"What's Wrong with This Hurricane?"

At the moment, the expected path for Hurricane Gustav threatens the Gulf Coast. Is the Bush administration ready?:

What's wrong with this Hurricane?, by Moira Whelan: I just noticed that the daily brief customarily done in advance of a hurricane is ... being given by NORTHCOM. So what does this tell us and why does it matter? It tells us that things are as broken as they were before Katrina.

The military, like EPA, Commerce, or anyone else, is only involved in emergency management to the point that they are requested to do so by the governor or the FEMA director (who acts on behalf of the President).

When it comes to disasters, the governor is always in charge. At any point, he or she can call in their state’s National Guard, and/or ask other governors for their help... If a governor is worried things are getting out of control, they ask the President to provide help through FEMA... FEMA is then in charge of coordinating the resources of the federal government to support the governor and the state. In a sense, when FEMA is working properly—as it did under Clinton—when the FEMA director tells another Federal agency to do something, it’s as if the President is calling. The government agency is expected to deliver and cut through red tape to make things happen and happen fast.

There is no allowance or legal authority for the Department of Defense to take any sort of control or command in this scenario. In a hurricane, DoD, like Human Services, Transportation, etc, all work for FEMA and the governor of the impacted state.

This is done for a very specific and important reason: here in America, we believe that governors should have control over their own states. The federal government needs to be there to help, but they absolutely do not move in and take over. We also do not believe that the military should ever forcibly operate inside the United States unless they are under civilian control.

With NORTHCOM taking the lead on briefing the public, it’s clear the Bush Administration wants to send the message that everything is under control. Instead, to those that do this for a living, the message is clear that everything is absolutely and completely broken.

Perhaps the state governments need help. Perhaps FEMA is not up to the job. Perhaps the Bush Administration simply wants a uniform on camera, and this way of doing things is preferable to things happening the way that they should (a process, by the way, that WORKED before Bush screwed it up).

NORTHCOM taking the lead in public relations is a clear indication that nothing has been fixed in DHS and FEMA since Katrina. As a result, there is no confidence in FEMA’s ability to respond to this hurricane. With NORTHCOM at the helm, the Bush Administration either doesn’t care if, or doesn’t want, the systems to work. ...

The bottom line is that things will not work the way they should with NORTHCOM in charge. Governors don’t take orders from Generals. No one else in government takes orders from DoD. No one in emergency management even knows what NORTHCOM does, except come in and issue “orders” to a bunch of civilians who don't work for them.

I hope for the sake of the people on the Gulf Coast that the hundreds of civilians who want to do right by them prevail over the system that the Bush Administration has failed to fix. ...

Comments

[sootytern]

Moira Whelan is, of course, correct regarding FEMA and the Bush Administration. I do think that the military, as a last resort, is the best organization to provide help that the rest of the federal government cannot. They have the communication and organizational capability to do the job without screwing it up totally.

[lonesome moderate]

It seems that they have gone from being (A) an organization where everything is broken and management is in denial, to (B)one where everything is broken and management realizes it. Having worked for organizations in both categories myself, I have no doubt that (B) is preferable, although not exactly desirable.

This fits with my general impression of the Bush administration, that things are still a mess but not quite as bad as in the first term.

[bakho]

Katrina was in the Bush 2nd term. Had it happened in the Bush first term, Bush Never would have been reelected and probably would have been forced by his party not to run.

[John]

Sootytern's comments about the military having the communication and organization not to screw the job up provoked two reactions in me. First, I am concerned about the possibility that the military might view the civilians in power as corrupt and incompetent, and might decide to do something about it. The founding fathers demanded civil control of the military, and made the President Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

History shows that military takeovers of third-world countries are a huge bane in their history -- so much so that abolishing the military is the best thing a third-world country could do. Might the military (or some faction) pull off a military takeover of the US?

My second reaction is to recall that on 9/11, our military disappeared until the Pentagon was hit. According to the 9/11 Commission's report, the only time the military actually got a fighter jet in the air to chase down a hijacked plane was with the Phantom Flight 11 -- the nonexistent aircraft heading toward DC from New York.

[btg]

The hurricane hit Pinar del Rio province in Cuba - of course, Cuba gets less play on US TV than when a hurricane goes through Jamaica or Mexico, but what is interesting is that the Cubans are well organised and can do a last minute massive evacuation of the areas getting hit.

I have an ex-girlfriend who lives there in PDR - my thoughts are with her tonight.

but given what crappy housing they have there, it would be hard to imagine people surviving the winds and destruction if they weren't evacuated!

[BJ Feng]

Currently, the military cannot just come in and take over a city, running it as it wishes without the State asking for such help. Think about it, do we really want the military to be able to come into any city they want and override civilian authority? What if Bush ordered the military to "help" San Francisco prepare for an earthquake or even storm, and the military decided to start enforcing marijuana laws and deporting illegals as Federal law mandates?

Governors only have to ASK. Is this too hard? Katrina was a special case of incompetence because the governor was especially inept and didn't know what to do. In previous disasters, FEMA responded well, and neighboring Mississippi which received less FEMA aid was able to do an adequate job.

No the system isn't broken, no system can make up for the incompetence of leaders and the people who run the system. The FEMA system was fine before, there was never a need to create a new command structure and a new level of bureaucracy. Brownie, the FEMA leader, was in charge and failed, he has been replaced. Blanco, the bimbo Governor, has also been replaced. The main reasons for the poor response are gone.

[Yves]

Northcom isn't supposed to have authority in this case, even if requested by State. The so-called "insurrection act" amendment to the Posse Comitatus of 1807 was repealed in 08 by H.R. 4986.
Curently the law reads:
Under 18 U.S.C. § 831, the Attorney General may request that the Secretary of Defense provide emergency assistance if civilian law enforcement is inadequate to address certain types of threat involving the release of nuclear materials, such as potential use of a nuclear or radiological weapon. Such assistance may be by any personnel under the authority of the Department of Defense, provided such assistance does not adversely affect U.S. military preparedness.
I don't see Hurricanes anywhere I look.

Fishy....

[Laura]

Isn't this what you'd expect after Katrina?

The state was late in calling in the feds. The feds actually asked for permission to come in and were denied. And the fed received almost all the blame for the slow reaction.

So now we're violating state's rights because the fed isn't willing to risk it.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[Laura]

For reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_government_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina#State_and_local_government

[No - they're damned if they do it wrong]

And they ought to be damned if they do it wrong.

That point is covered in the article, "The bottom line is that things will not work the way they should with NORTHCOM in charge." This is not what the military ought to be doing. Don't confuse people by acting as though criticism of FEMA's response last time - FEMA is an agent of the administration - is the same as criticism of the miliary's role here (which you are doing).

They are supposed to be ready. They aren't. FEMA can't even handle communications after all this time?

[save_the_rustbelt]

First, the Army Corps of Engineers has primary responsibility for the levees all of the time, so they were already on scene.

Second, for the ill informed, FEMA does not have the hard resources (helicopters, trucks, transport aircraft)that is standard TOE for the military.

Third, is the left more worried about assigning blame or getting the people out? After watching the media for the past 24 hours I'm not certain.

Check Ms. Whelan's bio and you will find her entire career has been in government and in think tanking type work. Translated, she has never really been responsible for anything more than arranging her pencils. Why does she have such instant credibility in the blogosphere?

[bakho]

Mississippi was NOT better served that New Orleans by FEMA last time. They had many of the same problems but substantially less devastation. NewOrleans sustained both hurricane damage AND FLOOD damage when the Levee broke. No other region was hit with the extensive flooding that NO received.

People in NO survived the hurricane just fine. It was the flood the next day that caused most of the death toll and devastation. By that time, Bush and FEMA should have been fully aware of the prospect that the levees might not hold and were utterly unprepared to act.

When a disaster hits, usually most of the infrastructure in major urban areas is intact and can serve as a base for relief. In this case, the major urban infrastructure was destroyed, so relief had to come from urban areas that were more distant. This is where FEMA failed.

says...

sootytern says...

". . . the military, as a last resort, is the best organization to provide help that the rest of the federal government cannot. They have the communication and organizational capability to do the job without screwing it up totally."

A touching, but utterly baseless faith. They managed to screw up Iraq pretty thoroughly, and at great enormous cost. Phrases like FUBAR were invented in the course of military operations, for a reason.

PS to Laura: everything you believe is wrong. Don't try to have political opinions, and, please, please, for the sake of your suffering country, don't vote.

[prostratedragon]

In 2005 with Katrina there were disturbing signs before landfall not only of co-ordination problems, but of the possibility that some might have been regarding them as exploitable for other agendas. That is not an easy aspect of the story to research from scratch (as I suspected at the time it might not be by now), since the CW that developed almost immediately was that the institutional failures were only those that became evident after the storm hit and the subsequent flooding began.

For instance in the set of interviews and other materials that FRONTLINE assembled for its program on the event, much attention is given to the actions of the governor and mayor after the flooding, which are certainly worth scrutiny, but little to the interactions between them and the federal government that helped to set the stage for their agencies response. Of the third parties brought into the FRONTLINE discussion, Tom RIdge was the main one to make any reference at all to the preparatory malfunctions in state-federal communication and interaction, about 3/4 through FRONTLINE's interview transcript with him.

But then, as Ridge is a former governor of a state one would expect him to spot the issues instantly.

A better timeline of government response to Katrina is at Annenberg School of Journalism, USC. The timeline includes links to documents and some very interesting quotes from correspondence. Other good ones are at Brookings and ThinkProgress; they come up near the top of a "Katrina timeline" google search.

But a person with both time and industry might also look through news reports and the actual postings on the various government websites from the last week in August 2005 to get the fullest picture of a most dispiriting story of state-federal dysfunction.

[prostratedragon]

Well cowabunga!

Was just looking for some fresher urls for some of the actual communications and documents that I hadn't looked for since 2005, and found a pretty fresh archive from nola.com, the Times-Picayune site, of materials from the former governor's office.

[ig0at]

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned: Blackwater is NOT the military. They are militaristic, but they are a privately owned and operated corporation. They could be just as easily hired by the state, or another private corporation.