How Bushcorp Destroyed FEMA: If It's Been Fixed, Break It

Sidney Blumenthal wrote in Salon (see yesterday's Dreaming Up Daily) that FEMA became a fully professional emergency response agency in the Clinton administration. Also in salon, Farhad Manjoo wrote about FEMA's failures under Bush. He talked to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! about how things were done in the Clinton years:

I talked to George Haddow, who was one of the deputies in the Clinton administration's FEMA under James Lee Witt, and you know, he talked about how when they knew that a disaster was coming or when a disaster occurred like the Northridge earthquake in California or the Midwestern floods, all of the kind of the principals who were in charge of disaster relief from the federal government, from the state government, from local government would meet in a room and talk about what should be done, and there weren't sort of people pointing fingers at each other and blaming each other.

That's very different from what's happening here. And it leads to, you know, a complete breakdown in the response and in coordination to the point where federal officials last week had no idea what was going on in New Orleans. I mean, they didn't learn, even though it was all over TV, they didn't learn until sometime in the middle of the week that there were people at the Convention Center who had no food and water and were waiting to be evacuated.

FEMA Was Unprepared for Katrina Relief Effort, Insiders Say

From ABC NEWS:

FEMA was an independent agency, answering directly to the president, until it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security two years ago. However, the latest government figures show that 75 cents out of every $1 spent on emergency preparedness goes to anti-terrorism programs. Well before Katrina, FEMA insiders were sounding the alarm.

A timeline of events leading up to the hurricane illustrates what went wrong.

On Saturday at 8:30 p.m. -- about 35 hours before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast -- Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, was so concerned about the storm, he personally called the governors of Mississippi and Louisiana as well as the mayor of New Orleans to make sure they understood the severity of the situation.

The next day, President Bush listened in on a FEMA conference call during which Mayfield warned of a storm surge of more than 20 feet of water rolling over levees.

FEMA had 1,300 disaster assistance workers pre-positioned, and FEMA Director Michael Brown assured Bush they were ready for the storm.

But inside FEMA, longtime emergency managers were convinced the agency was not ready for Katrina.

"All of us were just shaking our heads and saying, 'This isn't going to be enough, and the director has to know this isn't going to be enough.' But nothing more seemed to be happening," said Leo Bosner, president of the FEMA Headquarters Employees Union.

Bosner has been with FEMA since it began 26 years ago. He says the agency has been systematically dismantled since it became part of the massive Department of Homeland Security.

"One of the big differences I see," said Bosner, "besides taking away our staff and our budget and our training, is that Homeland Security now, in my view, slows down the process."

The union warned Congress in a detailed letter about FEMA's decline a year ago. State emergency managers also warned Capitol Hill and Homeland Security just weeks ago that DHS was too focused on one thing -- terrorism.

"We've had almost zero support for a natural disaster and an all-hazards approach," said Eric Holdeman, director of the King County Office of Emergency Management in Washington State.