FEMA Role Clarification and Katrina Performance Assessment: The Congressional Hearings September 27, 2005; Part 3

The following questioning of Michael D. Brown, former undersecretary of emergency preparedness and response, Department of Homeland Security, was transcribed by Margaret O’Leary on October 2, 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 questioning followed immediately after Mr. Brown’s opening statement, available in the previous Biot, #271, available at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_271.html.

The video of the testimony is available online until mid-October 2005 at: http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=michael+brown. Paragraphing and insertion of headings below is by the transcriber. To learn more about Mr. William Jefferson, please visit: http://www.house.gov/jefferson/

Chairman Tom Davis: Mr. Brown, thank you very much. We’re going to get into some fairly lengthy questioning shortly organized timeline and then by subject matter. But let me begin by asking an important question on a lot of people’s minds and you take the time you need to answer it. Based on what you know now, what would you do differently and specifically, what would you have done to evacuate New Orleans Center, what would you have done to insure unified command, what would you have done to address the security in the Superdome and throughout the City of New Orleans. What would you have done to maintain communications and what would you have done to get the National Guard or the military there sooner knowing now what you know and seeing the problems that you see. What were your, the biggest mistakes you think FEMA made [garbled] your command and control.

Mr. Brown: Mr. Chairman, that’s a pretty darned good compound question and just give me a minute to write down…I’d be happy to cover…

Chairman Davis: Mr. Brown, could you get that microphone close to you? We wanted to give you the opportunity first and we’re going to go through the timeline and open it up for questions.

Mr. Brown: Let me start out by addressing the premise of the question, which I don’t entirely agree with: What could FEMA have done in terms of the evacuation? What could FEMA have done in terms of communications and law enforcement? Those are not FEMA roles! FEMA does not evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not communications. But having said that, I have to tell you in hindsight there were things that I, as former director of FEMA, wish that I had done that maybe would have addressed those particular areas. First and foremost, when we started the video teleconferences that we do with state and local, I should have pushed harder to those in Louisiana, particularly Louisiana.
“With all due respect, I do not want to make this partisan, but I can’t help but Alabama and Mississippi are governed by Republican governors and Louisiana is governed by a Democratic governor. That’s not issue with me. Every state, regardless of who the governor is, we do what we can. I didn’t have a problem with the evacuations in Mississippi or Alabama. They were doing it. Jeb Bush had already ordered evacuations through the Keys as Katrina was making its way through that area. My mistake was in recognizing that for whatever reason that we might want to discuss later, for whatever reason, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were reticent to order a mandatory evacuation.

“If I, Mike Brown, individual, could have done something to convince them that this was the “big one,” that they needed to order mandatory evacuation, I would have done it. Maybe I could have gotten on the telephone with General Landreneau in the emergency operations center and said, “General, get some of those National Guard troops out there and start driving buses and pick people up and start taking them out of there.” Maybe we could have done something like that. That is all speculation.

Chairman Davis: Is there any federal authority anywhere in evacuation where the federal government can come in the case of reticence on the part of state [government? garbled]?

Mr. Brown: Mr. Chairman, not that I’m aware of. In terms of communications, one of the things that I didn’t mention in the litany of things that we prepositioned is something called our MERS, our Mobile Emergency Response Support system. Those are vehicles that are command and control units that have satellite hookups, telephone hookups, video hookups that enable us to do communications. I prepositioned those in all three states so that we would have communications wherever we needed it. I eventually sent one of those command units, in fact, it was one of the largest ones that we had called “Red October”—I eventually sent one of those into New Orleans for Mayor Nagin to use. In retrospect, I wish I had done that four days earlier. Had I done it four days earlier, guess what? It probably wouldn’t have gotten there. I’m second-guessing myself and perhaps I should have prepositioned it there before Katrina made landfall. But again, that’s not the role of the federal government. That’s Mike Brown, Monday-morning quarterbacking, having seen everything that took place and trying to figure out OK, seeing everything that did not work in Louisiana, if I had known that before hand, what could I have done? That’s what I’m telling you.

“Law enforcement? Law enforcement is purely a state and local role, Mr. Chairman. I don’t know what I could have done again except get on the phone with General Landreneau and suggest that he get the best National Guard troops that he has or request to the President to federalize the National Guard, or do something. Maybe I could have started that earlier. But law enforcement, no. FEMA does not do law enforcement.

“My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional.”

Chairman Davis: Dr. Max Mayfield, who is the head of the National Hurricane Center, is quoted as saying September 5 [2005] as saying, they knew that this one was different, “I don’t think that Mike Brown or anyone else at FEMA could have any reason to have any problem with our calls. They were told how bad this would be. They knew that Katrina would be an extraordinary, would be catastrophic beyond anything the coast had ever seen.” In all honesty, was FEMA really prepared or trained to handle this massive a disaster even though you had prepared assets and so on? A lot of problems getting stuff back into the city, getting ice and water, basic needs in there.

Mr. Brown: Mr. Chairman, this event stretched FEMA beyond its capabilities. There is question about that. It did it in several ways. One is FEMA over the past several years has lost a lot of manpower. At one point during my tenure, because of assessments by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA has lost, at one point we were short 500 people. In an organization of about 2,500, you do the math; that’s pretty significant. I managed to get that down to a more manageable number, but it’s still a significant number.

“FEMA has suffered from the inability to grow to meet the demands. By that I mean, the more successful FEMA becomes, the greater the expectations are that FEMA will take on something larger and larger and larger.

Chairman Davis: You had the ability to call on other agencies, didn’t you down there?

Mr. Brown: Yes.

Chairman Davis: FEMA is small by itself but your ability to coordinate with other agencies and the assets of the federal government are greater and we still weren’t ready even with that, is this fair to say?

Mr. Brown: It is, and Mr. Chairman, I have not figured out, but intend to figure it out, why it is that prior to landfall on Saturday and Sunday, FEMA is issuing mission assignments, for example, to DOD [Department of Defense] to provide air and ground transports for support as directed by FEMA in the State of Louisiana, that we’re asking DOD to help us establish a mobilization center on August 28, [2005], that we are indeed asking for bed count alert through our FCC for potential movement of beds and shelters to DOD, that we are requesting strategic air lift support for 8 swift-water rescue teams to be transported from Travis Air Force Base and March Air Force Base to Lafayette [?] Regional in Baton Rouge. I need to find out why some of those requests that were put into the system either did or did not end up actually taking place because the system was there to do what it was supposed to do, but I have no record sometimes of whether some of those things got to where we asked them to go to.

Chairman Davis: We have a time line that we’re going to go to with questions. I just wanted to get this out to start with. I’m going to give Mr. Jefferson, who is recognized for ten minutes.
 
Congressman William Jefferson (eight-term Member of the United States House of Representatives; Democrat representing the 2nd District of Louisiana since 1991, graduate of Southern University A&M College and of Harvard University Law School. In February of 1996, Jefferson received his Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University, making him only the second Member of Congress to do so while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. For more info, please visit: http://www.house.gov/jefferson/biography.shtml):

“I thank the Chairman for letting me participate in the meeting today. As you know, I am not an official member of this committee or this inquiry. But I think that there is so much at stake in Louisiana, in my own region, that I thought it was important for me to come and participate to the extent I can, as I believe that [two other Congressmen] find their way to become involved.

“I find it absolutely stunning that this hearing would start out with you, Mr. Brown, laying blame for FEMA’s failings at the feet of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans.

“I think it’s fair to say that perhaps mistakes were made all around. But I don’t think the response of the federal government explained on the basis of, as you said here, that you could not persuade the governor and mayor to sit down and coordinate a response. As you probably know, Governor Blanco requested a disaster declaration from the President three days before the storm made landfall, and the President declared a disaster two days before the hurricane hit. So the local folks made an accurate request for support. But even if they hadn’t made any request for help at all, even if they were plainly, as you said, dysfunctional—I’m not hear to defend them but I don’t believe that that is an appropriate characterization of what happened here.

“FEMA had already been engaged in an exercise that would put to lie any notion that this should have been handled by local people. For instance, in the FEMA document as a result of this Hurricane Pam exercise we’ve heard so much about lately, it says at one point this: “A strong hurricane hitting heavily populated southeast Louisiana will create a catastrophic event with which the state would not be able to cope without massive help from neighboring states and the federal government. The geographic situation of southern Louisiana and the densely-population of the New Orleans area would complicate response to problems and quickly overwhelm the state’s responses. You said here that FEMA itself had capability issues and was overwhelmed. How much more would one think that a state or a local government would be overwhelmed by such an event?

“Furthermore, a catastrophic event will produce a chaotic and degraded environment, the possible loss and malfunctioning of various layers and sections of all levels of government. A major storm would create a possible need to reconstitute local and state government authorities, responsibilities, capabilities, missions, and resources, meaning that the normal response one might expect from state and local government in this situation was not even contemplated to be available. And then there is the Department of Homeland Security national planning scenario for a major hurricane includes the following assumptions: that most of the local fire, police, and other response personnel and officials are victims of the storm and are unable to coordinate in meeting the response resources. State and local [garbled] triage [garbled] in the disaster area are overwhelmed. And the National Response Plan talks about a proactive federal response. Catastrophic events says, including a major natural disaster that results that extraordinary casualties and damage, it almost immediately exceeds the resources, almost immediately exceeds the resources normally available to states, local, tribal and private sector authorities in the affected area. The response authority of local jurisdictions may insufficient and quickly overwhelmed. 

“Now, we all knew from the various scenarios that were created to [garbled] Hurricane Pam exercise, [garbled] the 2004 National Geographic report on might happen in the event of a Category 4 hurricane or higher. In September 2004, the US [garbled] on OSHA [garbled] reported to the President on the same manner. Even the newspapers ran articles that talked about this catastrophe occurring.

“Now, it was more than a matter of the media not having the proper briefings and the governor and the mayor not being able to sit down and coordinate a response. The response was concentrated was a federal response and not a state and local response.

“I am interested in what actually happened down there before landfall and about whether there were meetings with FEMA before landfall and if there were how many there were and where they were and what happened there, about the contacts by phone and in person with DHS [Department of Homeland Security] or with the Secretary [Chernoff] before landfall, and how you dealt with Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, Governor Barbour in the week prior to the landfall, and what resources supplied by FEMA and other federal agencies before landfall, and since you said you were aware of it, how were the resources deployed before Katrina differently than the resources deployed prior to Hurricane Rita?

“Now, that’s before the landfall. If you want me to stop here, I could let you stop and let you deal with it, but I think, also—after the landfall, here’s what we know on the ground in Louisiana, that however the statements go over here today, no matter how the matters get described, the help just didn’t come. People suffered from it. The President himself said early on that the response was unacceptable. He since that time has made statements which are more complete about some of the failings and shortcomings. I think it’s real important if we’re going to find out what happened and make sure that it doesn’t happen again because I’m not interested myself in pointing fingers at you or any particular individual. I hope you know that. I simply want to find out what happened and how it can prevented from happening again because what happened here has already created, people have already suffered, we’ve already had terrible losses. It is in the wake of this today to try to figure out what happened to cause all those people to suffer to answer that question, to [help to understand?] those people who don’t know why they’re in the situations they’re in and who have lost loved ones and lost property and lost a sense of place, of being at home that may never recover.

“So it is very important for us to justify to them why the government didn’t do all it could to make their situations come out better. But this prospective in its value because, as I’ve said, people have already gone through that suffering. We’re looking to how we can make sure that our government works better in the wake of these disasters, which we can see are coming more ferociously and more frequently than we’ve ever seen them in recent times before. And so the preparation has to be equal the challenges that we face. For me and for others in the regions, it’s really important that we be able to reassure our people that the government is handling this problem, and handling it properly.

“I really am troubled by the response when one asked what you would have done differently and did you make mistakes and you crystallized it to these two matters of not having appropriate media briefings and not being able to get Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down and coordinate a response. I think that is a very weak explanation of what happened and very incomplete explanation of what happened. I hope that we could look forward to a fuller explanation before the day is gone because I don’t think that’s going to cut it, really.

“FEMA is there for a reason. You say that it is there to be and honest broker, it’s there to coordinate various levels of government and that it’s not a first responder. In the ordinary course of events, perhaps that’s how things go. But one has to have the government match the threat that’s out there. Everyone knew what might happen to that region in the event of catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina posed. Therefore, the preparation for it, by your own documents from the government—all of them—contemplated something quite different. Yet we seem to have proceeded in quite the usual way as if we expected without these catastrophic horrible events, that we going about some usual disaster planning that didn’t pose these extraordinary risks. It can’t be approached that way and expect the results to come out any different than they did, which is to say that the coordination effort, if that was the object of FEMA, failed; the coordination effort, if it was to get local people working together, of course, failed; if it was to get resources in place, failed; if it was to reach people in town who needed help, it all failed.  I think the results are quite stark in that regard. I hope, and I think that we have a right to expect, a full explanation of what happened from you and from the other persons who were leading the agency, before the day is done, before these hearings are done. Mr. Chairman, I have specific questions about prior to landfall and few for after landfall. You can take the before landfall ones I inquired about earlier. I would appreciate a response to that. Thank you.”

Mr. Brown: Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. I’m glad you were there because you and I can talk first hand about what we saw and what took place. Before landfall, I had numerous conversations with Governor Blanco specifically asking about mandatory evacuations, whether she was going to order those or not. I never understood what the reticence was in not ordering those mandatory evacuations, but I did push and push her in that regard.

Congressman Jefferson: If I may ask, when was that?

Mr. Brown: That was on Saturday [August 27, 2005], Saturday and Sunday when we were both participating—I think she was participating on Saturday on VTC [video teleconferencing]. But I don’t recall specifically. But both myself and the staff of FEMA pushed the state EOC [emergency operations center] and I personally pushed the governor for mandatory evacuation prior to landfall. The other thing that I think it is important to know before landfall is, and you didn’t have benefit of my statement but it’s in my statement—all of the things that we pushed forward into Louisiana prior to landfall, because as you correctly point out, she made a request for Presidential disaster declaration, President Bush signed that, which enable FEMA to go ahead and start prepositioning all those assets.

“One of the things that I did, that FEMA did, which was unusual in this case, is that we sent a federal coordinating officer although not in that capacity, but an individual of that capability, and another career FEMA person, into Mayor Nagin’s office, so that they would be there prior to landfall. FEMA did that because having for the first time in the history of the organization put together catastrophic disaster planning, and having specifically chosen New Orleans because of the potential for a catastrophic disaster, we knew that the mayor was probably going to have some problems, that any mayor was going to have some problems. So FEMA thought it was incumbent upon us to make certain that there was someone on the ground to be our eyes and ears within the mayor’s office so that we could help that mayor in whatever needs they might have. We did the same thing in the state emergency operations center, too.

“Mr. Jefferson, I know that you saw what I saw when I was there on Sunday, Sunday evening and Monday, which was no one in charge. I couldn’t find out who was driving the resource requirements, who was making the decisions about what needed to be done. You saw that middle room, the room where we sat with the President and had the briefing. On Sunday and Monday, that room was chaos. I remember walking into a small room like that in some rural county in Florida, I don’t remember what county it was, it’s immaterial. I remember commenting to some of the folks that were there that, “Wow!” This team had its act together because they had at the county level—in your case, the parish level, they had someone there who was their county coordinator; they had their emergency support functions set up. We walked in, FEMA walked in, knew who was in control, who was making the decisions, where the resource requests were coming in, and how they were being fed out. I never found that in Baton Rouge. I never saw that room function the way that it should have functioned.

“[Interrupts chairman] We put people in the mayor’s office because we knew based upon Hurricane Pam exercise that any mayor may have a difficult time communicating and getting those resource requests into us, so we specifically put people in there to help us feed those resource requests. On Tuesday, the governor and I got into a helicopter and flew to the Superdome, landed and walked into the mayor. I was ready for bear. I was madder than a wet hen at the mayor at the time. My staff did what they were supposed to do. The FEMA staff did their job. They sat down with mayor and said the FEMA director’s going to come in here and we promise you that after the cameras disappear and you’ve had your little photo op, he’s going to sit down with you and ask you what do you need? He’s going to ask you what the priorities are for those needs. Lo and behold, I walk in, the photo ops occur, and I sit down with him, and he does, he has his list there with everything he needs and the priorities. I turned to Phil Parr, the FCO on the ground, and said, Phil you guys have done a good job, the mayor has his list here. Feed those into the system. Let’s help this guy. The state EOC was incapable of doing that. It didn’t happen. I’m not here to point blame. I’m not here to point fingers. I’m here to tell the truth, I’m here to tell what I saw and what I witnessed, and that’s what we witnessed.”

Congressman Jefferson: Would it surprise you to know that the mandatory evacuation ordered by Governor Blanco was ordered on Sunday at 11 o’clock. This was the same time exactly the same time that Harrison and Jackson Counties in Mississippi ordered their mandatory evacuations?

Mr. Brown: Yes, I am. I was on the phone to Governor Blanco before she made that call with Mayor Nagin. I urged her to do that as rapidly as possible.

Congressman Jefferson: Would it surprise that it occurred at the same time as the evacuation of Harrison and Jackson Counties…

Mr. Brown: No, because if you go back and you look at the tracking and the reports from the National Hurricane Center, I think those evacuations made in Mississippi were made at approximately the same time. The evacuation order in New Orleans was made a day late.

Congressman Jefferson: They were made at about the same time and now you’re saying that Mississippi—are you saying that FEMA did everything right in Mississippi and Alabama and only in Louisiana it had problems?

Mr. Brown: No, I’m saying that the system worked in Mississippi and Alabama. The system did not work in Louisiana. Congressman Jefferson, we can’t divide that point that it worked in the other states and did not work in Louisiana.

Congressman Jefferson: Would it be surprise if people in Mississippi and Alabama have complaints about FEMA’s performance that are similar with what we’ve had about FEMA’s lack of response in Louisiana?

Mr. Brown: Congressman, every state in every disaster has a complaint about FEMA.

Congressman Jefferson: My point is that FEMA wasn’t there, didn’t show up in time, didn’t discharge right, not little complaints but big complaints…

Mr. Brown: Yes, I can into any disaster and find a county commissioner, a mayor, find someone because FEMA in every disaster—no disaster is perfect. Mistakes are made in every single disaster. The difference here—the simple point I’m trying to make here is that the system was functioning in those states. The system was not functioning in Louisiana.
Congressman Jefferson: You think then that this was all the fault of the mayor and the governor? What do you think was FEMA’s coordinating responsibility in that area? It didn’t take place appropriately. It didn’t use assets appropriately and that sort of things because New Orleans, of course, is a little different from some other places, and you want to make the distinction about that earlier. If that be the case, FEMA should have applied its resources earlier and more effectively. If New Orleans was different in any significant way, then one has to approach it differently, it would seem to me. So I can tell you that I was in some rooms with you when we were all concerned with how things were working, but I don’t think—you said you can bear witness to the fact that it was because of the lack or dysfunction between the mayor and the governor. There was some concern about what the federal response was going to be, what role the federal government was going to take, whether it was going to take a stronger role. There was some concern about how the National Guard and the active duty forces would coordinate their work. I remember that very pointedly. And that seemed to be a point of contention between the governor and the President to some extent.

“But before we get to that whole set of issues, when you went through that exercise with Pam, which assumed that everything bad that could go wrong went wrong, including not just poor communication between locals, but no communication, that nothing worked, that everything was blackened, there was no way to do anything and the question was, in any event, it was so bad that the local folks were overwhelmed immediately, there’s no communication, there’s no coordination between the mayor and the governor or anybody else; In those circumstances, if they came up with an appropriate response and that response was not taken, why was that response not taken, assuming that everything else was going wrong. Tell me why the response that Pam contemplated under those circumstances wasn’t undertaken.”

Mr. Brown: Pam was an exercise. Pam was the first time that the federal government, and particularly FEMA. had sat down and looked at the potential catastrophic disaster hit our homeland. The public policy debate that now needs to occur between the administration and Congress is what do we do? Do we muscle of FEMA? Do we muscle up NORTHCOM? Do we somehow tie NORTHCOM and FEMA together? I don’t want to list only those things, but there are any number of things that we can do so that FEMA can respond effectively to that catastrophic event. I go back to my basic premise that FEMA does not have the capability or the capacity to come in to New Orleans and reestablish their government immediately. In the best of situations, that is going to take several days because you have an urban area, an urban area that was not evacuated, an urban area where the police and fire services have broken down and disintegrated. You cannot, even the Fifth Army or the First Army, turn on a dime and be there two hours after landfall and reconstitute that. So yes, we can have those policy debates all day long and frankly I think Congress probably should have those policy debates all day long.

The fact of the matter remains that New Orleans did not evacuate in the time line that was anticipated in Hurricane Pam, the state did not utilize the National Guard, for example, to drive the buses that everyone has in photographs on their websites somewhere, none of those actions took place despite the actions and cajoling that we could do. At this stage of the game, it is not the federal government’s responsibility. It is a state and local responsibility.

Congressman Jefferson: I want to thank the chairman for permitting me this time. At this point, I would ask that at the very end of this, the staff and I gave authority on the exercise, we contemplated that there was no coordination, no talking with anyone, that is the response that I am talking about that did not take place. I want to thank the chairman for permitting my asking. I hope that I get a chance to have another round.

Chairman Davis: Thank you, Mr. Jefferson, thank you.