FEMA Role Clarification and Katrina Performance Assessment: The Congressional Hearings September 27, 2005; Part 1.

The following testimony of House Select Bipartisan Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-Virginia 11th, Northern Virginia) was transcribed by Margaret O’Leary on October 1, 2005 from a C-SPAN recording of the House Select Bipartisan Committee on Capitol Hill investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina held on September 27, 2005.

The video of the testimony is available until mid-October 2005 at: http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=michael+brown. Paragraphing of text below is by the transcriber. To learn more about Representative Davis, please visit: http://tomdavis.house.gov/davis_contents/about/).

Chairman Tom Davis: “Good morning and welcome to this morning’s hearings. Today the Select Committee will examine the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina. With the help of former FEMA Director Michael Brown, we will attempt to construct for the record a time line of what FEMA did and didn’t do before, during, and after the catastrophic storm. Our focus will be on what happened, when and why. We will ask Mr. Brown whether the time line of events we’ve constructed matches his memory of how things transpired. We’ll ask him what local, state, and federal officials he spoke with and what they spoke about. Like it or not, fair or not, FEMA and Mr. Brown in particular, have become the symbol of what went wrong with the government’s response. Today we’ll hear his side of the story and ask the questions all Americans want and expect us to ask. What went wrong? What would you have done differently?

“We have the benefit this morning of compare and contrast. While Rita was a very different storm than Katrina—a size large compared to a size XXX, a storm that struck a far less densely populated area, the governments at all levels did things differently the second time around. Despite differences in scale and scope and strength and speed, despite the fact that all was not perfect with the reaction to Rita, the latest hurricane showed that we have already learned a great deal from Katrina. If only we had learned a little earlier. Supplies were stockpiled on the ground prior to Rita’ arrival. The federal government declared Rita an incident of national significance two days before landfall, triggering our most thorough response and named a federal officer in charge. These steps occurred after Katrina. Ten thousand National Guardsmen were called to Texas in advance of Rita. Louisiana summoned five thousand before Katrina. Search and rescue operations were far better coordinated, leading top military officials to tell President Bush that we need a national plan to manage this phase given the “train wreck” that occurred in New Orleans where at one point five helicopters arrived to rescue the same individual.

“Even if rough around the edges, the massive pre-storm evacuation of Houston and surrounding locales showed improved foresight of state and local officials and how lives can be saved when people pay attention to a coordinated message from their governments. While questions remain about inadequate fuel supplies along evacuation routes and delays in converting highways into-one way outgoing routes, the relative urgency in getting people out of harm’s way was night and day. There’s just no easy way to move millions of people. I think we’ll hear from Michael Brown today that none of this is easy and with Katrina, he faced a big, big storm, the largest in recorded Gulf history.

“It’s no doubt true and problematic to many Americans and perhaps even some state and local officials that falsely view FEMA as some kind of national fire and rescue team. An important task for this committee moving forward is getting an accurate description for the record of what FEMA is, what it can and it cannot do based on what it is actually charged with. FEMA is not a first responder agency with the resources to assume principal responsibility for overwhelmed state and local governments during a disaster. This is not the movies. There is no Tommy Lee Jones character who comes in and takes charge of everything. And that’s probably a good thing. I continue to believe that the worst lesson to be learned from Katrina is that all answers reside in Washington.

“But before we get to what FEMA cannot do, let’s understand what they simply did not do. Just because they’re not first responders does not mean they should be a second thought. It’s not like we’re talking about a division of motor vehicles. We’re talking about the federal agency charged with coordinating response to massive disasters. It’s no big surprise that FEMA has ranked last or near last for several years in surveys rating employee morale at large federal agencies. Today we seek to find out what happened and what didn’t happen on the ground. Then we can work backward beginning no doubt today to discover what may have caused or enabled failures in preparation and response.

“Maybe we’ll end up discovering that it’s some mixer of the following: inadequate [? garbled] or naiveté in the Stafford Act, organizational or budgetary shortcomings, state and local governments that didn’t know how to ask for help or simply didn’t, a bureaucratic mindset that now emphasizes terrorism to the exclusion of natural disaster planning. We’ll explore these possibilities and more. Today we’ll ask about reports that so many who wanted to help were prevented from doing so by the government, about ice and water trucks diverted elsewhere, about physicians and other health care providers told to stay home, about FEMA emergency phone lines busy for hours on end.

“When Michael Brown admitted to reporters that he didn’t know thousands of survivors were stranded in New Orleans Convention Center without food or water, even though TV journalists had been reporting that for hours, his appearance before us today became inevitable. We’ll ask Mr. Brown’s opinion of why all residents weren’t evacuated, why the levee system failed, why relief and medical supplies were so slow in arriving. And we’ll do so with the unfortunate knowledge that more than one study or exercise gave officials ample notice about a big storm and what could happen along the Gulf Coast and especially in New Orleans. FEMA scientists participated in the now-widely known exercise called Hurricane Pam in July of 2004, an exercise that predicted with eerie similarity Katrina’s impact on New Orleans, including an evacuation of a million people, overflowing levees and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of buildings.

“Dr. Kathleen Tierney, director of the National Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder said on a recent program that government missteps along the Gulf Coast were absolutely unavoidable. It was common knowledge that the levees could not withstand a Category 3 storm, that thousands of residents without cars would be stuck if an evacuation order was given, and that hesitancy in issuing mandatory evacuations proved devastating. Even 2003’s Isabel, a much smaller hurricane, offered lessons for FEMA based on oversight hearings we held in this committee. Two years ago in Virginia we heard disturbing tales of slow federal responses and nearly invisible coordination.

“We don’t know yet why FEMA failed. That’s why we’re having this hearing and why we continue to gather documents and why our investigation will soon be on the ground in New Orleans and elsewhere. At the end of the day, I suspect that we’ll find that government at all levels failed the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Gulf Coast. I think we’ll hear from Michael Brown that there was simply no unified command structure or clear lines of authority in Louisiana. That means we’re confronted with profound questions about not only went wrong with FEMA but what maybe wrong with our government at all levels when it comes to disaster preparations and response at this level.

“Are we lacking a culture of urgency, a culture of getting things done? Or is it that even when we have the best possible planning and predictions available, we come face to face with the vast divide between policy creation and policy implementation? After Katrina the American people are wise to the fact that a policy that cannot be implemented is no policy at all. This committee’s charge is to address the life and death difference between theory and practice.

[…brief housekeeping details] We recognize today’s first witness Michael Brown, former Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response. [He is sworn in.]”

Please go to SEMP Biot 271 at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_271.html for Part 2 of “FEMA Role Clarification and Katrina Performance Assessment: The Congressional Hearings September 27, 2005.”