PA 598C: Emergency Policy

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PA 598C Emergency Policy

• January 23, 2008

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Todays agenda

• Any questions or comments about the course
• Any ideas for what you might want to write about
  for your term project?
• Next week sign up sheet for individual meetings
  with me about your projects

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Key Terms

• Mitigation
• Preparedness
• Response
• Recovery
• Focusing Event
• Hazard
• Disaster and Catastrophe
• Risk

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A Brief History of Emergency Management in the
United States

• Overview
• For most of the nations history, emergency
  management has been a state and local function
• The federal government only recently became more
  involved. Why?

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Explanations for the Minor Federal Role, 1800-1950

• Federalism and the constitutional division of
  labor
• Resistance to asking for or receiving relief in
  some communities
• Charleston 1889
• San Francisco 1906
• Relatively little federal capacity to directly
  intervene in disasters, except
• Army Corps of Engineers Levees, Flood Protection
• Military Relief, Law and Order (San Francisco,
  1906).

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Explanations for the Increased Federal Role

• Compassion
• Insufficient state and local capacity
• Insufficient state and local commitment
• Connections between emergency management and
  civil defense
• Assumptions
• Nuclear warfare with USSR
• Survivability with preparedness (until about mid
  1960s)
• Results of research the Strategic Bombing Survey

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The Shift Begins Four Focusing Events

• Galveston Hurricane, 1900
• San Francisco earthquake and fires, 1906
• The influenza pandemic of 1918
• The Long Beach earthquake of 1933

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Common features of these events

• Denial of the hazard ignoring warning events
• Hubris mans domination over nature
• Poor planning
• Shoddy construction
• Difficulties in providing relief
• Poor decisions in reconstruction

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Relevance to current emergency management

• Could these events happen today?
• A major earthquake in California? Or near St.
  Louis?
• A bird flu pandemic?
• A hurricane on the scale of Katrina or the
  Galveston hurricane?
• What would be the likely consequences of such
  events?
• What different kinds of competencies would be
  required to respond to these events?

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What do we mean by focusing event?

• A sudden event that is known to the public and to
  decision makers more or less simultaneously
• An event that focuses attention on the event and
  on the policy issues surrounding the event
• An event that can yield policy or managerial
  change

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The Expanding Federal Role

• The 1927 Mississippi flood
• Significant racism in response
• Shortcomings of the levies only policy
• Replace with a federal local partnership for
  construction of flood control structures
• Created a major role for the Corps of Engineers
• 1947 Texas City explosion
• First successful assignment of responsibility to
  the federal government for technological
  accidents

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The Range of Hazards in the United States (and
the world)

• Before thinking about the broad range of hazards,
  lets keep in mind these questions
• Are these hazards unique to the United States? Or
  are they also seen in other parts of the world?
• What makes the U.S. more prone to face these
  hazards?
• What makes the U.S. more resilient in the face of
  these hazards
• Are different people or groups of people more or
  less vulnerable to the hazards we will review?

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Lessons Learned

• Disasters happen with greater frequency than most
  people think, (at least at the national level)
• Disasters are soon forgotten and their causes are
  often denied
• Mistakes are often repeating are lessons really
  learned?
• Past disasters affect present-day disaster
  management
• positive aspects
• Negative aspects
• Bottom line there is a difference between
  lessons observed and lessons learned

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Key features of the formative years

• A desire to regularize disaster relief
• A desire to plan for civil defense
• A greater appreciation for federal reach and power

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Key policy changes during this period

• The federal disaster relief act of 1950
• Established permanent federal authority
• Moved responsibility to the White House
• Committed the federal government to pre- and
  post-disaster assistance
• Small business act of 1953 disaster relief
• The Alaska earthquake of 1964 as a focusing event
  
• Hurricane Betsy as a focusing event

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Key policy changes during this period

• The disaster relief act of 1966
• The national flood insurance act of 1968
• Disaster relief act of 1966
• Disaster relief act of 1970 focus on aid to
  individuals
• Disaster relief act of 1974
• the creation of FEMA in 1979

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What happened here?

• Incrementally increasing federal role in disaster
  response and relief
• Increasing federal role in providing assistance
  to individuals
• Increasing federal efforts to improve local and
  state capacity to plan for and respond to
  disasters
• But, at the same time, increasing state and local
  dependence on federal aid and assistance before
  and after disasters

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The creation of FEMA

• Created by President Carter in 1979 under a
  reorganization plan, not a statute
• This may have made FEMAs organizational standing
  a bit tenuous
• Was intended to be an all hazards agency,
  addressing all phases of emergency management
• Mitigation
• Preparedness
• Response
• Recovery

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FEMAs early history

• President Reagan used FEMA more for civil defense
• Reagan administration rejection of mutually
  assured destruction
• Increasing belief that nuclear war was survivable
• Relatively few major natural disasters in the
  1970s and early 1980s
• Problems with FEMA has a civil defense agency
• Focus on unlikely events rather than likely
  events
• Quasi-military organization of the civil Defense
  function
• Relatively poor relationships with state and
  local emergency managers

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Three focusing events that changed FEMA

• 1989 Hurricane Hugo
• 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
• 1992 Hurricane Andrew
• Common features of these events
• Poor federal preparedness
• poor federal response
• In the hurricanes, overwhelmed state and local
  governments who didnt know what to ask for in
  the way of assistance
• Political repercussions both for FEMA and the
  president FEMA as turkey farm

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The key legislation the Stafford act

• Gives FEMA the task of coordinating federal
  response
• Outlines the key public assistance and individual
  assistance relief programs
• Creates a hazard mitigation grant program
  mitigation becomes more important
• Makes clear that the federal governments role in
  disaster and emergency management is to assist
  state and local governments. The federal
  structure is maintained

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The Witt Revolution

• President Clinton may have learned from these
  events
• He appointed to James Lee Witt, a disaster
  profess to lead FEMA Witt was allowed to select
  a professional staff
• Witt changed the way FEMA worked by
• Building relationships with state and local
  emergency managers
• Structuring FEMA to become proactive in the face
  of emergencies, rather than waiting for requests
  for aid after the fact.
• Promoting pre-disaster mitigation efforts
• Promoting mitigation as a key element of recovery
  planning
• Many of these ideas became part of the disaster
  management act of 2000, including better state
  and local planning for pre-disaster mitigation
  funds
• Trading project impact, a program intended to
  build public-private partnerships to improve
  community resilience and mitigation

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A Major Witt Innovation Mitigation

• Mitigation had received little attention before
  1992 however, the idea of working with nature
  incident against it had existed since at least
  the 1930s
• The 1993 floods suggested the need to apply
  mitigation ideas
• Creation of the hazard mitigation grant program
• Creation of the mitigation directorate within
  FEMA
• 2006 Multi-hazard Mitigation Council study found
  that every dollar spent on mitigation yields four
  dollars in savings

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Disaster Management in the Bush Administration

• The Bush administration returned FEMA to its
  pre-1992 turkey farm days
• Joe Allbaugh, FEMA director, and his disdain for
  mitigation
• Political connections trump expertise Michael
  Brown, etc.
• Still, FEMAs base was solid, as seen in its
  effective response to the 2004 Hurricane Season
• This was aided by Florida being a particularly
  good state in EM

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FEMA Comes Apart September 11 and Homeland
Security

• FEMA was folded into DHS under the Homeland
  Security Act
• Even before September 11, FEMA lost much of its
  claim on response to terrorist attacks
• Witt resisted bringing terrorism management under
  FEMA in the mid-1990s
• He realized this mistake too late, after the
  office of domestic preparedness was created in
  the Justice Department, and his attempts to move
  the ODP back into FEMA failed
• After September 11, FEMAs ability to respond to
  natural or intentional events was severely
  undermined
• Experts in homeland security replaced EM
  professionals
• Morale suffered greatly at FEMA as traditional
  programs were cut
• Spending priorities were clearly in HS, not in EM
  broadly

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The result the poor response to Hurricane Katrina

• No risk analysis was really undertaken comparing
  HS with natural disaster events
• New Orleans hurricane was among the nightmare
  scenarios that were drilled
• But planning for a big hurricane in New Orleans
  was a much lower priority
• Federal HS aid was based on pork instead of on
  risk-based notions of need.

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The outcomes Change in EM at the federal level

• Scrapping the National Response Plan in favor of
  a National Response Framework
• The local Emergency Mangers are very unhappy with
  this a framework is not a plan
• Locals still dont know what the feds can or will
  do in the case of emergency
• Increased local responsibility?
• Increased mitigation effort?

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Conclusion Disasters are political

• They invoke the who gets what questions
• Their impacts are not evenly distributed
• The distribution of federal aid has positive
  implications
• The failure to quickly respond can have negative
  political implications
• Most of the effects are, however, anecdotal
• Some of the evidence is contradictory.

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Where do we go from here?

• Abolish FEMA and reconstitute?
• Put the military in charge?
• Pull FEMA out of DHS and make it stand alone
  again? Reporting directly to the president?
• Make DHS subordinate to FEMA? (!)

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The big questions this raises

• Is EM in an HS event the same as EM in a
  natural or unintentional event?
• How is it similar
• How is it different?