CONGRESSIONAL CLIPBOARD
National Disaster Preparedness Inventory Act
CONGRESSMAN
IN AUGUST 1989 the Federal Emergency Management Agency conducted the “Response ’89” earthquake exercise in Sacramento, California. An important initiative in hazard mitigation and response, this exercise brought together urban search and rescue specialists from across America to examine the coordination of federal, state, and local response to a catastrophic earthquake. The importance of such coordination and cooperation cannot be underestimated. Once a disaster strikes, any time lost in arranging command and coordination structures means potential lives lost.
Chief Frank Borden, chairman of the Urban Rescue and Structural Collapse Committee of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, participated in the exercise and reported the following to the I AFC: “A national fire service urban search and rescue resource inventory and coordination system are definitely needed. Neither exists today… [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] could be the appropriate agency to allocate and coordinate the deployment of these fire service resources nationally”
Last month I introduced legislation that would do just that: The National Disaster Preparedness Inventory Act of 1989 directs FEMA to establish a national inventory of resources that are available for search and rescue and emergency response operations and to develop a plan for getting those resources to the site of a disaster fast enough to be effective. Unless such information and a system for utilizing it are in place beforehand, quick response in a time of crisis obviously will be impossible.
Two important points to note about this legislation are that (1) it does not direct FEMA to stockpile supplies and equipment, and (2) it establishes an inventory of both public and private resources. The latter is especially important because it means that the inventory, once operational, can be used by all public safety agencies in responding to serious emergencies that may not be of sufficient magnitude to be declared as such by the federal government. Organized geographically, this inventory would become a quick-response tool for firefighters and rescue crews in every life-threatening situation from blackouts to building collapses.
Search and rescue and disaster response specialists across the country have long been calling for just this sort of response mechanism. FEMA, on the other hand, is trying to scuttle the bill.
FEMA’s first complaint is that it is short of resources, but so is the fire service. It wouldn’t be much of a public service if America’s firefighters decided that they would devote their extremely limited resources to publishing pamphlets about how to avoid fires rather than rescue people from fires when they occur. Confirmation that FEMA sees its role as being primarily one of publishing and check issuing can be found in the fact that FEMA’s top medical disaster coordinator went on vacation the day after the San Francisco earthquake—apparently, the agency did not see any need for the medical coordinator for the Office of Mobilization Preparedness to be on the disaster site, or even on the job.
FEMA’s second objection is essentially “It’s not my job.” This, of course, is ridiculous. Once the American public, through Congress, directs FEMA to do something, it becomes the agency’s job. In a letter to the Washington Times, Julius Becton, former director of FEMA, stated that “if FEMA were reinvented,” he hoped it would not have to report to 25 committees and subcommittees of Congress. In a nutshell, that has been the agency’s longstanding problem with Congress: Congress tells it to do one thing, and the agency does another.
This situation climaxed in 1986 when the agency took it upon itself to write a mathematical formula based on population and damage figures to determine when a disaster could be declared. A General Accounting Office study of this formula found that had it been used between 1980 and 1985, 61 out of 111 disasters would not have been declared, including a tornado that leveled three communities and left 65 dead in Pennsylvania. Fortunately, Congress held oversight hearings and pressured FEMA into abandoning the formula, but one still has to wonder how many “resources” were devoted to developing this elaborate formula to justify not responding to disasters.
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Whether by accident or design, the result of FEMA’s “civil-defense-first” philosophy is that the agency devotes the bulk of its money and manpower to programs that will, hopefully, never be tested, and for which there will be nobody around to answer if they fail. In the meantime, FEMA could do itself and the public a favor by better preparing for less catastrophic but relatively common emergencies such as floods, tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
Preparing an inventory of emergency response and rescue resources would greatly assist in accomplishing this, as well as provide a valuable tool for the entire emergency response community. At the very least, it would be a better exercise in disaster preparedness than debating the issue ad nauseum in conference and position papers.
