There are hopes that a structural reform and management reorganization of FEMA under the Obama Administration will solve the problems that emerged in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Dolly and Ike. There is a lot of important work to be done with reforming FEMA but even a perfect emergency management agency won’t provide the essential ingredient for an effective federal disaster response.
Don’t get me wrong. The agency needs better management, more efficient organization and better accountability.
But restructuring alone is not enough. The quality of Presidential leadership is the truly defining factor that makes of breaks an effective government disaster response. Contrast the role of President Bush who left it to “Brownie” to deal with the Katrina disaster to President Johnson’s approach to the Hurricane Betsy disaster.
Immediately after Hurricane Betsy devastated New Orleans in September 1965 President Johnson flew to the city. In the flooded Ninth Ward, Johnson visited the George Washington Elementary School, on St. Claude Avenue, which was being used as a shelter. “Most of the people inside and outside of the building were Negro,” the White House diary reads.
The diary describes the shelter as a “mass of human suffering,” with people calling out for help “in terribly emotional wails from voices of all ages. . . . It was a most pitiful sight of human and material destruction.”
Johnson was deeply moved as people approached and asked him for food and water; one woman asked Johnson for a boat so that she could look for her two sons, who had been lost in the flood.
Johnson had entered the crowded shelter in near-total darkness; there were only a couple of flashlights to lead the way. ” At first, the people in the darkened shelter did not believe that it was actually the President.” Directing the flashlights pointed at him Johnson announced to the refugees, “This is your President!. I’m here to help you!”
Johnson dispatched Secret Service agents from his protective detail to bring water to the shelter, ordered the Mayor of New Orleans who was with him to mobilize local resources and picked up the phone, called the directors of two dozen federal agencies and ordered them to drop everything to bring the resources of their agencies to bear on the problem.
The appropriate role of a President in mobilizing the resources of the federal government is illustrated in a telephone recording of a conversation between LBJ and Robert Phillips, the Director of the Government Readiness Office of the Office of Emergency Planning, the predecessor of FEMA.
[A good place to begin fixing the problems with the Hurricane Ike recovery program would be for President Obama to have a conversation like this with the federal, state and local officials working on disaster recovery].
Recovering from Betsy was hard, slow and painful. But the recovery did take place.
The first step today is to yank FEMA out of the Homeland Security Department bureaucracy and make it and the entire disaster response program directly accountable to the President as it used to be before the so-called 9/11 government reforms.
Effective disaster response requires Presidential leadership.