**July 18, 2006 FEMA Emergency Management Higher Education Project
Activity Report**

\(1\) CORPS OF ENGINEERS:

Concord Monitor (Editorial). \"Put A Stop To Corps Of Engineers
Boondoggles.\" July 18, 2006. At:
[[http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060717/REPOSITORY/607170303/1027/OPINION01]{.underline}](http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060717/REPOSITORY/607170303/1027/OPINION01)

\(2\) DISASTER (LOSSES) AS A GROWTH BUSINESS:

Gaul, Gilbert M., Dan Morgan, Sarah Cohen. \"No Drought Required For
Federal Drought Aid.\" Washington Post, July 18, 2006. At:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701237_pf.html>
\[Note: 4 1/2 printed pages.\]

\(3\) DISASTERS WAITING TO HAPPEN:

Associated Press. \"Breach In Dam Exams.\" July 18, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/07172006/mainenews-ph-me-mainedams.html]{.underline}](http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/07172006/mainenews-ph-me-mainedams.html)

Emery, C. Eugene Jr. \"Travel Routes For Evacuation Are Ill-Defined.\"
Providence Journal (RI), 18July06. At:
[[http://www.projo.com/eastbayandmass/content/projo_20060718_mahurr18.18c1995.html]{.underline}](http://www.projo.com/eastbayandmass/content/projo_20060718_mahurr18.18c1995.html)

King, Robert P. \"The Lake O Dike: 20 Years Of Warnings.\" Palm Beach
Post, July 18, 2006. At:
[[http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/content/local_news/epaper/2006/07/16/m1a_DIKE_0716.html]{.underline}](http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/content/local_news/epaper/2006/07/16/m1a_DIKE_0716.html)

\[Note: See \"Weekend Reading\" section below on \"The Black Cloud \--
about 1928 Hurricane that breached Lake Okeechobee levees and killed
many hundreds.\]

Milkovits, Amanda. \"Hardest Part Of The Evacuation Plan May Be
Convincing 135,000 People It\'s Time To Leave.\" Providence Journal
(RI), July 18, 2006. Accessed at:
[[http://www.projo.com/news/content/projo_20060718_evac18.17e5e24.html]{.underline}](http://www.projo.com/news/content/projo_20060718_evac18.17e5e24.html)

\(4\) EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT & HS/D HIGHER EDUCATION CONFERENCE, JUNE 2006
MATERIALS:

Received for review from Admin Support, transcripts of recordings of
following plenary speakers:

Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant, United States Coast Guard.

Federal Coordinating Officers Panel on Catastrophe Readiness and
Response Perspectives \-- Scott Wells, Louis Botta, and Michael Bolch.

Michael Kemp, President of International Emergency Management Students
Association.

Local Emergency Management Perspectives on Catastrophe Readiness and
Response \-- Marg Verbeek, Mike Selves, & Matthew McCracken.

James Lee Witt

Copies of transcripts are being sent to each transcribed speaker in
order to provide opportunity for edits. As soon as we receive an
\"Okay\" from respondents, their transcripts will be placed on the EM
HiEd Project website \-- EM HiEd Conferences tab \-- 2006 Conference
(open the agenda).

\(5\) HAZARDS MAPPING AND MODELING COURSE:

Reviewed 1st draft of Session 11, \"Supporting Emergency Response
Operations Using GIS and Modeling,\" by lead course developer, Dr. John
Pine, Director of the Disaster Science and Management Program at
Louisiana State University; provided review comments; and forwarded
session to the EMI webmaster for upload to the EM HiEd Project website
\-- Free College Courses tab \-- Courses Under Development section \--
where it should be accessible shortly. Scope statement:

\"This session examines the use of GIS and modeling in emergency
response operations. Through case studies and examples, the session
explores how emergency responders are using GIS and hazard modeling in
saving lives, protecting property and sustaining our environment.\"

\[Note: There is an interesting reference to Michael Hodgson\'s 2005
research finding that \"very few state emergency management agencies had
the capacity to process geospatial data within their agency.\"

\(6\) HOMELAND SECURITY:

Chertoff, Michael. \"Statement of Support by Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff on the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism.\"
Washington, DC: Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Press
Secretary, July 15, 2006. At:
[[http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=5742]{.underline}](http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=5742)

Stein, Joel. \"The Terrorists Hate Our Baby Animals - Why Are The
Evildoers Targeting America\'s Petting Zoos?\" Los Angeles Times, July
18, 2006. At:
[[http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-oe-stein18jul18,0,5653711.column?coll=la-opinion-center]{.underline}](http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-oe-stein18jul18,0,5653711.column?coll=la-opinion-center)

\(7\) MATERIALS RECEIVED:

Abbott, Ernest B. and Otto J. Hetzel (Eds.). A Legal Guide to Homeland
Security and Emergency Management for State and Local Governments.
American Bar Association, 2006, 283 pages.

\(8\) MITIGATION:

Miami Herald (Editorial). \"Building Group Must Take Off Blinders.\"
July 18, 2006. At:
[[http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/15061319.htm]{.underline}](http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/15061319.htm)

\[Excerpt: \"Earth to the Florida Building Commission: Look at the map,
for goodness sake. Locate Florida\'s Panhandle. It is part of the Gulf
Coast\.... All the experts \-- the state insurance commissioner, the
state\'s top emergency managers, even the Florida Cabinet \-- told the
commission exactly that. They pleaded for tougher inland building codes
to be approved for the Panhandle, to no avail. Instead, those 15 members
listened to the Panhandle builders and building officials who have
consistently enlisted their state lawmakers to exempt the region from
the tougher codes that apply elsewhere in hurricane-prone Florida. Under
current rules, only a narrow mile-wide coastal band along the Gulf must
fortify buildings\....As a consequence of the commission\'s
irresponsible decision, more insurers could drop at-risk Panhandle
customers, leaving them to the state\'s insurer of last resort, Citizens
Property Insurance. A devastating hurricane in the area could yet again
put Citizens in the red as happened after our state\'s intense hurricane
activity over the last two years. In that case, just as in 2005,
Citizens would need a bailout from taxpayers and Citizens\' other
customers in the rest of the state.\"\]

\[BWB Note: Predict that Florida Building Commission will weather the
storm.\]

Roberts, Deon. \"Parishes Slow To Adopt Elevations.\" New Orleans City
Business, July 17, 2006. At:
[[http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com/viewStory.cfm?recID=16155]{.underline}](http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com/viewStory.cfm?recID=16155)
\[Déjà vu\]

\(9\) COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENT\'S EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT ACCREDITATION
PROGRAM:

Talked with Nicole Ishmael, Assistant Director of the National Emergency
Management Association\'s Emergency Management Accreditation Program, in
response to her communication requesting that I join a task force which
is \"to evaluate EMAP\'s current assessment process and procedures\...\"
After communicating with management, agreed to join the EMAP Task Force.

\(10\) PREPAREDNESS:

Associated Press. \"No Fido Or Fluffy Left Behind.\" July 18, 2006. At:
[[http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/17/bc.na.gen.us.petevacuat.ap/]{.underline}](http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/17/bc.na.gen.us.petevacuat.ap/)

Department of Homeland Security. \"U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Launches Updated Emergency Preparedness Web Site.\" Washington, DC: DHS,
Office of the Press Secretary, July 17, 2006. At:
[[http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home8.jsp]{.underline}](http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home8.jsp)

Jordan, Lara Jakes. \"Feds Need La. Help For Hurricane Plans.\"
Associated Press, July 17, 2006. At:
[[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701060.html]{.underline}](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701060.html)

Walsh, Bill. \"Chertoff Cites Gaps In Storm Preparation: He Lists Them,
Tells Blanco To Plug Them.\" New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 18, 2006.
At:
[[http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/115320480461930.xml&coll=1]{.underline}](http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/115320480461930.xml&coll=1)
\[Note: The DHS Secretary Chertoff letter has been posted on the
Times-Picayune website at:
[[http://www.nola.com/katrina/pdf/071706_chertoffletter.pdf]{.underline}](http://www.nola.com/katrina/pdf/071706_chertoffletter.pdf)\]

\(11\) WAR ON TERROR:

Thomas, Cal. \"Understanding the Temper of the Times.\" Jewish World
Review, July 18, 2006. At:
[[http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas071806.php3]{.underline}](http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas071806.php3)

\(12\) WEEKEND READING:

Kleinberg, Eliot. Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928. New
York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. {\"Black Cloud\" refers to clouds
of black smoke from mass cremations near Lake Okeechobee.}

Note: Read this weekend before last, but no time until today, to pull
any notes.

First, an observation that this is not pleasant reading \-- the blatant
and dramatic discrimination that was practiced in the early part of the
past century makes for a tough read.

Excerpts:

\"\...in West Palm Beach, is Tamarind Avenue, one of the city\'s
roughest streets. It\'s a place that often appears in the same sentence
with TV news-talk such as \'drug deal gone by\' and \'drive-by
shooting.\' At the corner of Tamarind and 25th Street is a field
surrounded by a chain-link fence. For three-fourths of a century, no
marker noted the fact that nearly seven hundred people lay entombed
under the street. Second-class citizens in life, they became truly
invisible in death. They are the faceless dead of the great storm of
1928.\" (p. xii) All African Americans, and none in coffins (p.228).
\"Over the years, the tract along Tamarind Avenue that held the 1.5 acre
mass grave in its northeast corner hosted a slaughterhouse, a dump, an
incinerator and a sewage plant. In 1964, 25th Street was moved, and part
of it was built over the grave and neighboring graves from a paupers\'
cemetery.\" (p. 230)

\"The 1928 storm\'s official death toll is 1,836. And that number,
assigned by the American Red Cross and state health officials in the
weeks following the disaster, is almost certainly low. Too many people
were hurriedly put into mass graves, stacked in piles and burned, or
found as piles of bones years later in the fields. Historians suggest
that 2,500 to 3,000 is a more realistic number. The volume of death was
so staggering to the pioneer region that after a while, people just
stopped counting. In summer 2003 the National Hurricane Center made
plans to change that official count to 2,500\....The storm would then be
officially classified as the second deadliest disaster in American
history, behind only the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed
between 6,000 and 12,000 people, and passing the Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, flood of 1889, which killed 2,209.\" (p. xiv) \[BWB Note:
Maybe \-- some have estimated Johnstown Flood deaths as high as 3,000.
Also, some have estimated 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire deaths
as high as 3,000.\]

\"Lawrence E. Will, author of Okeechobee Hurricane and the Hoover Dike,
wrote the State Board of Health and the Red Cross in 1958, saying he had
always accepted a figure of 2,500 \[deaths\]. Will said the mayor of
Belle Glade at the time had told him 1,850 bodies had been take from
Belle Glade alone\....If you just add up the number in the graves, the
number is already past 1,836. The mass grave for blacks on Tamarind
Avenue: 674. Woodlawn: 69. In a trench dug into a canal bank at Miami
Locks: 22 to 800. Ortona: 28. Sebring: 22. And that mass grave at Port
Mayaca, on the northeast shore; a marker says 1,600 are buried there.\"
(p. 214)

\"{Lake Okeechobee} covers 730 square miles, making it three-fourths the
size of Rhode Island. At 33 miles long and 30 miles wide, from the shore
you cannot see the other side.\" (p. 5)

\"This was a storm that spanned hundreds of miles, tore up 60 miles of
coastline, and drowned thousands of people some 40 miles inland.\" (p.
76)

\"As early as Sunday night, with hard reports of devastation already
coming back from Puerto Rico and the news from Florida growing worse by
the hour he \[President Calvin Coolidge\] had already been in touch with
the Red Cross and told the War, Commerce, and Labor departments to make
themselves available to relief agencies\....He\...\[asked\] the Red
Cross to lead the effort and urged people to give promptly and
generously.\" (p. 131 \-- note the Federal government was not the lead.)

\"And so, in 1928, the second deadliest hurricane in \[U.S.\] history
had killed so many not from strong winds that smashed buildings, not
from buckets of rain that turned streets into waterways and creeks into
raging rivers, not from the ocean surging onto land like a bulldozer. It
had killed thousands in a way unlike any storm before it and, probably
none since: Its wind had pushed water from an inland lake and spread it
across the land in a moving engine of death.\" (p. 140) \[Note: The
water was so deep that some had to cut holes from attics through roofs
in order to escape rising water. (p. 151)\]

\"On September 26 alone\...workers burned 267 bodies, 87 of them in a
single pyre.\" (p. 150)

\"As would happen six decades later, after Hurricane Andrew leveled
southern Dade County, the 1928 storm brought up the issue of how well
buildings were constructed\....In West Palm Beach, Nat Pierson, the
city\'s building inspector, noticed something common in all the homes
that had come off their foundations; those foundations were just blocks
of concrete on which the homes had sat, secured by nothing more than
gravity. When the wind slid the buildings off their foundations\...they
usually collapsed.\" (p. 162)

\"The top of the front page of the Okeechobee News for September 28,
twelve days after the storm, carried a grim cartoon. A woman was on her
knees in front of her smashed home. A man lay still beside her. She held
a baby up and shouted \'Help!\' in front of two specters, labeled
\'starvation\' and \'death Okeechobee\'. Atop the cartoon, a headline
read: \'For years we have asked for flood control, and received canals
that flow backward. Two thousand live pay the price of politics,
indifference and mismanagement\'.\" (p. 191)

Kleinberg notes that the government\'s long term response to the failure
of levees and dikes around Lake Okeechobee \"was to tame nature more.\"
(p. 195) \"Less than eight years later, in March 1938, a little shy of a
decade after the great storm, the Herbert H. Hoover Dike stretched for
85 miles around the north, northwest, south and southwest shores of the
lake\...It was 34 to 38 feet above sea level\...\" (p. 197) \"Now the
dike encircled the big lake for 140 miles\" \[1964\]. (p. 199)

\"\`Controlling the water in Lake Okeechobee is like having an
Everglades panther by the tail,\' U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district
engineer Paul T. Troxler said in an interview published the day of the
dedication.\" (p. 198)

\"Two failures in the 1970s had small consequences but put a nasty scare
into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1974, a breach
occurred\....Five years later, the reservoir dike at a Florida Power &
Light plant east of the lake breached, causing extensive flooding. Heavy
rains in 1995 and 1998 sent the lake level past 18 1/2 feet above sea
level and caused major leaks. The Army Corps of Engineers considers the
dike at dangerous levels for failure at about 21 feet; its highest
recorded level was 18,9 feet in 1949. Engineers have said that while
there was little chance of it, they cannot guarantee there won\'t be a
major failure, unleashing a wall of water onto the 40,000 people living
around the lake that would make the 1928 surge look like an overturned
wheelbarrow. One panel of engineers from as far away as Michigan and the
Netherlands concluded that \'a very serious risk of catastrophic
failure\' was real and reasonable.\" (p. 201)

\"In a 1998 study, researchers \-- adjusting for inflation, population
growth, and increased property values \-- determined the 1926 storm \[a
Florida hurricane 2 years before Lake Okeechobee storm\], should it
follow the same path today, would be the costliest on record, with an
estimated \$80 billion in damage, dwarfing Andrew.\" (p. 225)

B.Wayne Blanchard, Ph.D., CEM

Higher Education Project Manager

Emergency Management Institute

National Emergency Training Center

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Department of Homeland Security

16825 S. Seton, N-430

Emmitsburg, MD 21727

\(301\) 447-1262, voice

\(301\) 447-1598, fax

wayne.blanchard@dhs.gov

[[http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu]{.underline}](http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu)

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