Hmmmm

GovExec is a publication primarily intended for Beltway Bandits, but which has items of interest to anyone who watches the .gov. I've been told it's dead-tree edition is heavily laden with advertising, and that subscribing to it doom as you to a junk-mail-filled future, but some of the electronic editions and blogs are available for free, and if they come with complimentary spam, it's not very pernicious, as my spam-blockers are effective.

Today they resurrected an item from back in April of this year, entitled Recovering FEMA. It details efforts to rid FEMA of the bureaucratic mazes that had so much to do with preventing disaster response from being as effective as it oculd have been.

According to the White House investigation, the Interior Department gave FEMA a comprehensive list of assets it could contribute to the relief effort and repeatedly tried to provide hundreds of boats, dump trucks and heavy equipment, a dozen aircraft, several dozen maintenance crews and more. But FEMA didn't have a mechanism for accepting the support.

Several agencies offered thousands of housing units nationwide to shelter evacuees, but FEMA officials believed they had to negotiate certain requirements before accepting the offers, and so most were never used. Officials at the American Bus Association in Washington spent an entire day trying to find a point of contact at FEMA to coordinate bus deployment, but they never found one.

When Katrina hit, Army Col. William "Eric" Smith was director of the Defense Logistics Agency's operations center, where he was supporting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon officials tapped him to join the relief effort at home, but his biggest problem soon became navigating the FEMA bureaucracy: "There was no single point of contact for logistics decisions. Every commodity [the military could supply] seemed to require a different signature at FEMA." It was the opposite of the military's command structure. Nancy Ward, then a senior manager in FEMA's Region 9, which covers nine Western states, including California, was detailed to the Gulf Coast to coordinate the flow of aid during Katrina's aftermath. A week after the storm hit, she issued a directive requiring headquarters officials to release rebuilding funds within three days once projects were approved by FEMA officials on the Gulf Coast. But superiors at FEMA headquarters overturned the directive in a move critics contend greatly slowed disaster assistance in the weeks and months to follow.

One thing that folks need to remember is that this did not happen overnight. True enough that FEMA was (reasonably, I think) folded into the Department of Homeland Security, which is more focused on terrorism and security defined in more traditional terms--although preparation for, and relief from, natural disasters certainly qualifies as "Homeland Security" in my book--and that therefore some of FEMAs operations, or preparations, may have suffered therefore. But I cannot believe that anyone can point to a single moment between, say, 9/11/2001 and Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and say "This is the day that FEMA Went South."

Anyway.

The article is full of interesting tidbits, and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about the nuts and bolts of how disaster recovery and relief at the Federal level is supposed to work.