Saying that “we are a nation, not 50 individual states” and that when a disaster hits “we, as Americans, stand together,” Sanders described Paul’s assertion that government should remove itself from the disaster response business as the GOP presidential hopeful being “completely out to lunch” on the issue.

“That’s what being a nation is all about,” Sanders said.

Although Sanders’ comments to CNN (embedded below) came in the wake of Hurricane Irene slamming the nation’s east coast, Paul, a Republican with a distinct libertarian bent, has long held that FEMA and other government programs should be eliminated. His latest remark came on Fox News Sunday, when he told Chris Wallace that “FEMA has been around since 1978, it has one of the worst reputations for a bureaucracy ever.

“It’s a system of bureaucratic central economic planning, which is a policy that is deeply flawed,” said Paul.

Paul has previously argued that FEMA assistance following hurricanes in along the Gulf of Mexico created a sense of dependency that helped ruin local economies — a charge he repeated on Sunday.

“We’ve conditioned our people that FEMA will take care of us and everything will be OK, but you try to make these programs work the best you can, but you can’t just keep saying, ‘Oh, they need money,’” Paul said, adding “this country is bankrupt.”

Instead of continuing to provide assistance through FEMA, Paul suggested an immediate end to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, earmarking half of the funds saved for deficit reduction and the other half to “tide people over until we come to our senses.”

According to the Associated Press:

FEMA spokesman Brad Carroll said the agency determined that state and local governments and the utility that owns the ruptured pipeline could cover the cost of recovery on their own.

At a hearing on the San Bruno explosion today, San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane expressed frustration at the decision. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), in response, said she would aid Ruane in any appeal of the decision.

It’s a message the agency has been pushing for years, and with only relative success. Even 9/11 did not scare America into compliance: A 2007 study by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, for instance, showed that 80 percent of Americans were “concerned” about another terror attack, but only one-third were prepared for a major disaster. And last year, a FEMA survey found that while the number of individuals who had set aside disaster supplies at home had crept up from 50 percent in 2003 to 57 percent in 2009, the agency was still far from its goal of having 80 percent of households prepared with a communications plan, disaster supplies and practice at evacuating or weathering a disaster at home.

Part of the difficulty is the unpredictable and varied nature of disasters. Topping the news right now is a diminishing Hurricane Earl, which the East Coast has been bracing for all week and now looks like it’ll have a minimal impact. But across the world, a major New Zealand city is reeling from a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Unlike hurricanes, earthquakes for the most part occur at random (although the Himalayas apparently have a winter earthquake season). In the United States, Californians deal with earthquakes most frequently, but Seattle is also at risk and New York City has had a couple in its day.

In a terrorist attack, an hurricane or an earthquake, it surely won’t hurt to have at hand a gallon of water per person, per day, three days worth of food, a flashlight, dust masks, a first aid kit and other items FEMA recommends. But preparedness is more complicated than that. It means knowing that in an earthquake, for instance, it’s smarter to stay inside a building than to try to get out, the agency says.

In a earthquake-prone area, it might be easier to see the use of remembering that dictate than of keeping uneaten cans of beans under the sink for an emergency that never seems to come. But FEMA can’t tailor its national preparedness messages that closely. It can only prompt people to think about these problems in a general way and hope they’ll seek out more information their own.

A school damaged by Hurricane Katrina. (Flickr, Paul Baker)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the federal government began the most expensive long-term rebuilding project in American history. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other organizations sent billions of dollars — the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center puts the total at $45 billion — to the Gulf Coast for the repair and reconstruction of housing, primarily, but also for the rebuilding of infrastructure like roads, sewers, libraries and prisons. In Louisiana, however, by far the biggest chunk of infrastructure funding is going to schools. But that does not necessarily mean that schools have come back online quickly enough. Indeed, despite the government’s best efforts to funnel a lot of cash fast to education, the pace of recovery remains slow.

[Environment1] Over the past five years, the recipient of the largest slice of rebuilding money in the state has been the Recovery School District, which took over most of New Orleans’ public schools after the storm. Since Katrina, the RSD has been allocated more than $763 million, according to a TWI analysis of data from the Louisiana Recovery Authority. In his speech Sunday, President Obama touted a settlement between FEMA and New Orleans’ schools that would send another substantial injection of funding into the system. “Just this Friday, my administration announced a final agreement on $1.8 billion dollars for Orleans Parish schools — money that had been locked up for years — so folks here could determine how best to restore the school system,” he said.

Even before this agreement, K-12 public schools as a group were slated to receive more than $1.7 billion — more than three times as much as the next largest group of recipients, hospitals and health care providers. Add to that sum this new infusion, which represents more than $900 million in additional funding, along with money received by K-12 private schools ($521 million), public higher education ($195 million), and private higher education ($144 million), and the total rebuilding money for Louisiana schools comes to more than $3.4 billion.

Since taking office, the Obama administration has promised to “cut the red tape and bureaucracy” for the recipients of disaster recovery money, as the President said Sunday, and the agreement with New Orleans’ schools helps the administration argue it is keeping that promise. The process that the Recovery School District had to navigate to get to this point, however, goes a long way towards explaining why, five year after Katrina, the city is still just beginning the process of rebuilding.

As recently as December, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, looked outside the Recovery School District for an example of how FEMA funding was reviving New Orleans. She held up Holy Cross, a private Catholic academy, as evidence that the administration was helping to “cut through red tape and streamline and expedite the decision-making process for public assistance” in the Gulf Coast. (The red tape trope is a refrain for the Obama administration: Secretary Napolitano used similar language when describing the RSD settlement on Friday.) Holy Cross’ old campus was located in the Lower Ninth Ward. After Katrina, the school’s leaders decided to move it to Gentilly, a neighborhood left less damaged by Katrina. In the fall of 2009, the school welcomed students to its new campus; by this winter, phase one of the school’s reconstruction, complete with a new gym and performing arts spaces, should be complete.

Holy Cross raised money from private investors to help finance its rebirth, but it is also down for $82 million of FEMA funding, more than $70 million of which the school has already received, according to the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s data. The school ranks 20th on the list of the Louisiana funding applicants who have had the most money obligated to them, according to TWI’s analysis.

Holy Cross had to overcome its share of bureaucratic hurdles, but with the help of a local consultant with experience in public assistance grants and with the support of officials from the local to the federal level and of the surrounding community, the school was able to navigate the  process, says Stanton Vignes, who served on the executive committee of the school’s board for the past six years. “The process is tremendously bureaucratic and ever-changing, but we always realized it was a process,” he says. “We had a direction; we knew what we were doing; we knew where we wanted to be. That’s why we were so far ahead of the curve.”

The Recovery School District is not lagging so far behind; it opened the Langston Hughes Elementary School in August 2009, around the same time Holy Cross occupied its new campus. But ultimately, between rebuilding and repairing, the district needs to bring 87 school campuses up to snuff. (The final total depends on how the city’s population rebounds.) Langston Hughes was one of five Quick Start schools chosen for fast-tracked construction. Students occupied three additional schools in January 2010, and the fifth, L.B. Landry High School, opened in early August.

Across the city, however, more than 7,000 public school students, almost one out of every five, are still learning in “modular classrooms” — essentially, trailers. The New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, known as SciAcademy, has been in modular classrooms since 2008, its first year of operation, for instance. SciAcademy is one of the success stories of the post-Katrina education system: In its first two years, it has taken struggling high school students, some of whom were reading at a third-grade level, and brought them up to age-appropriate levels of achievement. This month, the school’s staff was preparing for the students’ arrival, rehearsing their plan for the first day and practicing responses to dicey situations, when the news came that they would have to pack up the entire school and move to a new, but still temporary, site.

“The capacity to find a facility is not tied to school performance,” says Ben Marcovitz, the school’s principal. “I understand that, but I really wish there was a clearer path.”

Part of the problem is that, initially, to receive funds from FEMA, the Recovery School District had to work on each project independently, which slowed down the entire process. Each building had its own project worksheet, used to assess damages and determine compensation. “Very early on, you may have had the same problem on every project, but FEMA treated every project differently,” says Lona Hankins, the district’s director of capital projects. “They’d rule differently. We’ve had to learn to fight those battles on a system-wide level.”

Without the lump settlement, it was more difficult for the district to plan the wholesale reconstruction of the school system. Earlier this month, for instance, the Recovery School District released a draft plan of long-term building assignments for all schools currently operating in the district. The reconstruction plan is divided into phases, however, and school leaders slated for buildings in later phases wondered if the district would be able to fund its ambitious plan.

Now, however, that worry is moot. The district estimated the cost of its master plan at $1.6 billion; the $1.8 billion FEMA settlement should be sufficient to rebuild or repair the rest of the district’s schools, if the process continues according to plan. The district has hired a pool of architects to take on the remaining projects as they reach the head of the line. Now all that remains to do is build the schools. The 24 new or totally renovated schools in phase one of the reconstruction plan should all be open by the fall of 2013. After that, the district will have only five more phases of construction to complete before New Orleans’ schools are finally rebuilt.

Gutsy move? That’s the question The New York Times poses this morning.

It turns out Brown has a radio show, which he moved from Denver to New Orleans this week (a decision one listener called “pretty gutsy”). And he’s promoting his upcoming book on the federal response called “Deadly Indifference.”

On his radio show, Brown said the Bush administration just didn’t listen to him:

Put yourself in my shoes. You’ve just come out of a meeting where you’ve just told your boss that nothing’s working, I can’t make stuff happen, state and local government aren’t doing what they need to do, the federal government isn’t doing what it needs to do, things are bad. And he comes out and tells me I’m doing a heck of a job?

I think the most important point is that everything that I was saying to [former homeland security secretaries] Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff prior to Katrina making landfall all came true. The people at FEMA who will now tell you that Washington had become too Washington-centric are absolutely true.

And later:

The lesson to be learned about this is first of all, every agency is going to make missteps. There are always going to be errors made. It’s the nature of the beast. . . .

Whatever your persuasion is, we have to recognize that this federal government of the United States is so large and cumbersome that we really can’t, and should not, expect it to be this kind of well-oiled, well-running machine. It’s not.

Blaming the idea of federal government for the failures of a particular administration or agency is a particularly nifty trick that only conservatives are able to play. Cases of individual negligence and failure are used to bolster a larger ideological stance that federal agencies are generally cumbersome and unhelpful as a rule.

President Obama, on the other hand, could no more blame a leaking oil well and a dysfunctional Minerals Management Service on the federal government being “cumbersome” than he could disavow his core beliefs as a liberal. He recognizes that it wasn’t the size of MMS, per say, but its cozy relationship with the industries it was supposed to regulate, that were to blame for allowing oil companies to evade regulations and safety measures. Admitting this involves accepting a degree of political heat, but it also involves coming up with a way to fix the problem in the future, rather than simply writing it off as an inevitable evil of Washington.

Hurricane Katrina victims take note. Michael Brown is safe.

A series of wind-whipped wildfires north of Boulder, Colo., have forced the evacuation of more than 11,500 residents — including Brown, the vilified ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency head.

Brown was lauded by President Bush for doing a “heckuva job” in the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of 1,836 people and caused more than $81 billion in damage. Brown resigned in disgrace and the event looms as a national turning point against the Bush administration.

This week, PBS’s “Frontline” broadcast a heart-wrenching investigative report, “The Old Man and the Storm,” about struggling post-Katrina rebuilding efforts more than three years after the massive hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

FEMA has promised to pay up to 75 percent of firefighting costs, according to a Daily Camera story.

The latest images and ground reports via Twitter can be found at twemes.com/boulderfire.

h/t Westword

Wendy Norris is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Colorado Independent. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/24440/ex-fema-head-michael-brown-evacuated-from-colorado-wildfire/feed 0 http://washingtonindependent.com/20635/emanuel-hedges-on-fema-autonomy http://washingtonindependent.com/20635/emanuel-hedges-on-fema-autonomy#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:15:44 +0000 Matthew DeLong http://washingtonindependent.com/?p=20635 One of the big questions concerning the future of the Department of Homeland Security is whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency should remain under its control.

Many have argued that the bureaucratic reorganization that placed FEMA in Homeland Security’s purview following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks played More...