FEMA altering how it handles disasters

[AussieMark]

FEMA altering how it handles disasters

By Mimi Hall and Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY
Thu Jun 2, 6:26 AM ET

Government inspectors surveying damage this hurricane season will be armed with digital cameras - the latest attempt to bring more accountability to the nation's disaster-relief agency.

The cameras will hold proof that the inspectors saw damaged property before doling out disaster aid. Photos will also help verify whether the damage was caused by a storm.

It's one of several simple efforts to solve serious problems of fraud and waste uncovered in an investigation into the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to last fall's unprecedented hurricane season. The recent problems come after more than a decade of criticism leveled at FEMA, an agency that seems to always be weathering another storm on the public-relations front.

Members of Congress and the Homeland Security Department's inspector general charged last month that FEMA gave $31 million in disaster relief to 12,000 Florida residents who it didn't verify had property damage after Hurricane Frances in 2004 and may not have deserved any money. They say FEMA paid $9 million in rental assistance to 4,985 Miami-Dade County residents who didn't need it, paid $125,742 for three funerals for people whose deaths had nothing to do with the storm and paid $192,592 for unverified expenses for cleanup equipment.

Accustomed to criticism

"Taxpayers also bought rooms full of furniture and new wardrobes (and) paid to repair or replace nearly 800 cars and provide rental assistance to people living in undamaged homes," Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate homeland security committee, told FEMA chief Michael Brown at a May 18 hearing. She called the situation "outrageous."

The public grilling may have been a first for Brown, but it was hardly a first for FEMA, which is bracing for what could be another tough Florida storm season. Wednesday was the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season.

In the past decade-and-a-half, FEMA has been criticized for its responses to earthquakes in California, hurricanes in the South and the 9/11 attacks.

This time, acting Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner said the problems in Miami-Dade are "indicative or representative of problems we may have nationwide."

Collins accused FEMA of adopting a wasteful "pay-first-ask-questions-later" policy and is demanding that Brown tighten the agency's rules to make sure inspectors verify damage before handing out checks.

However, if FEMA didn't dole the money out almost immediately after a disaster, "the same people bellyaching now would be bellyaching that you didn't move fast enough," said Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's first FEMA director. "It's unfair."

Brown acknowledges that some changes should be made - and he's started to make them. In addition to digital cameras, inspectors must more carefully document damage, including property that can't be inspected because it had to be discarded or washed away in the storm. Inspectors also must have software in their handheld computers that helps them determine how to hand out aid.

Brown makes no apologies for the agency's work in 2004, when four hurricanes hit in six weeks. He and others also dismiss the notion that presidential politics prompted FEMA to dole money out fast in a state crucial to Bush's re-election.

Clinton-era FEMA chief James Lee Witt says there's always political pressure and it comes from both parties, regardless of whether an election is imminent. Of last fall's problems, Witt said, "My hope is they were trying to be proactive and do a good job."

In its 26-year history, the agency has more often been taken to task for being slow, bureaucratic and ineffective.

In 1989, South Carolina Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings summed up widespread frustration after Hurricane Hugo hit his state when he called FEMA "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever known."

Pressure for fundamental change came to a head after Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992, causing about $30 billion in damage. At least 75,000 homes and 8,000 businesses were destroyed or severely damaged, and 160,000 people were left homeless.

Sweeping changes

FEMA's response to Andrew was almost universally panned as too little, too late. In 1993, the General Accounting Office (GAO) wrote, "The response to Hurricane Andrew raised doubts about whether FEMA is capable of responding to catastrophic disasters."

The GAO study and another by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) recommended sweeping changes for FEMA to cure numerous defects: a red tape culture, a mission weighted toward responding to a nuclear attack, and a workforce populated by patronage employees.

Among the recommendations by the two studies: create a disaster unit to plan for and assess damage from disasters; be more proactive in responding to disasters rather than waiting for requests for help; and slash the number of political employees.

Those calls for reform came at the start of Bill Clinton's presidency. He appointed Witt, an Arkansas emergency services executive, to take over FEMA.

Witt adopted the recommendations, and FEMA was soon hailed as an agency reborn. In July 1995, Washington Monthly, a magazine often critical of government, said FEMA had "transformed itself from what many considered to be the worst federal agency (no small distinction) to among the best."

Even so, the agency has not been without problems since then:

• After the 9/11 attacks, the agency's inspector general in 2003 criticized aspects of its response, citing "difficulties in delivering timely and effective" mortgage and rental assistance to those affected. Another inspector general's report in 2004 said about three-fifths of those receiving free air conditioners should not have gotten them.

• A critical analysis by FEMA's inspector general in 1996 found that from 1989 to 1995, the agency had spent $286 million "restoring parks and recreational facilities" affected by storms and quakes. Among the repairs paid for by taxpayers was $871,977 to repair cart paths and sprinklers at a Palm Springs, Calif., golf course affected by flooding.

Gary Wamsley, a professor of public administration at Virginia Tech who was the staff director on the 1993 NAPA study, recalls thinking at the time that FEMA would get in trouble for being too liberal in dispensing relief funds. Of the latest criticism, Wamsley said: "It was almost set up for this to happen when they caught so much hell for being so bureaucratically encumbered. ...What I hope now is that FEMA doesn't retreat into its shell again."


---Mark---