Orleans in August 2005, has posed the greatest challenge and . Once the system was activated, once all the disaster specialists from FEMA, Defense, Transportation, the Red Cross, and other sundry agencies got to work, it would be smooth sailing at the NRCC. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. A stronger storm on a slightly different coursecould have realized emergency officials' worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage, they wrote, three years before Katrina hit. Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, says he supports that idea. It was slow to provide food, shelter, and supplies to first responders and stranded residents alike. At 7 AM Saturday, we handed things off to the day shift and went home to get some sleep, all of us thinking that the wheels would begin to roll now that we had issued our warning. FEMA was rolled into the newly created Department of Homeland Security, and terrorism threats replaced natural disasters as the catastrophes warranting the most attention. It destroyed or damaged more than 850,000 homes. (2006). Once-thriving Black neighborhoods of Port Arthur, Texas, have steadily declined. During the Hurricane Ivan evacuation 600,000 people failed to evacute the city . 2023, A&E Television Networks, LLC. "It was probably one of the largest disasters they had to work on, and I've got to say -- and I know that they had a lot of great people back then -- they weren't really organized for a large-scale operation. I've watched it happen after hurricanes. The NSR was a daily executive summary of potential or actual disasters that affected the US In essence, it was FEMA's morning briefing report regarding impending or ongoing disasters. In documents released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, FEMA appears to have mismanaged offers of supplies and personnel from other agencies. FEMA might as well have awarded nothing for the roof repair, Donnie Speight says, for all the good it did. With the influx of Coast Guard officers, along with uniformed officers from various branches of the military, experienced disaster managers at FEMA found themselves pushed into the background, and many of them simply left the agency in disgust. The Transportation Department might activate its center to find out which disaster-damaged roads and bridges were in urgent need of repair. For example, as I came on duty one night I was approached by a young man I'll call Phil. Phil introduced himself, said he worked for the XXX company that was supporting FEMA in the disaster response and that he would be assigned to work for me. District of Columbia 1,000 We did our best for the victims of Katrina, but it was not nearly good enough and it was not what they, or America, deserved from their government. However, the exercise was unsuccessful because it did not consider the possibility of a breach in the levee system, which caused the majority of the damage during Hurricane Katrina. These rescue team members were firefighters and medics who had been doing hard, dangerous rescue work for about 15 hours or more and were now getting a little sleep before going out to do more rescues and I was ordered to wake them up to fix some numbers in a report. Overall, what I have heard so far from many of my former FEMA colleagues has been along the lines of, well, it seems to be getting better but pretty slowly. Leo Bosner was an employee of FEMA from 1979 until his retirement in 2008. They are not a priority.". Even without FEMA data about race, evidence points to systemic racism within federal disaster response, according to Willis of the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management. "Progress is being made, but we continue to search for victims and are working day and night to ensure that people have the food, water, medical attention, and shelter they need," said Brown. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.. Archived Content. The views expressed here are Mr. Bosner's personal views only. hide caption. Sorry, I said, the phone lines to the rescue team are all down because of the hurricane, so my call could not get through. But in the creation of what I like to refer to as an era, when almost everybody went to look at terrorism attacks, I was kind of looking around going, 'Last time I checked, hurricanes didn't stop.'". But was it really FEMA's failure? Many people are convinced that Hurricane Katrina should be considered as a prime example of government failure. He says many Black homeowners have struggled to get the federal help they need to repair homes after hurricanes and floods. "We have already too much inequality in America," said Sanders. Our leaders at FEMA and DHS had lost two precious days when they could have been taking robust action ahead of the storm; now, they had to play catch-up and FEMA's failures in that regard have been well-documented. Willis says the homogeneity of FEMA's leadership makes it all but impossible for the agency to develop systems to distribute assistance equitably. The Speights lived with the hole in the bedroom ceiling all winter through countless rainstorms, through February's deep freeze. The once-thriving Black neighborhoods of Port Arthur, Texas, show what happens when a large number of homeowners are unable to repair their houses after climate-driven disasters. Paulison issued a memo absolving Johnson of any wrongdoing, but the FEMA employee who leaked the photo that exposed the phony press conference was fired. hide caption. During Katrina, Brown testified Katrina ran on about $1 billion. During disasters, the Federal government provides law enforcement assistance only when those resources are overwhelmed or depleted. hide caption. One experienced disaster manager went so far as to tell me, Craig Fugate and [Deputy Administrator] Rick Serino are great, but from there on down the system is rotten.. Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA. It also recounted that immediately after the hurricane, the Interior Department "delivered to FEMA a comprehensive list of deployable assets that were immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance." WASHINGTON D.C. - One hundred percent of evacuees housed in the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center have been evacuated and more than 30,000 National Guard troops are on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi to provide help with search, rescue, and security in the disaster-stricken area, Michael D. Brown, Department of Homeland Security's Principal Federal Official for Hurricane Katrina response and head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced earlier today. The exercise also did not account for the inadequate response of the federal government and the slow response of FEMA. The Department of Health and Human Services might activate its disaster center to alert and deploy doctors and nurses to a disaster-stricken area if needed. And its budget was increased. FEMA also fails to serve people from marginalized racial groups, the report warns. I wish my former colleagues at FEMA the best. Ryan Kellman/NPR Many high-rise buildings suffered blown out windows, while roof sections of the Louisiana Superdomewhere over ten thousand people were shelteredwere stripped away. My co-worker Matt picked up on the first ring. FEMA was slow to deliver food and . He says he received nothing from FEMA because he does not own the home and didn't have a formal rental agreement. When FEMA was still an independent agency, it responded to disasters under the Federal Response Plan, the FRP. The FRP had clear lines of authority and specified exactly what was to be done in a disaster. No plan is perfect, but the FRP had served us well in numerous disasters. The Speights' mobile home in DeQuincy, La., is at the end of an unpaved road in a stand of tall longleaf pines. The incident made headlines nationwide, further damaging FEMA's reputation. It's unfair, admittedly, to compare this month's flood to the one that followed Katrina. Interestingly, it seems that the contract employees themselves did not actually receive the higher pay that went to the contracting company in the form of profit.. In the confusion of a disaster, such a discrepancy would be normal and it did not really matter. Woes at Embattled FEMA Spur Employee Exits, Testimony Refutes FEMA Ex-Chief's Ignorance Claims, FEMA Accounts Reveal Last-Minute Scramble, Ex-FEMA Chief Points to Others in Katrina Failures. But as we were soon to learn, that type of person was now in very short supply. Brown told CNN that FEMA didn't know for three days that hundreds of people were trapped at the Convention Center with no food or water. But about 35 to 40 people was not good enough for DHS. Now that he had been trained, his company had shifted Phil to another work site. Earlier this month, Speight says she unexpectedly received an additional $10,000 in housing assistance from FEMA. The letter also suggested that this was due to FEMA's inadequate coordination of the different agencies' rescue abilities and equipment. For example, FEMA could use government records and census data to pinpoint where vulnerable people live and get them money immediately after a disaster, says Beard, the former Port Arthur City Council member. Learn More. Terence Franklin settled in Houston with his family . "It affects the school system. The money Donnie Speight received from FEMA was not enough to cover the cost of repairs to her home after Hurricane Laura. Aid was late or non-existent, locals complained of confusion and obstruction. In Louisiana, there are currently 29 Disaster Medical Teams (DMAT); 5 Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams (DMORT); 2 Veterinary Assistant Teams (VMAT); and 1 Mental Health Team. ", On page 21, a specific example--law enforcement--illustrates the lack of coordination: "Although DOI has 4,400 law enforcement officersDOI was not called upon to assist under the NRP (National Response Plan) until late September. Get daily news, in-depth reporting and critical analysis from the journalists, activists and thinkers who are working to improve our world.. We're almost out of time to raise the $5,000 we need for groundbreaking reporting the kind that challenges the forces that prop up capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, nationalism, and all oppressive structures. You have permission to edit this article. Human interventionincluding expansion onto drained swamplands surrounding the original cityand the erosion of coastal wetlands only made things worse over the centuries. It was very lengthy and bureaucratic, and people were being moved in and out of the organization regularly so you had no continuity of knowledge at the time but I think it awakened on the federal level the need to reevaluate their response to a state when a call is made. One way to achieve a new version of fairness one that's based more on equal outcomes would be for FEMA to ensure proactively that vulnerable people have stable housing after disasters, rather than relying on survivors to prove eligibility. Ryan Kellman/NPR First of all, the American government systems are decentralized, which is why the integration between levels is too weak. (But as mentioned above, I kept copies of the two reports and you can read them for yourself. In 2016, that budget was $13.9 billion. 5,877 FEMA personnel have been deployed to the field, including: 1,811 National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) medical professionals, 1,777 Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) staff. FEMA's own analyses show that low-income survivors are less likely than more affluent people to get crucial federal emergency assistance, according to internal documents NPR obtained through a public records request. The hole was right next to the hospital bed where Stephen slept, and water leaked into the bedroom every time it rained. "I haven't left yet.". A failure of the initiative: Final report of the select . Hurricane Laura was the strongest storm to make landfall in the U.S. last year. 88 A FAILURE OF INITIATIVE photos from Hurricane Betsy sound and look familiar to our nation as it considers the damage from Hurricane Katrina, forty years later. The storm had been given a name: Hurricane Katrina.. . If registering by phone, owners of commercial properties and residents with only minor losses are urged to wait a few days before calling so those whose homes were destroyed or heavily damaged can be served first. The anniversary comes as the region is rocked by simultaneous disasters: COVID-19 cases are still high in Gulf states, and Hurricane Laura crashed into the Texas-Louisiana border early Thursday morning. And centuries of housing discrimination mean white people are more likely to own homes in general. It quickly became clear to me what an opportunity Hurricane Katrina was for some of the FEMA contracting companies. Now, the fact is, most of the contract employees with whom I worked were top-notch people who did a wonderful job. So, like most disaster survivors, they turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help. And those embarrassing NSRs that had given advance warning of Katrina's approach? Phone lines are open 24-hours, 7 days a week. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, federal officialsincluding Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who later resigned over his handling of the Katrina response, and President George W. Bushclaimed that the catastrophic failure of the levees in New Orleans was something that no one could have foreseen. When a hurricane damages your home, a clock starts ticking. Over the decade following Hurricane Katrina, federal, state and local governments spent more than $20 billion on the construction of 350 miles of new levees, flood walls and other structures. According to USACE's after action report on Hurricane Betsy She left in her wake a path of devastation unparalleled by any other storm in the recorded history of Louisiana.4 She says many neighbors who had passed down their homes for generations were forced to abandon them because they couldn't afford to fix storm damage. Many survivors of climate-driven disasters, including hurricanes, floods and wildfires, struggle for months or even years to repair their homes or find new stable housing. The Defense Department would certainly activate its center to be prepared to respond to requests for military aircraft to bring needed supplies into a disaster-stricken area. I was not especially worried. "FEMA was supposed to be the 'Plan B,' " Marks says. Victims are encouraged to register on-line due to the possibility of high call volume. "I got arthritis like crazy. In the twenty-six years before Katrina, it has been charged with providing temporary housing to . (Photo by Brett Duke, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune), Will Hopkins helps clear out a family friends home in St. Amant on Saturday, August 20, 2016. FEMA did not respond to questions about the Speights' case, including about whether NPR's queries to the agency about the situation had anything to do with FEMA's decision to award Donnie Speight additional funds nearly a year after the hurricane. Almost everything coming out of FEMA seemed to be aimed at standing by, getting ready, and the like. Goliath was especially comforting to Stephen Speight in the final year of his life. 93-288, as amended)? There's always going to be risk. Although a complete evacuation of the city has been the cornerstone of hurricane preparedness planning for the region, the highway evacuation plan used for Katrina evolved over a period of many years based on valuable lessons learned from prior storms in Louisiana and elsewhere. 13. If you click this web site today, you can read all of FEMA's daily NSRs going back to 2005 all except for the Hurricane Katrina NSRs. "Internally this means building a diverse and inclusive workforce which reflects the communities we serve.". It Has an Anti-War History Too. Female staff at several FEMA offices have complained of sexual harassment and even of workplace violence, but remedies to these complaints seem to come slowly, if at all. State and local government officials said that the storms significantly affected certain communities, local governments . Poor emergency planning led to the massive destruction . For example, a 2019 study found that survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Houston were less likely to receive FEMA grants if they lived in neighborhoods with more racial minorities compared with neighborhoods with more white residents and more financial resources. Friday afternoon, August 26, 2005, was a . I was not going to wake up exhausted rescuers in the middle of the night just to get some numbers for a speechwriter. For example, if inspectors are predisposed to seeing a neighborhood as less desirable or less valuable, those impressions are baked into how they judge the cause and cost of disaster damage there. Joe Raedle/Getty Images. Research suggests that implicit bias leads to lower home appraisals for Black homeowners, even when you control for other factors. Without her husband's veterans' benefits and Social Security, Speight's financial situation is even more precarious. The outer ends of the hurricane also produced tornados . Estimated relocations: hide caption. Without adequate FEMA assistance for repairs, many people have no choice but to abandon their houses. In 2017, the nation faced a historic Atlantic hurricane season. FEMA's failures are particularly worrisome because the agency leads the federal government's response to climate change impacts, they say.