FEMA Administrator Meets With Governors To Discuss Emergency Preparedness

States are responsible for the preparedness of their agencies. I'm not sure what FEMA can bring to the table with the economy forcing budgets cuts across most states.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- This week, the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate met with several of our nation's governors to discuss emergency preparedness and ensure that as many resources and plans as possible are in place prior to any potential emergency.

"FEMA is committed to protecting and assisting our states and citizens during disasters," said Administrator Fugate. "By working together and strengthening relationships at the state level, we can continue to build the national emergency response team which includes FEMA, as well as state, local, tribal and federal partners, the private sector and faith-based organizations. The work we are putting in now to build this team will go a long way during the next disaster."

This past Sunday Fugate addressed governors from across the country at the National Governors Association conference in Biloxi, MS, where he discussed how FEMA can best support the states and their citizens as we prepare for and respond to emergencies and disasters. While in Biloxi, Fugate met privately with Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue as well as Iowa Governor Chet Culver. After returning to Washington, Fugate met Monday with Governor John deJongh Jr. of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Tuesday with North Dakota Governor John Hoeven.

The NGA meeting, as well as the individual meetings with governors, built on efforts already underway to strengthen the national emergency response team. FEMA's primary responsibility as a member of this team is to support governors and ensure that all members of the team work together to better prepare for and respond to all types of emergencies. As part of the meetings, Administrator Fugate stressed the key role the public plays in these preparedness efforts. The more Americans do now to prepare their families, including developing a family emergency plan, the more effective our response team will be.

Prior to this week's meetings, Administrator Fugate had already met with a number of governors from across the country, including participating in a video teleconference with governors and officials from over a dozen hurricane prone states on his first day as Administrator.

FEMA leads and supports the nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation, to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the nation from all hazards including natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other man-made disasters.

Report from Emmittsburg, MD

FEMA Director W. Craig Fugate was the opening speaker for the All-Hazards Higher Education Conference. He spoke to the 400 or so emergency managers, first responders and academics attending this year’s conference in Emmittsburg, MD. There had been speculation whether President Obama would pull FEMA out from under the Department of Homeland Security, however he and Secretary Napolitano are convinced FEMA should remain under DHS.

Director Fugate is a former paramedic/firefighter who most recently headed the Florida Division of Emergency Management. He has only been on the job officially for a month not leaving him much time to develop a vision for his new agency.

His comments did not really address the purpose of the conference, namely the advancement of professionalism in emergency management through higher education. The Director believes instead of elaborate emergency management systems, the best way to respond to future emergencies is to change people’s behaviors. People react to crisis and disasters in certain ways based on their culture. The director feels the key is to get people to be better prepared and to evacuate when it becomes necessary. He believes that Americans in general are not prepared.

The research material on disaster sociology and psychology tend not to support this view. Behavior is not governed by preparation but rather by resources and cultural factors. If you have the resources to evacuate you will and if you don’t you tend to remain in place.

He did bring up the concept of getting children to understand the need to be prepared and that may provided some needed impetus to parents who don’t have a family emergency plan in place.

Overall, the friction between homeland security and emergency management continues to go on without any near-term resolution. Academic institutions continue to struggle with what it means to produce a emergency management/homeland security professional. There are over 100 colleges and universities that offer courses, certificates, and degrees in emergency management. The curriculums vary but all tend to focus on the basics of mitigation, preparation, response and recovery. The problem is there are few primary sources of information to create courses and textbooks. Many of the titles in publication today tend to previous works and repeat older studies. There is a great need to support and foster more research particularly in the area of recovery.

The unspoken challenge, in my opinion, is not teaching students the basic concepts but making sure they have requisite coursework in ancillary fields. For instance, knowing how to create and practice an emergency management plan is important but students also need to understand laws, logistics, budget managements, risk analysis, technology, and resource management. Many of the degree programs already address these skills however there isn’t as much discussion regarding appropriate courses or textbooks to insure students are receiving relevant coursework.

Next Secretary of DHS, part 2

No sooner do I post a blog on Sen Chuck Hagel possibly becoming the next Secretary of Homeland Security then I read the following this morning;

“President-elect Barack Obama's top choice to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, according to several media reports, citing unnamed Democratic officials.

Gov. Napolitano, whose handling of immigration issues brought her praise from fellow governors, was an early supporter and campaigner for Obama's presidential campaign and was reported to be on a short list of people to fill cabinet posts in the new administration.

Napolitano, 50, was re-elected to a second four-year term in 2006 as governor of Arizona, the home state of Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in the race against Obama.”

Governor Napolitano previously had been the attorney general for the state of Arizona. She won’t be the first governor to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security, former Secretary Ridge was governor of Pennsylvania. If she is appointed, she would bring an interesting combination of experience as attorney general and governor of a border state. Current Secretary Chertoff concerns over the last few years have centered around immigration. I don’t know if her experience in Arizona will continue this trend or cause her to refocus DHS efforts elsewhere. I am glad to see someone from outside the Eastern Seaboard to hold this position. Perhaps now DHS efforts will have more relevance to those states without borders or coastlines.

On a related note, The U.S. Council of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM-USA) is calling for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to be restored to its former status as an independent agency reporting directly to the President. IAEM-USA also urges that the Director be designated as a member of the President's Cabinet. When DHS was created, FEMA was moved under the new department. Many feel the debacle of response during Hurricane Katrina was a result of FEMA being too far removed from the President. I’ve never understood why an agency that exists to respond to disasters reports to an organization responsible for preventing terrorist attacks. I don’t know when the next terrorist attack will occur but I can tell you to start preparing for hurricanes starting around April. FEMA needs to be able to do its job without trying to compete with homeland security interests.

Elections, are they over yet?

The elections this year means hours and hours of political discussions on “hot button” issues. Many bloggers are working overtime analyzing, criticizing, and restating these political discussions. As readers of my blog know, I am not a political junkie and only bring up politics because there really very little else being covered in the news.

Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have focused and organized their agencies around preventing or reacting to a terrorist attack. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) concept became the de facto standard for everyone from first responders to the National Guard. NIMS is the overarching organizational concept that uses the Incident Command System (ICS) as its basic component. ICS was created by West Coast firefighters to deal with large scale forest fires. ICS is a modular concept expanding or contracting as the size of the response changes.

DHS and FEMA, in looking for a national standard, focused on NIMS and requires any agency looking for federal dollars to be NIMS compliant. Sounds fine until you start to read some of the academic papers on how NIMS and ICS are really implemented. To DHS, whenever an incident (ranging from a fire to a hurricane) occurs all responding agencies fall in on the ICS and NIMS model. In large metropolitan areas with huge fire, EMS, and police departments having a common organizational structure to add resources from outside agencies makes sense. But as typically happens with a one-size fits all approach, when you leave the metropolitan areas another model appears.

In rural America, over 90 percent of the fire departments are volunteer departments. The sparseness of populations means funding for large, full-time departments doesn’t exist. The smaller volunteer departments may have to cover large areas. Rather than becoming a deficit, volunteer departments and their communities leverage relationships to form strong response packages. Smaller communities take great pride in being able to protect their friends and families without depending on resources arriving from outside. What this means is NIMS really isn’t a factor in the majority of the United States. Smaller communities build their response packages on years of knowing one another and who has which resources. They don’t go outside of the communities for the most part to deal with major disasters.

Even larger areas tend to follow their typical response protocols without regard to NIMS. All of this makes me ask, has DHS and FEMA created a paper lion? If NIMS became the aegis to protect the United States from another terrorist attack, what will the policies of the next administration mean? My hope is they move away from a national standard to responding to disasters and to a more local approach. Each state has an emergency management office that works for the governor. These agencies understand the threats, capabilities and funding issues better than any national agency. Let these agencies form their response protocols without some vague “compliance” requirement to compete for federal funding. A governor’s declaration of emergency is all that is needed to qualify for federal relief funding. Some may quip, what about federal dollars for training? Those dollars are associated with NIMS and DHS compliance, which may or may not have any relevance to the threats facing a local community.

What about federal grants? Grants are a dual-edged sword, while they allow communities to purchase equipment otherwise unavailable there is no ability to maintain and update equipment through grants. Grants can create an uneven distribution of resources when one community has a great grant writer and another doesn’t.

During the next months of discussing alternative energy, Iran, Russia and the economy it will be interesting to see if there will be any discussions regarding the roles of DHS and FEMA in the future.