What FEMA promised

Why didn’t local government have enough stockpiles for four days post-emergency?
This first-hand report from the Hurricane Pam exercise says that FEMA promised the locals quick and massive response.

They promised to have 1,000,000 bottles of water per day coming into affected areas within 48 hours. They promised massive prestaging with water, ice, medical supplies and generators. Anything that was needed, they would have either in place as the storm hit or ready to move in immediately after. All it would take is a phone call from local officials to the state, who would then call FEMA, and it would be done.

And why did FEMA seem to spend much of its energy turning down offers of supplies?

There were contracts-in-place with major vendors across the country and prestaging areas were already determined (I’ll have more to say about this later, but this is one reason FEMA has rejected large donation and turned back freelance shipments of water, medical supplies, food, etc: they have contracts in place to purchase those items, and accepting the same product from another source could be construed as breach of contract, and could lead to contract cancellation, thus removing a reliable source of product from the pool of available resources.”

3 thoughts on “What FEMA promised”

  1. Ah Adina,
    Those Democrat talking points, still!
    FEMA says local govt should not expect any relief for 72-96 hours, and FEMA has never responded faster than that, in fact their response to Katrina was very fast by the metric of their responses to other emergencies. The local and state govts didn’t follow their own emergency plans!
    Officials in FLA and NG reservists and doctors for example have heavily criticized the NOLA delays and confusion. Gov Blanco blocked the Salvation Army and Red Cross from entering, didn’t approve doctors from other states to practice. Mayor Nagin had an evac plan using city buses, never activated it. None of that is FEMA’s responsibility.
    Lots more here.

  2. I believe there is fault at the federal and local levels. Nagin could have done more to bus people out ahead of time. That would have meant not only busing people, but arranging shelters in the surrounding area ahead of time. When I watched poeple streaming to the superdome before the storm, I thought “that place is going to be either a deathtrap or a hellhole” after the storm. The failure of local communications seems partly a local problem (poor maintenance) and partly federal (this is one of the problems that Homeland Security money is supposed to have helped solve; national organizations could have helped with more backup generators sooner). The implosion of local law inforcement must have been in large part due to a weak police force before Katrina.
    That said, it is R talking points to blame all of the failure at the local level and ignore the serious problems caused by hiring hacks into FEMA management. There is clear and copious evidence that FEMA put a lot of energy into preventing the delivery of aid (see link below). The legal bickering and delays in Washington resulted in people dying on the Gulf Coast. The policy that the locals should be able to hold out for 72 hours is not an excuse to delay the arrival of helicopters, food, water, generators, firefighters, medical and police assistance. Have you seen the contrast to the response to the 1906 SF Earthquake?
    http://constructiveinterference.blogspot.com/2005/09/local-failure-caused-by-fema.html
    http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist10/06timeline.html

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