Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

From the Washington Post courtesy of...well, I forget; it's probably from Kos or Eschaton, maybe This Modern World:

New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."

"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."

But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it."

Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing fixed."

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This sounds very much like the attitude evidenced by the Bush administration toward terrorism in the months before 9/11. That is, early on, Bush staffers are on record as having criticized the Clinton administration as being "obsessed" with Osama bin Laden--the White House then proceeded to de-emphasize terrorism as a priority, and started focusing on missile defense and other cold war toys and games. Then 9/11 happened, and Bush changed his priorities accordingly. I think. Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that it appears that FEMA simply lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Now, thousands more than were lost on 9/11 are dead, and Bush, through his negligence, is responsible.

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