popular logistics

More on how NOT to respond to a disaster.  CNN reported that FEMA gave away $85 million in household supplies intended for Katrina victims.   Click here for the Article on CNN.

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FEMA has decided that it’s not going to deliver ice in disasters, except in narrowly defined “medical” or “life-threatening” circumstances. Ice, of course, is a staple in disasters. The Disaster Accountability Project has coverage of the FEMA decision here.

And DAP has also organized a petition drive - sign the petition at this link.

This isn’t, I think, what one hopes for in government efficiency: taking a defective and dangerous item which shouldn’t have been distributed in the first place - and giving them to a different set of disaster victims.

Doctor of Thinkology has an account here: “Love, FEMA.” The Doctor’s claims notwithstanding, there’s clearly no need for a diploma or a brain.

Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton reported last week in the Times that

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Advocates for public housing residents contended that HUD plan would not provide housing for all of the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Katrina, almost all of them black.

The Council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately and to rebuild all of the public housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said the Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

How much can FEMA get done in 19 months? It can not test trailers - occupied trailers - for formaldehyde, which it’s known about for that long.

Ralph Blumenthal follows up on this in the October 18th editions of The New York Times.

Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.

“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” - Representative Henry A. Waxman.

“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”

But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.

One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.

Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.

“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.

This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.

But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense.

According to Ellen Sullivan’s Associated Press piece, published on Firehouse.com

The nation is preparing for its biggest terrorism exercise ever later this month when three fictional “dirty bombs” go off and cripple transportation arteries in two major U.S. cities and Guam, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Yet even as this drill begins, details from the previous national exercise held in 2005 have yet to be publicly released - information that’s supposed to help officials prepare for the next real attack.

Christopher Cooper and Robert Block’s book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security is essential:

If, after four years and billions of dollars spent on preparedness, Homeland Security can’t handle a hurricane, it is likely to struggle when faced with any manner of other disasters. The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina should disturb all Americans. If New Orleans is vulnerable, so are we all.

….

From the very start, FEMA’s bureaucratic brass had trouble integrating all of these subdepartments, with their starkly different cultures, into one cohesive federal agency. President Carter did his best to work out the problem by appointing John Macy as FEMA’s first director. A career bureaucrat with a knack for organization, Macy attempted to unite the various fiefs behind a common philosophy that all disasters - by they unseen or expected, extraordinary or run-of-the-mill - demanded the same response from Washington. He developed what he called the “Integrated Emergency Management System,” which people now refer to as the “all-hazards approach” to disaster preparedness. It is a simple concept, rooted in the assumption that many response tools such as warnings, evacuations, and damage assessments are equally applicable across the universe of disasters.

More from Cooper and Block in the near future.

See also: FEMA (Wikipedia)

[Show as slideshow]

In a memo dated August 2, 2007. Corey Gruber, Acting Deputy Administrator, National Preparedness Directorate of FEMA, wrote

This Information Bulletin (IB) is to clarify that Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) funds are allowable to support and deliver the following training:

• Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) basic training for volunteers in eighborhoods, schools, campuses, workplaces, and all other venues determined by the agency that sponsors the local CERT Program
• Supplemental training for CERT members who have completed the basic training
• CERT Train-the-Trainer course
• Campus CERT Train-the-Trainer course
• Teen CERT Train-the-Trainer course

As our  blogroll has grown, I’ve been increasingly concerned that it isn’t  particularly useful as a research tool. So I’m going to try to write short introductions as we add links to the roll. While the posts won’t stay up - they’ll still be searchable via the archives.

Ernest B. Abbott is a former General Counsel at FEMA, and is the leader of a specialized practice called FEMA Law Associates.

From the firm’s website:

FEMA Law Associates provides legal and regulatory consulting services to help those who are eligible for FEMA assistance understand and navigate FEMA’s processes successfully. Key client groups that benefit most from the services of FEMA Law Associates are:

• Government entities, public authorities, and such non-profit organizations as utilities, hospitals, and educational institutions that are eligible for FEMA assistance programs.

• Vendors providing services funded directly or indirectly by FEMA programs.

• Insurance companies participating in FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program through the Write-Your-Own Arrangement.
• Associations representing companies and institutions that are eligible for assistance under FEMA programs and are affected by FEMA’s regulatory and legislative initiatives.
• Law firms and other service providers requiring specialized legal and regulatory advice on FEMA matters.

The set of attorneys with repeated experience dealing with FEMA is probably very small - since by definition FEMA dealings are often the result of unusual events - i.e. disasters.

According to the Citizen Corp website, accessed today, there are 2,716. Link to that statistic here. There’s no telling from this website how many people are in each time, what if any advanced training

After FEMA started providing trailers to survivors of Katrina and Rita, high levels of formaldehyde were found in many of the trailers. I first learned of this from Dr. Irwin Redlener’s excellent Americans At Risk, which we’ve referred to before, and will again. Suffice it to say for present purposes that

1. There was formaldehyde in the trailers, in which were housed many people, of every age, male and female, and varied in many ways - although probably very few of them affluent.
2. The formaldehyde is dangerous -
3. And its presence in housing - above certain parts-per-million (I believe that’s in air samples - not in the building materials themselves)
4. When FEMA officials first found out that this was a possibility  - FEMA counsel instructed them not to test - and to take the position that that was not a FEMA function - fearing that with knowledge would come responsibility.

Alas, the index of Americans at Risk does not do it justice - so a discussion of Dr. Redlener’s account will have to wait for an updated post.

“an official policy of premeditated ignorance”

Congressman Henry Waxman’s description of FEMA lawyers instructing FEMA employees not to test trailers for formaldehyde.

Professor David Michaels has been providing excellent coverage of this issue at The Pump Handle, a most-excellent public health blog.

You can read Michaels’ excellent post of July 26th here;

Michaels’ two previous posts here and here.

Michaels points out that The Washington Post, in an editorial called “FEMA’S TOXIC ENVIRONMENT,” says that the Post tells FEMA director R. David Paulison that “knocking a few heads in FEMA’s general counsel’s office would be a good first step” in sending a strong signal that the beleaguered agency needs to undergo major changes.

The Post is right, of course. Michaels links to an excellent article by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle - citing a number of legal ethics experts - who agree that the FEMA attorneys’ behavior was unethical. These attorneys include Monroe Freedman, perhaps the best-known legal ethics expert in the United States, and Ronald Rotunda, another leading ethics expert. Ask most lawyers to name nationally known legal ethics experts, and most will give you a short list - Freedman and Rotunda would, I think, be on nearly every list.

[Disclaimer: I know and admire Monroe Freedman, and have worked with him on at least one matter].

Professor Rotunda - who has the funniest law professor’s web page that I’ve seen - was assistant majority counsel to the Ervin Committee (for you young people, that was the Senate Select Committee on what’s now referred to as “The Watergate Affair”) - which might mean he was once a Democrat - but he’s also been counsel to Ken Starr while Ken Starr was Special Prosecutor, special counsel to the Department of Defense in the current administration - would, I hope, not be offended if we described his politics as “other-than-leftist.”

My point is that there’s a consensus that government lawyers should not take the position that “we don’t do those tests, because if we did we’d be responsible for knowing about the results and acting on them.” This is not a controversial proposition.

However - will these FEMA lawyers be disciplined? Our best bet is - probably not - unless someone formally brings it to the attention of legal ethics officials in a state in which any of the attorneys is licensed. Because this involves what is probably unethical conduct - but hasn’t resulted in a conviction - although it may have made some people very, very ill - the state licensing agencies (in some states, the bar association) aren’t likely to act on the basis of news reports.

We’re going to have the crack Popular Logistics research team look at the five thousand page document set released by Congressman Waxman’s committee and report back. Stay tuned.