AGA Today
States Feel Left Out of
Disaster Planning
By
Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 8, 2007; A01
A
decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation's
emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency
officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes
that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two
years ago.
State and local officials in charge of responding to disasters say that
their input in shaping the National Response Plan was ignored in recent
months by senior White House and Department of Homeland Security
officials, despite calls by congressional investigators for a shared
overhaul of disaster planning in the United States.
"In my 19 years in emergency management, I have never experienced a more
polarized environment between state and federal government," said Albert
Ashwood, Oklahoma's emergency management chief and president of a
national association of state emergency managers.
The national plan is supposed to guide how federal, state and local
governments, along with private and nonprofit groups, work together
during emergencies. Critics contend that a unilateral approach by
Washington produced an ill-advised response plan at the end of 2004 --
an unwieldy, 427-page document that emphasized stopping terrorism at the
expense of safeguarding against natural disasters.
Bruce Baughman, Ashwood's predecessor as president of the National
Emergency Management Association and a 32-year veteran of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, said that a draft of the revised plan
released to state officials last week marks a step backward because its
authors did not set requirements or consult with field operators
nationwide who will use it to request federal aid, adjust state and
county plans, and train workers.
"Where's the beef?" asked Baughman, who is Alabama's emergency
management chief. "I don't have any problems with a framework . . . but
it's not a plan . . . and it's not national. Who are we fooling here?"
Last week, DHS circulated to federal and state officials a streamlined,
71-page draft, renamed the "National Response Framework." DHS
spokeswoman Laura Keehner said that state and local officials were
included earlier in the decision-making process, but that an initial
draft they produced with FEMA and DHS preparedness officials in May "did
not meet expectations." The initial collaboration resulted in what
several federal officials familiar with the process described as a
convoluted version that sought to satisfy too many constituencies and
re-fought old bureaucratic battles.
The disagreement over the plan comes at a time of increasing mistrust
between Washington and state homeland security officials. In recent
months, they have sparred over dwindling federal grants, the adequacy of
local intelligence-gathering efforts and what states regard as
Washington's reluctance to share information about potential threats.
"Coordination between state and local governments and the feds . . .
seems to be getting worse rather than better," said Timothy Manning,
head of emergency management in New Mexico and a member of a
DHS-appointed steering committee that initially worked on the emergency
plan before being shut out of the deliberations in May.
Testifying before a House panel last week, Ashwood and colleagues openly
questioned why the draft was revised behind closed doors. The final
document was to be released June 1, at the start of this year's
hurricane season.
Federal officials, Ashwood said, appear to be trying to create a
legalistic document to shield themselves from responsibility for future
disasters and to shift blame to states. "It seems that the Katrina
federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and
ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness," he
said.
The blunt remarks spotlight a breakdown in joint efforts to fulfill a
core recommendation by investigators who examined federal missteps after
Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005.
In
the White House's after- action report in February 2006, President
Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, called the
National Response Plan overly complicated, Washington-driven and filled
with "enough government acronyms and jargon to make your head spin."
"We need to rewrite the National Response Plan so it is workable and it
is clear," she said. "We will draw from the expertise at the state and
local levels to ensure that we get it right."
The pre-Katrina plan was developed shortly after FEMA was subsumed in
the huge new homeland security bureaucracy, a shift that critics later
concluded had put new bureaucratic layers between responders and
decision makers.
Partly as a result, White House investigators said, senior officials did
not anticipate the long-foreseen levee breaches that flooded New
Orleans, or activate federal powers to speed the movement of 70,000
troops to the region, or unify chains of command to promptly evacuate
the Louisiana Superdome and secure the chaotic city after the
hurricane's landfall.
Instead, senior U.S. officials including Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff, then five months on the job, implemented the existing
federal plan late, ineffectively or not at all, a special Republican-led
House panel on the Katrina disaster reported. Conflicting command roles
under the plan also contributed to a bitter public feud between Chertoff
and Michael D. Brown, who resigned as FEMA director in September 2005
after Chertoff relieved him of his on-site relief duties on the Gulf
Coast.
In
a statement, Brown said a "Washington knows best" attitude led the
nascent DHS to produce a convoluted, out-of-touch plan and to "ram the
results down the throats of first responders, mayors and governors" in
2005 before Katrina proved they would not work. "How many times does it
take Washington to realize that state and local governments are the
first responders and we should rely on their expertise, their knowledge
and work with them as partners?" Brown asked.
DHS Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson, who is preparing the new draft
with Joel Bagnal, the White House deputy assistant for homeland
security, said in May that the old plan was "impenetrable" and that a
rewrite was necessary so that "people can use it and train to it and
understand it at a governor's level, at a mayor's level, at the level of
a congressman."
The new draft, which was released publicly only after it was leaked to
Congressional Quarterly, states that it is a simplified but "essential
playbook" that describes various responsibilities of government
executives, private-sector business and nongovernmental leaders and
operators. Acknowledging that its directives exceed current
capabilities, however, the framework commits the federal government to
developing later actual strategic and operational plans.
Bush officials add that state, local and private-sector partners will
get their say during a 30-day review when the plan is formally released
later this year.
"The draft National Response Plan will be presented to the president
after an extensive 30-day review period by federal, state and local
officials, and we look forward to receiving the draft plan after that
review period," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
John R. Harrald, a professor at George Washington University's Institute
for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management, cautioned that shutting out
state and local voices during the plan's preparation would be
ill-advised. He said that the administration appears "to be guided by a
desire to ensure centralized control of what is an inherently
decentralized process. . . . Response to catastrophic events requires
collaboration and trust in a broad network of organizations."