[NYTr] FEMA Splits With States, Draws Own Disaster Plans

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by rich winkel - activ-l

AP via Truthout - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101307F.shtml


FEMA Shifts, Draws Own Disaster Plans

By Scott Lindlaw
The Associated Press

    Oakland - The Federal Emergency Management Agency is quietly drawing
up plans for a handful of disasters: devastating earthquakes beneath San
Francisco and St. Louis and catastrophic storms in South Florida and
Hawaii, FEMA's chief said Thursday.

    In a departure from its traditional expectation that states develop
such responses, the agency is forming "base plans" for responding to
specific calamities, FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said in an
interview Thursday with The Associated Press.

    FEMA officials expect to finish plans for a massive Bay Area quake
by the end of the year and are at work on another response blueprint
for a large quake on the New Madrid fault, which runs from southern
Illinois to northeastern Arkansas and lurks beneath St. Louis, Paulison
said.

    FEMA also is preparing for a Category 5 hurricane in the Miami area
and has nearly completed response guidelines for a failure of the
143-mile dike around Lake Okeechobee, northwest of Miami, he said. About
45,000 people live in flood-prone areas around the lake.

    Also, the agency recently began assembling response plans for a
catastrophic hurricane in Hawaii, Paulison said.

    Last year, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer
expressed dismay that the federal government did not have a plan to
respond to a catastrophic earthquake in their home state of California.

    In March 2006, Paulison's boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff, called those concerns unwarranted and said federal officials
were fulfilling their duties by meeting with state emergency management
planners and reviewing their plans.

    "They've got to write it," Chertoff said then of the state's primary
role in a response plan.

    Yet by late last year, FEMA's regional offices - not Washington
headquarters - were well into the writing of some of the planning
documents, a process that Paulison said began before Boxer and Feinstein
aired their objections.

    "We recognize that we've got to do catastrophic planning," Paulison
said in Thursday's interview at FEMA's regional headquarters.

    A spokesman for Chertoff did not immediately return an after-hours
call for comment.

    The federal government spent $5 million to develop the Florida
plans, about $17 million for the New Madrid plan, $1.5 million for
Hawaii and $1 million for northern California.

    Next year, FEMA hopes to obtain additional funding to write another
plan for an earthquake catastrophe in Southern California, said Nancy
Ward, the administrator for the FEMA region that includes California,
Arizona, Nevada, Guam, Hawaii and other Pacific islands.

    FEMA has adopted a more aggressive stance toward disasters since
Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of the Southeast in 2005. Paulison
called it a "culture change" at FEMA.

    Paulison did not mention a base plan for the New Orleans area, but
FEMA officials said the agency worked closely with state and local
authorities to complete a New Orleans-area disaster plan.

    Paulison said the old model of waiting for states to plead for
federal help was a recipe for "sequential failure."

    "We've got to go in as partners. We've got to stand side by side,"
he said.

    "We're going to move in early, we're not going to wait for the state
to ask for things before we start moving them, we're going to anticipate
what the needs are, and then when they ask for them, we're going to be
there," he said. "The worst that can happen is they don't need them."