*Catastrophe Readiness and Response Perspectives---Federal Coordinating
Officers*

Moderator: Richard Sexton

Panelists: Scott Wells, Louis Botta, Michael Bolch

**Richard Sexton**

Good morning, everyone. On behalf of EMI and the National Emergency
Training Center I want to thank you for being here.

As Mr. Piño said, this is one of the critical topics that we're dealing
with, especially with the lessons learned in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, and it's a very difficult one, because as Mr. Piño well put it,
you have the four pillars and people, as the flavor of the month, and we
try to transcend the way we're looking at disasters, and we oftentimes
get focused on hurricanes, which we are now, and then losing track of
the other disciplines and then flipping to terrorism and then losing
sight of the other things.

One of the things we're looking at and one of the things that is crucial
to all of us as professionals in the field is preparing a workforce and
preparing the public and preparing those people for an all-hazards
approach and being ready for any catastrophe. What we're going to do is
do it a little different here because I know you guys have some real big
questions and should have a lot of them, so we will spend about 12 to 15
minutes for each one of them to talk a little bit and then the remainder
of the time will be questions.

**Scott Wells**

Thank you all for giving me the opportunity to talk to you today about
not so much Katrina---we use Katrina as the lens, but just the disaster
management, disaster operations, and we will focus on response because
that's really where preparedness comes in, although there is a
significant preparedness component to recovery operations that we
probably ought to discuss because recovery is very important, too, but
we don't have the time to do that today.

The first thing I want to do is take you through to try to get you
connected to Katrina, and it's very difficult because you have to be
there, you have to see there, you have to drive through there, you have
to fly over there, you have to see victims, and then you feel it, and
then you get it. When people come from D.C. or places outside, they come
in with a perspective. Everybody has their own anchor point, their point
of reference for disasters.

When you come to Katrina, when you come to Louisiana, Mississippi, that
all goes away. People say one of two things: they either say, oh, I get
it now, I see what you've been talking about, because you drive for
miles and miles and miles of total devastation. Homes that moved---not
just fallen down, but have been washed several hundred yards away.

This thing hit the 29^th^ of August. Back in early May, we found two
bodies---that's about 8 months into the disaster. They knew where those
bodies were and they went to their home, but actually their home had
moved over 300 yards, 3 football fields, down, and the bodies were in
the home. They're still finding bodies down there, there's still no
electricity, there's still a lack of infrastructure throughout that New
Orleans metropolitan area.

The scene on the right is a collection point---we call that a lily pad.
It was by design. When we use the search and rescue folks, they took the
people from boats and helicopters and put them on these high points,
roads and stuff, and then they'd be transferred later on.

Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded---Orleans, which is the parish
for New Orleans, is a little over half a million; Jefferson Parish,
right beside it, is a little over half a million. There are about 1.3
million people in that metropolitan area.

For the first two weeks we saw people---families, children---walking
through water, going from point A to point B. This was just not
something that happened the first day or two.

The scene up top is where one of the levies broke---I think that's the
17^th^ Street Canal.

This is a convention center. There were actually two disasters.
Pre-event, the Superdome was a refuge of last resort that people flowed
into. There was no water, food, or anything there for them---they just
went into there. In post-event, we had overtopping of the levies and
then breaches and there was a sizeable population that went to the
Convention Center---about a total of 65,000 people between the two
facilities.

I want to talk a little bit about what made Katrina different. The first
thing that comes out is just the magnitude. I remember three things from
my four years in college. The first thing was I was sitting in an
auditorium like this and they were talking about this ain't the 13^th^
grade. I didn't know what that meant---I do now---but when you went from
high school to college, it wasn't the 13^th^ grade.

When you go from a large disaster to something like Katrina, it isn't
one notch up. You do things totally different, and I think that's what
Admiral Allen was talking about---that legacy response of FEMA. I think
that's what I was talking about early about everybody has their point of
reference. Point of reference is the last disaster they fought, or the
last hurricane they had. A catastrophic disaster is different, and it's
different because of the magnitude. You can't appreciate the magnitude.
Let me just give you some examples.

They had six oil spills. They had more than six, but they had six major
oil spills. Each one was an incident of national significance. All of
the oil that was spilt was about 75 to 80 percent the size of Exxon
Valdez. People don't realize that. Everything we did went beyond the
pale of what we had done in other disasters---everything. Every one of
those emergency support functions---transportation, medical, urban
search and rescue, EPA clean-up. We're still cleaning up white goods.
We're still picking up refrigerators and all those things, and we'll be
doing that until the end of this hurricane season from Katrina.
Everything.

Let's talk about medical patients. Remember the four hurricanes two
years ago when Ivan, Jeanne, Frances, and Charley hit Florida? If you
add all the patients up for those four hurricanes total, that doesn't
even add up to the patients we had for Hurricane Rita. I want to talk
about that a little bit.

Rita was a big storm. If you go back to what cost to Stafford Act, what
FEMA does, Rita was number 3 since the late 80's, only exceeded by
Katrina and the Northridge earthquake. We treated more patients in
Rita---that's about a \$2.5 billion disaster in and of itself. It came
right on the heels of Katrina---that landed on the 24^th^ of September.
The number of patients we did in Katrina is about 11 to 15 times larger
than what we did for Rita. Everything we did was of great magnitude.

To me, as an operator, the most significant thing for a catastrophic
disaster was the tempo that you have to work at. I don't know quite how
to describe it other than you have an operational tempo you work at, and
the bigger disaster, the faster you have to go. It's like running. The
operational tempo for a catastrophic disaster is so fast, you got
anaerobic, quick. You can't keep up. You don't have the resources. You
don't have the training. You don't have the expertise. You don't have
all those systems in place---or we didn't---to manage that disaster like
a disaster ought to be managed.

One thing I will remember for the magnitude of this is you have to have
your systems in place to keep that up tempo or you will fall behind and
not do the things you need to do to save lives and to prevent human
suffering and reduce the amount of damage. And that didn't happen.

The second thing that stands out with Katrina was the situational
awareness, the common operating picture. We had none. We sent Federal
assets---mostly FEMA, some Corps of Engineers, other Federal
agencies---into Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge is about 80 miles north of New
Orleans. We went in on Saturday---two days before the storm. The storm
hit Monday morning.

Just as an aside---not that it's real important, but in other
discussions it might be---this hurricane was not even supposed to hit
Louisiana---it was supposed to hit Florida. FEMA early on, D-5 days,
started moving assets toward Florida and the models in general agreement
it was going to hit Florida, and then it started drifting, and then we
lost all confidence in it and about Friday afternoon, then it looked
like at that time Louisiana became in that zone of error, and then we
started at it. Saturday, two days before, we went into Louisiana, into
Baton Rouge, and set up an op center and worked out of the State EOC.

The storm hit Monday morning around 6 a.m. It was a very large storm. It
was about ten times larger than Andrew in '92. Andrew was a very
powerful storm that hit Florida, but it was very small and compact. This
was a very large storm, so it took several hours for it to come ashore
and to make its way through New Orleans and then up north and then went
into Mississippi. We got Cat 1 winds in Baton Rouge. It took several
hours. We could not get a rapid needs assessment team out that day. It
was dark before we could get them out. No situational awareness.

It hit 6 a.m. Monday morning, and that means it got into New Orleans
about 9 a.m. Monday night, in the State EOC, Louisiana, a catastrophic
disaster, and people were milling about, drinking coffee, talking to one
another, and it looked just like another day. And I'm serious---it was
quiet. That was the most quiet night, the most inactive night of the
whole disaster because Saturday we were doing planning all night long;
Sunday night we were doing planning all night long---it was coming
ashore; and then that Monday night, we were waiting to get these
reports. We got nothing. It reminded me of when I was in the Pentagon in
the Army Ops Center which Andrew hit because that's exactly the same
thing---when Andrew hit, we were just sitting in the basement of the
Pentagon talking it out, yakking it up. Phones weren't ringing in
Louisiana, nothing was going on. And I said either this is good news or
bad news, but it was bad news.

We never got a good operation picture throughout, at least that first
week, week and a half. Baton Rouge became a communications void. We sent
teams down Monday morning into the Superdome to get with the mayor and
the State and they could communicate out a little bit on satellites, but
we could not get traffic into Baton Rouge and we couldn't get it out, so
our regional office out of Denton, Texas, and our national offices with
FEMA and DHS---they were all talking, so the situation awareness was
virtually non-existent, it was different from any other disaster I've
ever experienced. If you don't have situational awareness, you won't get
your job done---it's just that simple.

Continuity of government: I need to talk about that a little bit because
it means different things to different people. I think to most local
people it means providing essential services to your constituents. I
think to most Federal people it means just making sure you have your
government officials in a place where they can carry on operations. I'm
talking about everything.

In New Orleans in particular---not exclusively, but in particular---they
had no government. The mayor was holed up in a hotel. All of his
lieutenants went to Baton Rouge and they didn't come back for about
three weeks. The police, fire, and emergency responders were all in
disarray. Hundreds of the police left. They left with their families or
they just left---they didn't show up. I remember one day about a week
into this two of the police committed suicide in one night. They walked
around with that 20-mile stare wherever they went. Like Admiral Allen
was saying yesterday, they carried their weapons on their shoulder.

They had no government. In a very large city in our country there was no
government. We had to do continuity of government operations in a
catastrophic disaster. We had never done that before.

There were a lot of things we had never done before, but there's a lot
of lessons there. When you're looking at things to look at, that's
something to look at. How are you going to do that? How are you going to
do those emergency services? What's the best way to do that? How are we
going to plan on that? This was a natural disaster. What if it was
terrorism?

Mass evacuation operations: That was different. That's normally
considered---it is considered, had been considered a State and local
responsibility. I think that's all changed, but that has been the policy
that has been our doctrine that evacuation is all State and local. We
did that post-landfall. About 65,000 people out of the New Orleans in
about four days from scratch. This was a Federal operation.

I want to say there are a lot of lessons learned there. If somebody
wants to study that, that needs to be studied because what they did in
those four days from ground zero---a lot of special needs, elderly,
people who had medical conditions, people who were obese, people who
were criminals with guns and knives and all kinds of weapons---it was as
bad as you can imagine, and they did 65,000 people in about four days,
air and ground. That was a miracle that they did it that well. I'm fully
aware it wasn't good enough, wasn't quick enough---I think we all know
that. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what they did from
on-the-fly needs to be studied and looked at. There are a lot of things
we can glean from that to do it better next time.

But the real lesson is you'd better be prepared, because if you aren't
prepared and you have to go from ground zero, it will take a while. Four
days was damn quick---let me tell you. That was quick for not being
prepared.

Security: We've never been concerned in FEMA about security issues;
we're just a bunch of wussies. We were scared of everything. It was a
frightening environment down there in New Orleans. There was a lot of
looting, a lot of people shooting, a lot of the criminal element early
on. It got exaggerated in the media big-time---that only made it worse.
We heard reports there were 100 dead in the Superdome, 200 people dead
in the Convention Center---these were the kind of credible reports. We
got a lot of Internet traffic throughout that was interesting---the
first time I've ever seen this---saying, we have people holed up under
siege in this hospital or nursing home, and we started tracking these
things down. Ninety-five percent of that stuff was bogus---that
information. That wasted a lot of our time on what we were doing.

Security is something we need to look at, we need to factor that in.
We've got a little bit with hauling ice and water and stuff like that,
but we had to actually shut down our search and rescue operations, we
had people shooting at helicopters doing hoist operations, for example.

The National Guard pulled security out of the Superdome on Thursday. We
had two DMAT teams in the Superdome. They left. At liaisons with the
mayor and the State New Orleans, they left Thursday for security, and
they didn't come back until Saturday. One of the most problematic things
was we broke contact with that city on Thursday. That was really at the
height of where tensions were and where coordination was most needed and
we left. But we're not used to security issues; we're not used to people
shooting at us and things like that. That needs to be studied.

Hotels, cruise ships: We used hotels as a shelter. And guess what?
People went to hotels in Hawaii and 48 States. Those were shelters.
People were holed up in \$300-a-night-room hotels as shelter. This was
the largest displacement of people in the history of our country. We
brought in cruise ships---which I think is a good idea. A cruise ship
comes in, we put all first responders on two cruise ships for New
Orleans, and then we use one cruise ship for St. Bernard, and we put in
central workers, government workers, the fire, police, the Port
Authority, and people we shouldn't even have been putting on but it just
made sense, like the refinery folks. We were just supposed to be taking
care of victims. But if we don't get those refineries going and
repaired, guess what? You will be victims; you won't have any gas in
your cars. But that's a different issue. That needs to be looked at in a
critical infrastructure and what Stafford Act does and what Stafford Act
can't do.

Last thing we had Hurricane Pam. Hurricane Pam was an exercise we
started I think in '04 that I think helped out a lot. I want to talk
about it briefly because that was different from Katrina because we did
have a catastrophic plan. What we actually had was a draft of a plan
that hadn't been finished and hadn't been completed and it was just a
plan. There was a lot of criticism or dialogue about, you had Pam, and
why didn't use it, this and that. It's just a takeoff on what Gene was
saying earlier: you can't just have a plan. With D-Day they just didn't
have a plan. You have to first resource that plan. You have to get the
people, the resources for the plan, and then you have to train, and then
you have to exercise, and then you have to do it. I think it's
unrealistic to expect to do a catastrophic disaster without going
through those preparedness things of having a plan and testing the plan.

We have plans all over this nation. These local communities have plans,
these States have plans, and they just did a national plan view. Guess
what? They have plans, but that's it. You can wipe your butt with that
plan, but that's about all you can do with that plan unless you test it,
exercise it, or you train to it. They're just paper plans. You have to
do everything. The plan is just the start, the beginning of the
beginning.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the problems just from an
operator's standpoint. We have lots of problems in response operations.
I want to talk about the whole architecture of emergency management.
First off, we don't understand it. I don't think---maybe it's just
me---how many of you all understand emergency management architecture?

When I get a group of folks in a room and we talk about stuff, the only
thing I can get---just take one example: who's in charge of disaster?
The only time you can get consensus is when you come to the point where
you say, nobody's in charge and everybody's in charge. And everybody
goes, um-hmm, okay. That's what you get everybody to agree on. Other
than that, you won't get agreement.

Listen---you can't run a railroad with that type of understanding of
who's in charge. You can't run a football team, you can't win a war, and
you certainly can't do emergency management until we all have a simple,
common understanding of how emergency management works in this country.
I think one of the reasons we had poor PR---there are a lot of reasons
that public information was so poor in this disaster of getting messages
out what was doing, how it was working---is we don't understand how
emergency management worked. We can't communicate to the American
people. We can't communicate to the secretary of DHS, the president,
Congress, or the victims because we don't understand. You just don't
understand.

I think the fundamental part of that is emergency management is unlike
virtually anything else we do in the Federal government. It's unlike law
enforcement operations, education, the military in that it's bottoms up.
The people on the ground are in charge. In the military, it's top
down---the generals tell the colonels what to do, the colonels tell the
majors what to do, the majors tell the lieutenants, the lieutenants tell
the sergeants, and the sergeants tell the privates, and they do the
work. That's how we understand it.

Emergency management is not a lot like that. Those privates, those local
emergency managers, those incident commanders---they are in charge. That
jurisdiction, that mayor, the person the people elect to take care of
them, the safety and security---that's the guy in charge, or that county
executive or that parish president. Those are the people in charge. The
State is there to support and the Federal government is there to support
the State. That's the way it is, as I understand it, but that's not what
we practice, so we really have two systems out there going.

We have some conflicts in the architectures. For example, we took this
ICS system from the fire community and it's a great system, and it will
sound like I don't like ICS, but I really love ICS, but I think we need
to look at it. I'll give you a couple examples in the emergency
management community.

Under ICS, things come from the bottom and go up. Requirements are
identified at the bottom and they go up the chain and they get sourced
at the lowest level possible. That's how it's supposed to work. But what
works in emergency management is there is a political process also that
trumps that. For example, in Rita, I went to another State and we did
Rita, and the ICS system was identifying, as an example, we need two
1-megawatt generators and one 1-megawatt generator in Harrison County.
And that goes through the chain.

The State director has his own conference call with the county judges
every day, too, and they give him another requirement: I need 4-megawatt
generators in my parish and 6-1, so you get different. You get two
systems out there working. Of course, that political normally trumps the
ICS one, but what happens is it creates confusion and duplication. You
have two systems working and we're already getting the first system and
they're loading up the generators to go to Taylor County and now the
State director is saying, oh, we want them to go to Harris County, so
get them off of there and get them all here---it screws things up.

My point is there is a political element in emergency management that
trumps the ICS system that we need to look at. The other thing is ICS is
based on who can best fit a need. Get everybody at a tailgate of a truck
and say, okay, this is a problem, how are we going to fix it; and you
find who can best do it, who can do it the quickest, and who can do it
the mostest and who can do it the bestest. We don't do that in the
Stafford Act. The Stafford Act and the National Response Plan is based
on supplemental assistance. It's do everything you can local and then
you go through the State. Do everything you can State and then we go to
the feds.

Do you know how long that takes? Too long. Because part of the culture
we have in our country is nobody wants to say help until they've
exhausted every possible alternative and then it's too late. So if the
locals need a generator, ice, water, food, or radios, they will do
everything they can to try to do it, and then when they know they can't,
then they will ask. It's already a day late. Then they take it to the
State, then the State will go through EMAC or this or that or the
National Guard---oh, can't do it. There's another day late. And then the
Federal government gets it. Well, it's already three days late---it was
needed three days ago by the time we get it. That's Stafford Act.

ICS is not supposed to work that way, so there's a conflict between the
architects or, in my mind, between ICS and the National Response Plan,
ICS, and what we do under the Stafford Act.

The fourth problem we have is the States and locals do not have the
staff or the capacity to execute ICS unified command the way it's
supposed to be executed.

We have 15 emergency support functions. You go to a State. They might
have three people that are working all 15 emergency support functions.
They're not there. One of the new things we've been doing over since
about two or three years ago for big disasters is sending in Federal
teams into local jurisdiction---parishes and counties---to work in their
EOCs. The State can't match us up. So you have a system out there that
requires X amount of people, but you don't have the people at the State
and local level to match with the Federal level to execute the system
the way it's supposed to be executed.

Which takes me to the next point: the capability at the State and local
level. There isn't much there, and it gets less and less every year.
I've been in this business since '92, and what we have in emergency
management over the last 10 or 15 years is going down incrementally and
the capability to do the things that need to be done is just not there.
It's not there in response operation, but probably just as important,
it's not there in the peacetime preparedness operation---the Pillar 1
you're talking about, Gene. When you go into States and the local
jurisdictions, their staff is focused mostly on recovery types of things
in peacetime. Their plate is full doing that sort of thing.

We need to be aware of that, we need to understand that, and we need to
appreciate that---that they just don't have the people there to meet the
needs out there to get done to do the preparedness stuff. We need to
acknowledge that and we need to look at that and we need to find a way
to fix that, whatever way we can, but they don't have the people, they
don't have the expertise. If they have not had a disaster in the last
one to two years, they have lost their experience in response operation.
It's very perishable. It's not something you can learn today and it will
stay with you five years from now---it doesn't work that way---I don't
know why, but it doesn't. It has a shelf life of about one or two years
and it expires and then you're back to not knowing.

We also have a lack of guidance and standards for response operations at
all levels of government. All I would want to know as an operator is
tell me what I need to find success.

One thing I like about the military---I knew how many push-ups I had to
do, how many sit-ups I had to do, and how fast I had to run two miles.
We don't have standards like that to define success or failure in
emergency management. There's a doctrine like, locals are supposed to
have enough supplies for 3 days, emergency power, water, ice, food,
stuff like that, but that's not doctrine---that's general. Did they do
it? No. We not only don't have standards for response, past condition
standards for people, we don't hold them accountable. Until you develop
standards, you can't hold somebody accountable, so there's no
accountability out there.

Talk about leadership in management. There's a significant problem---and
I will just leave this within confines of FEMA, so I want to talk about
somebody else. We have a significant void of leadership in management.
We have no systems for professional development. We have no Army
equivalent of War College or Command and Staff College, moving people
around. The people that are in staff in D.C. in FEMA Headquarters---they
stay there. They don't come to the field. We don't move people around.
The people in the field---they stay there. They don't go to D.C.

In the military, you have staff assignments---you work in the Pentagon,
and then you go to the field, so you learn a little of both. That's
called professional development---you learn what the other side is
doing. You can do a better job that way. But in D.C., all you have are
people that have been in D.C. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years. No field
experience.

Now, how good a policy, how good a regulation, how good an execution at
national level do you think you're going to get when you have people
with no field experience? We not only need to move people around, we
need to have a professional development process that trains, educates,
and gives people emergency management exposure so we can be better
leaders and better managers.

This is sort of second tier things. Financial management---I won't cover
that. I do want to say we do 100 percent Federal for the State of
Louisiana through June 30. I think that's a significant problem.

Immediate response authority: the military has it; FEMA needs it. It
allows you to provide direct assistance before a presidential
declaration. We don't have that now. We can move things and we can
pre-position teams, resources, before a storm or before an event, but we
can't employ them, we can't give them to the State until there's a
presidential declaration. We need to have some type of immediate
response authority to do that.

Recovery programs: they're just too slow. We are not getting money on
the street fast enough to help local jurisdictions and States recover.
The faster we get money to them, the faster they recover---it's just way
too slow.

I think I've taken more of my time than I should have. I guess I want to
say one thing that you all are interested in: what can academia do to
help?

The one thing I would say is we need some response science, for lack of
a better word. We don't have response science. When I see operators out
there who don't know how to operate in response mode---somebody was
talking about a course in catastrophic disasters and stuff---I think
that's a great idea. We need to have courses, we need to have training
for people to be responders. We don't have that. Here's what you get
when you go to disasters: you get these people from other---I'm talking
Federal now---emergency support functions and being on the response
team---we call them teams. They're not teams, because when you go to a
disaster, this is the first time you're seeing 95 percent of these
people. You've never worked together, you've never trained together,
you've never coordinated together, you've never built relationships
together, so it isn't a team---it's a group.

You get your group together in a disaster and the people who are there
doing response stuff is not necessarily their first job---it's their
second job, or maybe their tertiary job, or maybe they just called on
the hey you roster, but they haven't been trained. It's a secondary job
for most all of us, and I'm just here to tell you it's a secondary job.
It's not a primary job being on a response team in most of the Federal
agencies. It's not. It's not a primary job in FEMA. If you look at a
number of response people, it's a very, very small percentage. If you
want to do something right, you have to invest in it, you have it make
it your first-time job.

Here's a real story: in Katrina, we had hundreds of thousands of people
without power. Had a Department of Energy lead in the joint field office
and I was asking him questions about what's the power grid look like,
are we going to get it up. It was obvious he couldn't answer these
questions. I said, wait a minute, how long have you been doing this, and
he said, well, wait a minute, I don't do power, I make bombs---I'm an
energy guy---well, actually, I make the stuff that make bombs; and then
he started talking to us in a meeting on power grid about what he does.
That doesn't work, but that's a vignette, an insight of why things work
the way they are. We don't take this business seriously. If you're going
to do response, it has to be your primary job if you're going to do it
right.

We need that response science, we need people to develop and train
people to operate in a response mode.

I will tell you one more story, and then I'll get off the podium. What
you get in disasters is people that do peacetime work, and they think
peacetime work---they think inbox, outbox, inbox, outbox. Have many of
you play chess? Nobody? How many of you have played chess with a clock?
Going to a disaster and seeing people out there working on the staff is
like playing chess---they all know how to play chess, take time, they
have all the time in the world to make a move.

In response operation, you're on a clock, and you have maybe 3 to 5
seconds to look at the board, see what your opponent did, and then you
have to make a decision. Some people can't work in that environment.
They don't know how to think, operate, make decisions in a
time-sensitive environment, and it kills us. We need to have that
science to give people those tools so they can do their job. That's
where academia can come in. Right now, in my mind, what we're doing is
we're still stuck on stupid, to take a quote from General Honoré. What I
see in the Gulf Coast is we're doing like Admiral Allen said yesterday:
we're putting these PFOs with the FCOs and we're getting water, ice, all
this stuff pre-positioned for the Gulf Coast.

Guess what? If we have a hurricane in the Gulf Coast, we will do great
this year. I guarantee it---we'll be ready. If we have an earthquake, if
we have a terrorist event, or we have another event somewhere else, we
aren't. Do you know why? Because we're treating symptoms; we're not
treating the fundamental problems. We're trying to treat the symptoms,
and we are treating the symptoms. We're treating the symptoms for
Hurricane Katrina, but we're fighting our last battle. We have to
address the fundamental problems we have in emergency management so it
applies throughout the whole nation because we don't know when, where,
and we don't know what, but we know it will happen; and until we repair
our fundamental problems, we will continue to have problems.

Thank you very much for your time.

**Michael Bolch**

Thank you very much. I won't take very long---I really don't have a
great message like Scott. Scott really fought in the trenches in
Louisiana and Texas in some really tough duties.

I was assigned as a Federal coordinating officer for the Hurricane
Katrina disaster and the Hurricane Dennis disaster in the State of
Alabama. I just finished up my assignment in Alabama Monday of this
week. That marks the longest deployment I've had in the six years I've
been with FEMA---that was 11 months long, from the 1^st^ of July of last
year until the 1^st^ of June this year, basically. And it was a real
tough assignment, but it wasn't anywhere as tough as the assignment that
went on in Louisiana.

As I was introduced, my background is in engineering. I was a reactor
operator in the Navy on a nuclear submarine, I was a senior reactor
operator in commercial nuclear power plants, and I'm a lot of technical
background---I like to get into the technical side of things and see how
things work and make them work correctly.

One of the things I've learned since I've been in emergency
management---and that was starting in 1980, right after Three Mile
Island, when the commercial nuclear power plants had to get involved in
emergency management---is one of our most complex components. Our most
complex component that we operate with is a human being. It's the one we
have sometimes the least control over.

We operate on three different levels with people out in the field and
disasters. As a Federal coordinating officer, I always tell my staff and
the staff who works for me on disasters that the primary level that we
work with is the disaster victim level---they're always our number one
customer, our number one priority, and we have to look after the
disaster victim. Sometimes we think of disaster victims just as numbers.
We think of them as the number of temporary housing units we put out or
the number of shelter spaces that are occupied or the number of hotel
rooms, or the amount of dollars we put out. But disaster victims are a
lot more than that---they're human beings, and they've been traumatized,
and we need to remember that, we need to deal with them as human beings,
we need to try to maintain their dignity and their self-worth and look
after them as human beings.

Another level we work with people is our counterparts, our direct
relations. Leon Shaifer was here just a minute ago, and Leon and I have
worked a couple of disasters together when Leon was with Mississippi
Emergency Management Agency. Very often, I worked with the State
director or a county director, such as Mobile County, and Bruce
Baughman, the State director in Alabama, and worked with the governors,
senators, even down to the city council's and mayor's levels. All these
people---they're human beings also and they have different forces
pulling on them.

One of the things mentioned previously was that there are a lot of
politics involved in emergency management. That's correct. Leon and I
know that very well. Those politics will shape a lot of the things we do
and it shapes a lot of the requests that come in to us, but we need to
establish good working relationships and we need to work in an incident
command structure so we can work with human beings on a one-to-one basis
and keep those relationships functional all the time.

Then the third level of people we worked with is the human beings we
work with as our subordinates and our employees and our staff. I had a
staff of 650 people working for me in Alabama and they were under a lot
of pressure. Alabama wasn't as tough as it was in Mississippi, nor was
it as tough as in Louisiana, but there are still people we have to work
with---people who have come in to work on disasters. They've left their
homes, they're staying in hotel rooms. They're under their owns stresses
and their own strains. We have to look after them, train them, bring
them along, and mentor them. We have to take care of them.

My brief message is that as an emergency manager, in 25 years of doing
emergency management work at different levels in different
opportunities, I've seen the human complexity of working with people in
all these different levels.

I'll be glad to answer any questions when the time comes. I look forward
to working with you in future disasters, if you're unfortunate enough to
have one in your State. I look forward to taking my time off---I've been
deployed for 11 months and I'm going on a month's leave right now. Thank
you very much.

**Louis Botta**

After Mr. Piño, Scott, and Michael, I have very little to say other than
to reiterate a couple of major points.

Over the last seven years that I have been in the Federal Coordinating
Officer Cadre, I have seen the---hopefully, if I'm pissing somebody off,
too bad---emasculation of what was the most effective agency in the
Federal government and the fact that up to the point it became, for one
reason or another, ill capable to meet the demands that were placed upon
it. Everything we can do from now is to get better.

The one thing that really concerns me is the divorce of the different
areas of the emergency management cycle into different areas of our
government. It has to be one, it has to be united, it has to be
indivisible. Preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation need to be
together and treated as one academic and operational discipline.

The emergency management cycle, needs to be a bottoms-up approach. In
addition, we need the formation of a professional cadre of emergency
management at all levels and its cross-flow across the entire spectrum
of emergency management. The military must be a partner because of the
fact that as a Federal coordinating officer, the law allows the Federal
coordinating officer to task any Federal agency for resources, et
cetera. Only the military has the conditions and the resources that are
necessary from time to time to bring into effect the massive use of
resources that are needed in a catastrophic situation. That's plain and
simple.

I will end with a little anecdote: I was deployed during Hurricane
Isabel as the Federal coordinating officer. Hurricane Isabel was for the
Washington, D.C. area, the State of Virginia, and up in the Ohio River.
It was a tremendous disaster. I was deployed to a particular State where
the State director came up and said, "Mr. Botta, if the Federal
government does not give us---I think it was 30 or 40 generators, we
will have to use our own." My answer to him was, "Well, sir, I guess the
system doesn't work, does it?"

I want you to know that because the folks in the bottom, the emergency
management directors, need to be in charge. That's basics for the
emergency management system.

Now I'll shut up, and hopefully, we can take some of your questions.
Thank you very much.

**QUESTIONS:**

The first gentlemen made some very profound statements, but I also felt
there was an indictment about local entities being able to handle their
own problems. If you look at the World Trade Center, the locals did an
outstanding job, but when you looked at Katrina, the poster child for
failure was Michael Brown, a FEMA person. What has FEMA learned from
that disaster in putting in people who are not capable of handling a
position like that?

**Scott Wells:** First off, let me say it's not indictment---it's
anything but that. I'm a big advocate of the State and locals. I'm just
saying throughout the nation, there's no robust local capability. I
think it's universally accepted that New York has a great local
capability and very robust and it's something you can be very proud of,
but I think it's also universally known that the rest of the nation does
not have that same local capability that you all have, so it is not an
indictment.

As far as what has FEMA learned? I don't know. Here's what I know is we
keep learning the same thing, the same problems over and over. We keep
making the same mistakes. We learn them. We know that when you touch
that oven, it gets hot, but we still touch the oven.

If something is wrong systematically we have out there it's because we
keep making the same mistakes over and over. We learn, we have
after-action reviews, we have hot washes---we do all that. We know these
mistakes and we learn them, but we don't institutionally fix these
things so they don't happen again. Other than that, I can't answer your
question, but please don't accept that as an indictment. I'm a big
advocate for local.

**Question from Tammy Harris, Canadian Defence Academy:** As an incident
commander for the Air Force, do you guys feel that you're getting to a
need where you have to train your people to do capability-based planning
and effects-based operations, because Katrina sounds like a three-block
war scenario from standing back here listening to you discuss. Were you
able to identify a center of gravity that you were working against in
that planning?

**Scott Wells:** I'm sorry---I don't understand your question.

**Question:** When you looked at Katrina on the whole, and listening to
Admiral Allen speak yesterday and yourself, sir, it sounds like you were
up against a three-block war scenario going on---that you were trying to
do rescue operations, response, and preparedness all at the same time.
Was there one center of gravity---what you would consider an enemy
factor---that you were working against, that you were all planning with,
or do you feel your planning was disjointed and that's what you were
talking about earlier?

**Scott Wells:** We were fighting on several fronts. We had many
different operations going on at once. Of course, the search and rescue
and fighting, trying to repair the levies were the immediate concerns,
the lifesaving things and the medical treatment, too.

After about Day 3, the thing became the center of gravity. Day 1 was the
29^th^, 30^th^, 31^st^---yeah, the 31^st^ to the 1^st^, the evacuation
of the Superdome and the Convention Center became the center of gravity,
but I don't want to try to characterize it as that it was just one thing
we were focused on. We had all these major issues---getting food, water,
generators; the search and rescue; the medical---still
establishing---you have to establish infrastructure, too. You can't just
show up. There's nothing there. Everything is flooded, it's hard to get
access, there's law enforcement, there's security, so for the first
week, I think, again, there's no situational awareness, there's no
common operating picture, so we were essentially working in the dark, we
were essentially in a very reactive mode, so we stayed reactive probably
for several weeks.

Normally, in most disasters---even a large disaster---if you can't get
your arms around it by the first 72 hours, you're in big trouble.
Normally, you can get your arms around it, found out what the context
is, and then you get things going. We couldn't do this for Katrina, so
we were constantly reacting to the situation in Katrina as it was a very
formidable enemy and every time you'd get something going somewhere in
the box, something else was happening.

The problem with the plans is, again, we didn't have the resources, we
didn't have the training, we didn't have the expertise. You make your
plans in peacetime, where you get that expertise, and that just didn't
happen. We didn't do that Pillar 1 thing.

**Louis Botta, responding to the local responder question:** I don't
know if any of you have seen the two bills that are on the
floor---they're in committee right now as far as the restructuring of
FEMA. The interesting thing is the Susan Collins bill and the other
one---I can't remember who is the sponsor---both of them not only unite
the concept of the emergency management cycle but also they direct. It
will be enshrined in the law that the director, the vice-director, and
all the appropriate division directors of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency must be seasoned emergency professionals. Over the
last many years it was not like that. Right now we have a consummate
professional---Chief Paulison---and the last one we had was James Lee
Witt. That hopefully should be eliminated.