FEMA: A Disastrous Response to Hugo
CONGRESSIONAL CLIPBOARD
THERE’S A JOKE going around Washington that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in violation of truth in advertising laws. “Management” implies, and in fact requires, leadership and coordination, neither of which was evident in FEMA’s response to Hurricane Hugo. In answer to choruses of criticism from residents and their representatives, FEMA’s defense was that the needed services were not “requested” through the proper channels, that FEMA’s role was a tertiary one after state and local governments, and that Hugo was a particularly brutal hurricane. Besides the feet that emergency management is not an over-thecounter commodity that one should have to ask for, FEMA’s response belied an inability to deal with any disaster serious enough to require federal assistance.
Looking at what FEMA was able to offer South Carolina in the wake of Hugo makes one wonder what it does with its annual budget of approximately $650 million. After the destruction of the Virgin Islands, FEMA waited as Hugo approached the East Coast for five days with an increasingly clear indication of where it would make landfall. Even in its area of expertise, FEMA was slow to react: It was fully eight hours after Hugo struck Charleston before the affected counties were declared disaster areas. Although FEMA’s response to the San Francisco earthquake was swift, it is depressing to hear the director for state and local programs boast about how FEMA skipped over the standard reviewstage and declared San Francisco a disaster area right away. Surely, a study of the situation was not seriously considered to be an alternative.
Senator Ernest Hollings, who represents South Carolina, despaired of FEMA as the “sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I have ever encountered in my life.” He correctly maintained that FEMA “is supposed to manage emergencies, not cause them.” It is easy to sympathize with those sentiments.
In the wake of Hugo, all commerce and communication was halted in most of seven counties for lack of electricity. Nothing could be accomplished until the electricity was restored, yet FEMA matter-of-factly declared that it had “no generators in the domestic United States.” Almost any disaster requiring a response by FEMA would likely knock out electricity, yet the agency had no plan for locating and installing emergency generators. Even worse, it was unable to arrange the simple transportation of generators that were donated. Exxon, for example, was willing to loan South Carolina the generators used in the cleanup of the Valdez oil spill if FEMA would provide military transport. FEMA never did; the generators never arrived.
Typically, while needed equipment was laying idle, FEMA was preoccupying itself with who would foot the bill for the cleanup effort. Procedure has been for the state to pick up 13 percent of expenses and local government 12 percent; FEMA required assurance of commitment to these terms before committing its own resources. Twelve percent may not sound like very much until one realizes that many towns were faced with more than 40,000 dump trucks of debris to clear away. Local government couldn’t finance 12 percent of such a project if it did it on the 100-year installment plan. What’s more, FEMA’s financial intimidation ignores instruments put at its disposal to deal with such emergencies. Section 502 of the Federal Assistance Act states, “In any emergency, the President may direct any federal agency with or without reimbursement to utilize its authorities and the resources granted to it under federal law, including personnel, equipment, supplies, facilities, managerial services, in support of state and local vices, in support of state and local emergency assistance efforts to save lives, protect property, protect public health and safety, and lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe.”
Of course, the above passage might not have affected FEMA’s first emergency response plan, which was to send minimum-security federal prisoners to man the cleanup effort in South Carolina. Clearer heads eventually convinced FEMA that it would be injudicious to send large numbers of prisoners who lacked training and equipment and who would need to be fed and housed in the hurricane-wracked counties. The Army was settled on as the more intelligent choice.
Unfortunately, the mere existence of FEMA hamstrings other federal agencies that could be of help. Since FEMA has been set up as the coordinator of all federal relief efforts, all other groups, from the Army to the Department of Transportation, wait upon its directive. After Hugo struck, the military indicated that it could be on the scene within five hours but in fact waited days to get marching orders from FEMA. I would not argue that disaster relief should be provided by separate agencies on a knee-jerk basis. There is clearly good logic to having a control tower for disaster response, but the value of the tower is certainly diminished if all the lights are out.
At the time of this writing, thousands of people are still homeless in South Carolina. Relief efforts there will likely be hampered by the need for a swift response to the San Francisco disaster. FEMA executives have made the point that the wrath of Hugo, quickly followed by a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area, has given FEMA a great deal to contend with. Nobody would argue with that. The problem is that FEMA appears to regard these events as an intrusion into its daily routine, when in fact such disasters are the single justification for its existence. If we only experienced “mild” disasters at convenient intervals we would not need a S650 million federal agency to coordinate emergency responses. But instead of dedicating themselves to developing plans for dealing with these events, they pass disproportionate amounts of time studying, for example, how to deliver the U.S. mail after a nuclear war. I am compelled to agree with Senator Hollings, who believes that “FEMA should either lead, follow, or get the devil out of the way.”
