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28–573 PDF 2006

GETTING READY FOR THE 2006 HURRICANE

SEASON

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

MAY 24, 2006

Serial No. 109–157

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio

——— ———

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

DAVID MARIN, Staff Director

LAWRENCE HALLORAN, Deputy Staff Director

TERESA AUSTIN, Chief Clerk

PHIL BARNETT, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on May 24, 2006 ............................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Donahue, Maura W., Chair, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Joe Becker,

senior vice president, preparedness and response, American Red Cross;

and Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive officer, the Council for Excellence in Government ................................................................. 161

Becker, Joe ................................................................................................. 184

Donahue, Maura W. .................................................................................. 161

McGinnis, Patricia ..................................................................................... 211

Foresman, George W., UnderSecretary for Preparedness, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Robert Shea, Acting Director of Operations, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of

Homeland Security; Major General Terry L. Scherling, Director of the

Joint Staff, National Guard Bureau; Rear Admiral W. Craig

Vanderwagen, M.D., Special Assistant to the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Robert R. Latham, Legislative

Committee Chair, National Emergency Management Association, and

director, Mississippi State Emergency Management Agency; and Walter

S. Dickerson, Director, Mobile County Emergency Management Agency/

Homeland Security ....................................................................................... 22

Dickerson, Walter S. ................................................................................. 126

Foresman, George W. ................................................................................ 22

Latham, Robert R. ..................................................................................... 114

Scherling, Terry L. .................................................................................... 88

Shea, Robert .............................................................................................. 66

Vanderwagen, W. Craig ............................................................................ 101

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Becker, Joe, senior vice president, preparedness and response, American

Red Cross, prepared statement of ............................................................... 187

Clay, Hon. Wm. Lacy, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Missouri, prepared statement of .................................................................. 141

Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 236

Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Virginia:

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 4

Prepared statement of Max Mayfield ...................................................... 11

Prepared statement of Voices for America’s Children ............................ 18

Dickerson, Walter S., Director, Mobile County Emergency Management

Agency/Homeland Security, prepared statement of ................................... 128

Donahue, Maura W., Chair, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 165

Foresman, George W., UnderSecretary for Preparedness, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, prepared statement of .................................. 26

Latham, Robert R., Legislative Committee Chair, National Emergency

Management Association, and Director, Mississippi State Emergency

Management Agency, prepared statement of ............................................. 117

McGinnis, Patricia, president and chief executive officer, the Council

for Excellence in Government , prepared statement of ............................. 215

Scherling, Major General Terry L., Director of the Joint Staff, National

Guard Bureau, prepared statement of ........................................................ 89

Shea, Robert, Acting Director of Operations, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 69

Page

IV

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by—Continued

Vanderwagen, Rear Admiral W. Craig, M.D., Special Assistant to the

Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 103

Watson, Hon. Diane E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of California, prepared statement of ........................................................... 157

Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the State

of California, prepared statement of ........................................................... 7

(1)

GETTING READY FOR THE 2006 HURRICANE

SEASON

WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 2006

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:06 p.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis (chairman

of the committee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Shays, Ros-Lehtinen,

Platts, Duncan, Schmidt, Waxman, Cummings, Kucinich, Clay,

Watson, Ruppersberger, and Norton.

Also present: Representatives Taylor and Melancon.

Staff present: David Marin, staff director; Larry Halloran, deputy

staff director; Keith Ausbrook, chief counsel; Ellen Brown, legislative director and senior policy counsel; Patrick Lyden, parliamentarian; Anne Marie Turner, John Hunter, and Steve Castor, counsels; Rob White, communications director; Andrea LeBlanc, deputy

director of communications; Grace Washbourne, Susie Schulte, and

Wimberly Fair, professional staff members; Teresa Austin, chief

clerk; Sarah D’Orsie, deputy clerk; Leneal Scott, computer systems

manager; Karen Lightfoot, minority communications director/senior

policy advisor; Michael McCarthy, minority counsel; Earley Green,

minority chief clerk; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The committee will come to order.

A wise man observed, ‘‘The time to repair the roof is when the

sun is shining.’’ Today we ask what has been done to repair and

strengthen our leaky national roof in the 9 months since the sun

broke through the dark clouds of Hurricane Katrina.

The 2006 hurricane season begins 1 week from tomorrow, and

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] predicts another very active period in the Atlantic basin. NOAA forecasts up to 16 tropical storms, 10 of which could become hurricanes; 6 of these could become ‘‘major’’ storms—that is, Category

3 or higher. But even today’s best science can’t tell us when, where,

how many, or how hard hurricanes might hit. Once again, we are

playing Russian roulette against Mother Nature, and it does not

really matter how many bullets are in the cylinder. Any one could

be lethal. Coastal States from Texas to Maine are vulnerable. We

have been warned, and we should get ready.

The Select Committee on Katrina found preparedness gaps and

deficiencies at the Federal, State, and local levels of government

and cited inadequate preparedness as the cause of inexcusable

weakness and failures in the disaster response. Emergency personVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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nel often lacked requisite experience, skills, and training. Evacuations were not coordinated. Critical commodities disappeared into

clogged logistics channels. Medical services were fragmented. Military assistance did not always mesh with civilian response plans.

Communications broke down, and the resulting information vacuum suffocated decisionmaking everywhere from the White House to

the fire house.

So we asked today’s witnesses to describe what has been done in

response to findings and recommendations by the Select Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the White House,

GAO, Inspectors General, and others to make sure we will be as

prepared as possible when disaster strikes. To be sure, in the face

of catastrophic damage on a regional scale, the challenges are enormous. But the size and complexity of the task cannot excuse any

failure to meet simple human needs—food, water, shelter, and

medical care. This is not rocket science. It is the art of caring for

our fellow citizens in need. It is basic blocking and tackling.

Since last year, the Department of Homeland Security and its

subordinate organizations, including FEMA, have worked to retool

Federal capabilities to support the State and local response. More

commodities have been bought and prepositioned, logistics and

tracking systems have been upgraded, and more radios and satellite phones have been deployed. The Departments of Defense and

Health and Human Services have streamlined decisionmaking

chains and better integrated their programs into the National Response Plan. States and localities have similarly bulked up their

response capabilities.

But quantitative improvements alone do not necessarily ensure

we are ready with the agile, proactive, scalable response needed to

meet Katrina’s 2006 counterparts. FEMA is still not fully staffed

and many key positions are filled on a part-time or acting basis.

Federal and State medical responses do not appear tightly coordinated yet. And recent hurricane preparedness exercises, however

useful, have also confirmed some worst fears about a detached, topdown Federal approach to emergency management. An evacuation

drill in New Orleans had to be canceled yesterday due to confusion

about who has jurisdiction over a FEMA trailer park.

Preparedness is not just a governmental obligation. It is a societal responsibility. The Federal Government should be ready to

push help toward the impact zone before landfall. States, counties,

cities, and towns should be well drilled in public communications,

evacuation, and shelter operation. Churches, nonprofits, businesses, and neighborhoods should have plans to mitigate damage

and spur recovery efforts. Families and individuals should be prepared to protect themselves by assembling emergency kits and having a plan.

Yet very recent surveys show too many people, organizations,

and businesses are not prepared to do their part.

Our witnesses this afternoon represent every element of the national response. Representatives from DHS and FEMA will discuss

steps to correct the many problems exposed by Katrina. Testimony

from the Department of Health and Human Services will describe

a better coordinated public health response to life-threatening

events. As the first military element in every disaster response, the

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National Guard paves the way for all subsequent DOD assistance,

and their witness will discuss the effective integration of defense

resources into the civilian response. Testimony from State and local

emergency managers will provide invaluable perspective on the extent to which Federal efforts have helped them make tangible improvements to local capabilities. And our second panel, consisting

of preparedness experts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the

American Red Cross, and the Council on Excellence in Government, will confirm the critical importance of corporate and individual readiness to an effective national response.

I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Taylor of Mississippi and Mr.

Melancon be permitted to participate in today’s hearing. And I now

recognize the distinguished ranking member, Mr. Waxman, for an

opening statement.

[The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:]

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Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased you are holding today’s timely hearing on our Nation’s hurricane preparedness. Serious questions remain about whether the Government is ready to

handle another major disaster like Katrina. This week’s forecast of

another active hurricane season underscored the importance of addressing the problems exposed by the failed response to Hurricane

Katrina.

The House and Senate investigations revealed that the failures

of the Federal response had two major causes. One cause was lack

of attention and weak leadership from top officials at the White

House and Department of Homeland Security. The other cause was

that the Government’s plans, organizational structure, and personnel were inadequate to provide the rapid and massive response

that was needed.

We hope that the administration has learned from Katrina that

major disasters require all hands on deck and engagement by senior leadership. But I question whether the organizational and planning problems have been sufficiently addressed.

Since Katrina, Secretary Chertoff has stripped FEMA of its responsibility for preparedness, even though experts agree that preparedness and response are two sides of the same coin that should

be handled by one agency. Senior posts at FEMA and DHS remain

unfilled, in part because experienced emergency managers are unwilling to work in an organization they perceive as broken. And responsibility for medical response is still divided between HHS and

DHS, while the National Disaster Medical System remains understaffed and undersupplied.

Some progress has been made, and the Nation is better prepared

for a hurricane season than we were last summer, when Katrina

was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. But the response to Hurricane Katrina was such a massive failure—and such a profound betrayal of our Government’s obligation to care for our most vulnerable citizens in their time of greatest need—that it is not enough

for our Government simply to be better prepared than it was for

Katrina.

The American public deserves an effective, efficient, top-notch

hurricane response.

I thank the witnesses for appearing today. I look forward to

hearing about how each of you have responded to the lessons

learned from Katrina.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Waxman.

Members will have 7 days to submit opening statements for the

record.

Ms. Norton, do you want to make any comment?

Ms. NORTON. Yes, Mr. Chairman, I have a brief opening statement.

I wanted to stop by to express my concern. I appreciate that evidence has been forthcoming of preparations for the coming season

of hurricanes, and I do believe that there has been some response

to Katrina, but, Mr. Chairman, you said the old adage about the

sun is shining and fixing the roof. But, according to the National

Weather Service, in the Gulf the sun may be shining for only the

next 2 or 3 days because they are already predicting the first storm

called Alicia and say that we may be getting her within the next

2 or 3 days and that she may be a Category 3 storm who may take

a turn right into a part of the Gulf. The National Weather Service

tells us there are going to be 16 storms and 6 of them will be major

hurricanes.

What I wanted to bring to your attention was something that

came to my attention in the ordinary course, and that is, a report

about a 2-day statewide hurricane preparedness drill that involved

the largest FEMA trailer park in the State located in Baker, which

is close to Baton Rouge.

This drill involving the—the 2-day evacuation drill is a very good

thing to do, a real-time exercise they were doing statewide. When

they got to this part of the exercise involving what everybody

would understand are the most vulnerable people in the State at

the time, they had to call it off, and this is what caught my attention. I want to quote what the director of the East Baton Rouge

Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness

apparently told the Associated Press. Her name is JoAnne Moreau.

‘‘We were unable to get any information from the State or Federal

Government on what policies or procedures were for evacuating

those sites, whose jurisdiction it was.’’ Heavens. The notion with

respect to trailer parks that kind of basic understanding was not

automatic could not be more troubling to me. I am on the Homeland Security Committee. I am on this committee. That kind of albeit anecdotal evidence does not inspire confidence.

I am very concerned. I am very concerned because it was a trailer park. I am very concerned because the trailer parks do not have

landlines and, therefore, have the kinds of cell phones that, according to the reports, do not work well in any case, and certainly not

in storms. I think this committee ought to be concerned. I think

Homeland Security ought to be concerned, the Homeland Security

Committee ought to be concerned. I think the Transportation Committee ought to be concerned. Those are the three committees here

that have jurisdiction. And, most of all, I think the Department of

Homeland Security, which clearly has not even gotten its chain of

command in order for one of the most vulnerable populations,

harking us back, God help us, to Katrina.

And thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

We will now move to our first panel. We have the Honorable

George W. Foresman, the Under Secretary for Preparedness, U.S.

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Department of Homeland Security; Mr. Robert Shea, the Acting Director of Operations, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Homeland Security; Major General Terry Scherling,

the Director of the Joint Staff, National Guard Bureau. We have

Rear Admiral W. C. Vanderwagen, the Special Assistant to the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Mr.

Robert Latham, chairman of the Legislative Committee, National

Emergency Management Association, and director, Mississippi

State Emergency Management Association; and Walter Dickerson,

director, Mobile County Emergency Management Agency.

I ask unanimous consent to include in the hearing record statements submitted by Max Mayfield, who is the director of Tropical

Forecast Center, National Weather Service, and the organization

Voices for America’s Children. Without objection, so ordered.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Mayfield follows:]

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[The prepared statement of Voices for America’s Children follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. It is our policy we swear all witnesses in

before you testify, so if you would just rise and raise your right

hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Foresman, thank you. A pleasure to have you here today.

STATEMENTS OF GEORGE W. FORESMAN, UNDER SECRETARY

FOR PREPAREDNESS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY; ROBERT SHEA, ACTING DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS,

FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY; MAJOR GENERAL

TERRY L. SCHERLING, DIRECTOR OF THE JOINT STAFF, NATIONAL GUARD BUREAU; REAR ADMIRAL W. CRAIG

VANDERWAGEN, M.D., SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE SECRETARY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES; ROBERT R. LATHAM, LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEE CHAIR,

NATIONAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION, AND

DIRECTOR, MISSISSIPPI STATE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

AGENCY; AND WALTER S. DICKERSON, DIRECTOR, MOBILE

COUNTY EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY/HOMELAND

SECURITY

STATEMENT OF GEORGE W. FORESMAN

Mr. FORESMAN. Thank you, Chairman Davis, Ranking Member

Waxman, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear today to discuss the national preparedness as it

relates to the 2006 hurricane season. Preparedness, as you noted,

Mr. Chairman, is not simply a Federal mission. It is a shared national responsibility among all levels of Government, including the

military, the private sector, and, most critically, the American people.

There has been significant review of the Katrina response, what

worked and what did not. The scope of these reviews is unprecedented. We have cataloged important facts and perspectives. The

reviews have galvanized action at all levels and across the full

range of our national preparedness.

I have spent more than 20 years in this business, and I should

note that many of the issues raised during the Katrina review are

not new. They mirror findings after storms like Hugo, Andrew, the

Midwest floods, and the Northridge earthquake, to name a few.

The fact that we are still dealing with these underscores that over

the past 20 years, this country has lacked a comprehensive national approach to preparedness, flexible enough to adequately

adapt in an all-hazards environment. The Northeast blackout, the

September 11th attacks, and the host of public health crises have

revealed the need to modernize preparedness for the realities of a

21st century America and the full range of risk that we face.

With this in mind, Secretary Chertoff announced the Second

Stage Review changes last July to ensure that national preparedness efforts are better coordinated and more comprehensive. He

said then, and Katrina subsequently proved, that the old preparedness approach of the 1990’s and early 21st century had not gotten

us ready for the catastrophic scenarios.

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Understanding the practical lessons from Katrina and in looking

first at the Federal piece and then across the remainder of our

partners—local, State, public sector and private sector—we asked

several questions that have guided our work for the coming hurricane season.

First, which preparedness areas require immediate attention to

achieve a modern 21st century approach that will better position

us for catastrophic hurricanes like Katrina? Slide 1, Mr. Chairman,

is a graphic of the combined 224 findings in the House, Senate, and

White House after-action reviews. These have been categorized according to the existing national standards for preparedness and the

national preparedness goal, both of which reflect a modern approach. Two of the highest deficiencies are planning and the development of operational procedures.

Second, we asked in the short term for this hurricane season,

what is a measurable target of national capability so that we can

be better prepared? We looked at a number of the historic hurricanes and, in the case of dollar impact, translated those into 2005

dollars and measured deaths, numbers evacuated, and homes damaged and destroyed. Slide 2 shows Camille in 1969. Slide 3 shows

Andrew in 1992. Slide 4 shows Ivan in 2004. Slide 5 shows Katrina

under the old scenario. And Slide 6 shows Katrina with the New

Orleans levee breaks. Clearly, the New Orleans scenario with the

levee breaks represents a catastrophic event. I am not here to debate why more progress was not made on preparing this scenario

throughout the 1990’s and into the 21st century. What I will tell

you is that it provides a reasonable short-term benchmark for improving our national posture, and especially our Federal posture for

the current season given the time that we have available.

Our two top leaders at FEMA are experienced crisis managers.

Under Secretary for Emergency Management nominee Dave

Paulison and his Deputy, retired Coast Guard Admiral Harvey

Johnson, along with the thousands of talented employees across

the Department of Homeland Security and, frankly, the entire Federal interagency, are committed to making sure that, along with

our State and local partners, the private sector, and the American

people, we have a stronger and more organized capability for the

upcoming season. We grow in strength every passing day.

Finally, we asked what was needed to be done immediately that

would have the most dramatic impact on capability for this season.

There are a few broad themes, Mr. Chairman. First is accountability. At the Federal level, the President, Secretary Chertoff, and the

entire Cabinet have been actively engaged, as have senior officials

across the Federal Government. There is better clarity on how we

will operate, make decisions, solve needs. Simply saying we are

ready is not enough. We are measuring our progress. We are practicing, pre-scripting, and preparing so that we can act in support

of States and communities quicker and more clearly.

The same is true for States and their Governors. Secretary

Chertoff has visited with many in hurricane-risk areas, and they

are focused from their levels on down into local communities with

improvement.

The findings of the after-action reports are being translated into

tangible actions, and progress is being tracked. This is what sepaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00027 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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rates a modern approach to preparedness from our past approach.

These will be lessons learned and not simply lessons documented.

Second is organization. We have retooled FEMA and the National Response Plan to ensure that decisions are made by those

closest to the incident and that Federal and State officials will operate with unity of effort, and this includes the military, active, reserve, and the Guard. The full resources of the Federal Government are actively being teed up, both civilian and military.

The third area is communications and awareness. We have taken

the initiative to collocate State and Federal authorities into one

joint field office to streamline communication and improve coordination. Roles and responsibilities have been clarified.

The communications architecture of the Gulf States, for instance,

has been met so that we have pre-season visibility as to what resources might be needed in the aftermath of a significant storm.

Pre-scripted communications mission assignments are ready to

more quickly meet a wide range of potential needs, including communication operability and interoperability.

For a Katrina-scale event, where local and State capabilities may

be stretched or overwhelmed, we put additional tools at the disposal of decisionmakers: satellites in space and satellite phones on

the ground.

Slide 7 shows the resources that have been prepositioned to support the most vulnerable areas based on NOAA predictions for this

hurricane season. I would also note on this particular slide, it is

courtesy of our intelligence community. Enhancements are in place

to ensure that the private sector has the information they need to

protect systems, deliver aid, and restore their services.

And, finally, with regard to logistics and supplies, my good

friends Bob Shea and Admiral Vanderwagen will talk about FEMA

and Health and Human Services efforts; General Scherling will

talk about the Guard; Robert Latham knows interstate and State

capabilities through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact and intrastate mutual aid agreements; and Walter Dickerson

understands the realities on the ground of coordinating in a community and the importance of getting disaster victims what they

need.

I encourage that each of their comments be taken in the context

of a large national integrated approach. Simply put, we are working to make sure that relief is at the right place at the right time.

Mr. Chairman, in closing, let me be perfectly clear. This season

will not be without problems or errors. Our goal is to make sure

that the problems and errors are associated with the disaster, as

they normally are, and not with the disaster response. Dramatic

improvements have been made in 9 months. There is more to be

done, but we are ready and will be more ready with each passing

day.

In closing, let me say that for all of this I still remain very concerned about the safety and security of the American people, as you

noted in your opening statement. Recent surveys tell us that they

are not ready for hurricane season. In the spirit of a shared goal

of this committee and all of us here today, there is a simple message that we need your help on this committee and getting out to

your constituents. Federal, State, and local officials are getting

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ready for the hurricane season, and so must those who live in the

hurricane-vulnerable areas. They need to have a plan. They need

to build a kit. And, most importantly, they need to be informed.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Foresman follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Shea.

STATEMENT OF ROBERT SHEA

Mr. SHEA. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the

committee. My name is Robert Shea. I am the Acting Director of

Operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On behalf of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, I am

honored to appear before you today to discuss FEMA, some of our

challenges and accomplishments over the past year, and our preparations for the upcoming hurricane season.

FEMA is undergoing an extensive retooling process to improve

response operations. Let me also note for the record that we are

grateful for the report of the House bipartisan committee and the

other reports and reviews which form the basis of our retooling effort. Areas we are focusing on include logistics, building a 21st century disaster supply tracking system, establishing advance contracts and vendor lists for greater surge capacity, including a historic memorandum of agreement with the Defense Logistics Agency. The cooperation has frankly been magnificent.

Implementing a strategic commodity prepositioning plan, we now

have stocked and prepositioned four times as much ice, water, and

food as we had prior to Hurricane Katrina, enough to sustain 1

million people for 7 days. We are also improving our delivery of disaster commodities within States through the first National

Prepositioned Commodities Plan.

With respect to emergency communications, we are enhancing

communications capabilities and interoperability in the field, and

we are upgrading information technology systems, both generally

speaking and also specifically within the National Response Coordination Center, and providing seamless connectivity with the National Operations Center.

With respect to situational awareness, we are deploying response

liaison teams with satellite phone capability to tie into State and

local Emergency Operations Centers. We are also deploying DHS

situational awareness teams within interoperable communication

assets to provide real-time disaster activity information from the

heart of the disaster. And, finally, we are staffing for the first time

two Federal Incident Response Support Teams [FIRST].

We are also greatly increasing our coordination with our partners. Secretary Chertoff, Acting Director Paulison, and Under Secretary Foresman, and other members of the Department’s leadership team have been meeting with senior elected officials in hurricane-prone States. This is an ongoing process and will continue

throughout the season. Working with Under Secretary Foresman

and his staff, DHS has predesignated principal Federal officials,

deputy principal Federal officials, and Federal coordinating officers

who are working with their State counterparts in advance of and

during the upcoming hurricane season.

FEMA is participating in a series of more and more in-depth exercises, training sessions, and conferences with Federal, State, and

local partners to improve our response and recovery efforts. We are

also greatly improving our coordination with the Department of Defense—NORTHCOM, the National Guard, the U.S. Corps of EngiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00070 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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neers, and the Defense Logistics Agency. Never has our planning

been so well coordinated or so well supported by the hierarchy of

the Department of Defense.

A defense coordinating officer is now permanently located in each

of the 10 FEMA regional offices for ongoing preparedness and response coordination. In addition, we have also completed work on

pre-scripted mission assignments, 31 this year as opposed to 13

last year.

FEMA is working with primary and emergency support function

agencies and has a finalized—a refined Concept of Operations for

the 2006 hurricane season. FEMA plans to activate more assets

earlier and place them closer to anticipated landfall.

The American Red Cross is stepping up to the plate and working

jointly with us to address shelter management issues.

Finally, our internal partners in DHS have been great. I frankly

wonder where we would have been without the effort and support

of the management areas of the Department of Homeland Security

and the Preparedness Directorate. And how can I say enough about

the Coast Guard, as well as the U.S. Secret Service, the Customs

and Border Protection, Transportation Security Administration,

and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In short, we are learning from our mistakes, and we are seeking to achieve a unified

command.

Finally, or next, FEMA is augmenting survivable and interoperable communications capabilities. We have increased capabilities

with high-frequency equipment such as land mobile radios, disaster

satellite communications, and mobile communications. We have

also tested our enhanced capabilities and will continue to do so

through interoperability exercises.

FEMA will train this year 3,000 generalist cadre disaster employees for ready deployment during the 2006 disaster season. This

is a reserve cadre, really. These are the folks who worked last year

for us during Katrina—volunteer firefighters, the U.S. Coast Guard

Auxiliary members, and the Blackfeet tribe from Montana. These

generalists will be trained across traditional program lines and program areas, including community relations, public assistance, and

individual assistance. Training is now taking place and will continue throughout the summer, although by June 1st we are estimating that 70 percent of this cadre will have been trained. These

generalists will free up FEMA’s more specialized and experienced

workers to tackle the more significant challenges of a disaster environment.

FEMA is also planning for the special needs population. We are

working a coordinated process with the Department of Homeland

Security Office of Equal Rights and our own office to work with

State and local officials to plan for evacuation, sheltering and housing of special needs, also quickly reconnecting them with the medical facilities, pharmacies, and their entire support structure.

Finally, the National Disaster Medical System is also working

with State and local officials to prepare for potential medical evacuations.

FEMA’s recovery initiatives are many for 2006. As I said earlier,

we are working with the American Red Cross to improve shelter

population management. We are increasing registration capacity on

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a daily basis from 100,000 to 200,000, part of our overall enhancement of our IT system. We are piloting deployable mobile registration intake centers. We have enhanced identity verification during

registration. We are expanding home inspection capacity now to

20,000 per day. We are improving the speed and suitability of temporary housing. And, finally, with respect to debris removal, we are

putting in place process enhancements, including consistent cost

sharing and enhanced and expedited local contracting. In short, we

are leaning farther forward in this season than any season in my

memory or in the history of the agency.

I have been involved in emergency management since the inception of FEMA. I began my career on December 3, 1979. The new

leadership team at FEMA—David Paulison, the Director-Designate, who appeared before his Senate confirmation hearing just

today; Admiral Harvey Johnson, our new Deputy who came to us

after a spectacular career at the Coast Guard; Deidre Lee, our new

Deputy Director of Operations and one of the top acquisition people

in all of Government, who I think has already appeared before this

committee—we are all working very hard to build FEMA’s work

force. When I returned to FEMA in late February, we were down

to 73 percent of our permanent full-time work force. One in four

positions were vacant, and we are currently experiencing doubledigit retirement every month. Please know that your words hang

in the hallways of FEMA. Please help us create a stable and attractive future so that we—you and the FEMA leadership team—can

pull together a FEMA work force that has the right tools to earn

your trust and that of the American public.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to answering any

questions you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Shea follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, thank you very much.

General Scherling, thanks for being with us.

STATEMENT OF TERRY L. SCHERLING

Major General SCHERLING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is my honor to come before you this afternoon to discuss the actions taken by the National Guard to prepare

for the upcoming hurricane season. While the National Guard response to Hurricane Katrina was a strong success, there are some

clear lessons that have been learned and some areas for improvement, to include understanding our capabilities, improving situational awareness, communication and coordination, and unity of effort.

Since Katrina, the National Guard Bureau has hosted several

planning and coordinating meetings with the Gulf States. In addition, we have participated in exercises, most recently Ardent Sentry, a NORTHCOM-hosted exercise. That exercise had a purpose of

testing the military support provided to Federal, provincial, State,

and local authorities, while continuing to support Department of

Defense homeland defense duties. There were approximately 5,000

military members of both the United States and Canada participating in numerous different events and disasters, to include major

hurricanes, a terrorist attack, and also a pandemic flu outbreak.

The goal was to define points of failure, and I would say that we

also had a shared goal of improving communications, interagency

coordination, and emergency response training.

As an outcome of that exercise, it is important that I share with

you that we have improved our working relationships. I believe

that there is still room for improvement. But we have much better

visibility of our communication and coordination capabilities.

The National Guard Bureau, as I mentioned, has conducted several hurricane workshops. Most recently we conducted a workshop

in New Orleans with the Adjutants General from each of the hurricane States. We also had invited members of the Department of

Homeland Security, to include Secretary Foresman, representatives

from FEMA; also Department of Defense, to include the Deputy

Commander from U.S. Northern Command.

We have also hosted planning meetings for our National Guard

representatives in the Hilton Head area as well as down in Florida.

We have had a number of States participate in those meetings,

along with members of NORTHCOM and the interagency.

The National Guard is committed to improving our interoperability. We have made many investments in our communication capability, to include training for our personnel at the Joint Interagency Training Center, and also in each State.

Through the application of lessons learned, the National Guard

is even better prepared this year to work with our Governors and

supporting them, as well as the President, and we indeed look forward and feel prepared to support our American people and their

needs.

I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Major General Scherling follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Admiral Vanderwagen.

STATEMENT OF W. CRAIG VANDERWAGEN

Rear Admiral VANDERWAGEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My

name is Craig Vanderwagen. I am a family physician and Uniformed Officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. I have also, as

you noted, been acting as an Assistant to Secretary Leavitt in developing our actions in response to the lessons we have learned

from a wide variety of sources.

I have to tell you we have the enthusiastic and full engagement

of our senior leadership, and on a daily basis we are engaged in

dialog about ways that we can make the next step forward. I will

tell you that we are better prepared. We have examined the spectrum of response from pre-hospital to burial, including mental

health, public health activities, primary care, special needs shelters, Federal medical shelters, the full spectrum. We have identified the assets needed and, working with our Federal partners,

have begun the development of identified teams with the skill sets

and the equipment needed to meet those mission assignments.

As Secretary Foresman noted, we have been working with our

Federal partners to assure that we have pre-scripted mission assignments that clarify the responsibilities of each of us as we move

forward to respond.

We have, in concert with DHS, identified the leadership that we

will deploy the JFO, to the community level, to take action. We will

assure that there is a clarity of command and control by making

certain that we have a clear line of control in our organization that

is aligned with the incident command structure of the Department

of Homeland Security and FEMA.

We will also assure that we have full communication, not only

through interoperable sharing of information from the local all the

way up, but we also will assure that each one of our teams has full

capability to communicate with multiple levels of redundancy—cell

phones, land mobile radios, with multiple programmable frequencies, identified frequencies with our Federal partners, local

partners, etc., satellite radios and satellite IT communication.

Our Federal partners have fully embraced the challenge. The

Veterans Affairs people have joined with us in identifying teams.

Our DOD colleagues and our NDMS folks meet on a weekly basis

to assure that we have clarity of responsibility and asset allocation.

We are also working to assure that we have more active means

of engaging civilian volunteers and bringing them together in

meaningful teams through our support and expansion of the Medical Reserve Corps. You may know there are 432 units nationally

at this point and close to 50,000 individuals who have identified

themselves and been credentialed in that process.

There are additional long-term objectives that we are committed

to meeting. That includes the deployable electronic health record

that has full interoperability and full-time deployable teams in the

health arena.

We are mission-driven organization. We believe that everything

we do must focus on meeting the health needs of people not only

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in disasters but on a day-to-day basis, and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Rear Admiral Vanderwagen follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Latham.

STATEMENT OF ROBERT R. LATHAM

Mr. LATHAM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to

be here again before you to represent the State of Mississippi and

the National Emergency Management Association, of which I currently serve as legislative chairman.

As our State prepares for what experts predict to be yet another

active hurricane season, we do so in the shadow of Katrina and the

massive devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. More than

100,000 citizens are currently living in temporary housing travel

trailers—38,000 to be exact—and manufactured housing, mobile

homes, and other temporary structures that certainly will be more

vulnerable during this hurricane season. More than 518,000 of our

citizens have registered for individual assistance. This represents

about 48 percent of the households in the State of Mississippi. Over

8,600 public assistance projects have been approved by FEMA for

infrastructure repair, totaling over $1.1 billion. The Small Business

Administration has accepted over 86,000 loan applications totaling

$2.3 billion. The National Flood Insurance Program has paid out

more than $2.3 billion in claims to more than 19,000 policy holders.

While we feel that our preparedness for and response to Hurricane Katrina went well in Mississippi, we can and must always do

better. We are confident that our planning adjustments and new

initiatives will improve State and local capability, reduce property

loss, and ultimately save lives.

I would like to take a few minutes to highlight some of the preparedness initiatives that our State is undertaking. Under Governor Barbour’s leadership, we developed and implemented an 8-

week, statewide ‘‘Stay Alert, Stay Alive’’ campaign focusing on

those vulnerable citizens that now live in temporary housing. Each

week we focused on different areas, which were individual and

family preparedness, private sector preparedness, flood insurance,

logistical planning, mental health, evacuation, and sheltering.

We developed a comprehensive logistics planning cell capability,

engaging both the public and private sectors as partners in this effort. While this is a huge step, better coordination and integration

with our Federal partners is absolutely critical.

We have initiated a statewide disaster reservist program, similar

to FEMA’s Disaster Assistance Employee Program, that would provide MEMA with a surge capacity of personnel with critical skills

in times of disaster. We will occupy a new 77,000-square-foot,

state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center by the end of July

that will improve the State’s command, control, communication,

and coordination capability. MEMA staff has been increased to improve preparedness and response capability as well as the preparedness things that are so critical and necessary before an event,

and establishing those relationships with local governments so that

once the response is initiated, we understand the capabilities as

well as the limitations of each.

While the House, Senate, and White House have completed reports outlining the lessons learned and recommendations for improvement for Federal response to disasters, I feel it is important

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to articulate the most important issues that are relative to Federal

initiatives aimed at preparing for the 2006 season.

We have to be careful not to create parallel initiatives at the

Federal, State, and local level that address logistical shortfalls or

failures. While all of these efforts are important, we have to integrate them and pull them together as a seamless, coordinated effort. Preparedness initiatives cannot be driven from the top down

but, rather, must operate from the system that can make a difference, and that is from the bottom up.

Exercises should not be conducted in a sterile environment.

Doing so will not give us a realistic assessment of capability. We

must train as we would fight and test continuity of operations,

communications systems, message flow, equipment and commodity

tracking, and the other critical components of our response system.

Long-term recovery officers should not be in the business of directing coordinating response. The office should continue to allocate

and dedicate all of its resources and energy to its primary mission,

that is, the recovery of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The concept of the new FEMA FIRST teams has potential for significant success, but the pre-deployment coordination and reporting

protocol raises some concerns. All elements of the FIRST team

should only be deployed after coordination and at the request of the

State and must be integrated into and work within the unified

command structure that worked so well in Mississippi.

The most important and critical component for strengthening our

national preparedness and response to disasters is Federal funding.

While billions of dollars have been invested to secure our homeland

and prepare for acts of terrorism, funding for natural disaster preparedness has suffered. This was evident in Katrina. The current

fiscal year 2007 proposed funding level for the Emergency Management Performance Grant is only $170 million. After modest increases, EMPG’s growth rate has not kept pace with increased Federal requirements. The burden of effective response, recovery, and

mitigation falls to State and local governments. All disasters are

local. Increased capacity building at the State and local level will

result in less of a reliance on a Federal response, decreased costs,

and a more effective and efficient system. This year, of all years,

the administration is proposing to cut EMPG by $13.1 million, despite the $260 million shortfall identified by NEMA in a 2004

study. EMPG is the only source of funding to assist State and local

governments with planning and preparedness and readiness efforts

associated with natural disasters.

Regardless of the organizational structure of FEMA, NEMA recommends that preparedness be closely linked with response and recovery and that the FEMA Director has a direct reporting relationship to the President of the United States. The relationship could

be structured much like that of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs

of Staff reporting to the President in times of crisis or war. The appropriate role for the active-duty military is to provide assistance

and support to civil authorities. This is the foundation that makes

this country what it is.

NEMA strongly recommends revisiting the National Response

Plan with rigorous input from representatives of State and local

emergency response community that actually have to make it work

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on the ground. These issues include: clarification of the role of the

FCO; elimination of the role of the PFO, which we do not understand the relationship; maintain emergency support functions as a

means to integrate all disciplines into the command and control

structure in the Emergency Operations Center.

However, the Department of Homeland Security has already conducted an internal review of the National Response Plan. The final

version is anticipated for publication by June 1st. However, there

was no stakeholder participation in this review.

In closing, Mr. Chairman, you are correct, quantitative solutions

are not enough. We must breed a new culture of preparedness in

this country. We are destined to repeat history, just as we did after

Camille, Andrew, and others, if we do not take the bold steps to

fix our problems now. We continue to travel the same road again,

and we will get the same results. Our Nation can and must do better. Those we serve—the citizens—expect nothing less of us.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be here on behalf of

NEMA and the State of Mississippi, and I look forward to your

questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Latham follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Dickerson.

STATEMENT OF WALTER S. DICKERSON

Mr. DICKERSON. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and distinguished committee members. First of all, I would like to focus on

the recovery efforts of Hurricane Katrina and those lessons learned

and what we have done in the State of Alabama and also in Mobile

County. Also of the utmost importance will be addressing the preparedness efforts for the 2006 season. Through the leadership of

Governor Bob Riley, the State EMA Director Bruce Baughman, and

local county officials, we have put a team together that continues

to address the long-term recovery issues as a result of Hurricane

Katrina, while ensuring we continue to move forward with our preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season. Being a local government, our position and role as part of the National Response Plan

is one of all hazards, with a comprehensive plan for domestic incident management which includes activities involving prevention,

preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery. This is essential

in protecting the life and property of our citizens.

As part of catastrophic planning efforts, we realize at the local

level that the potential catastrophic incident could result in a sustained national impact State and local impact over a prolonged period of time. Therefore, this type of situation will exceed our local

cleanups. Hopefully the National Response Plan will greatly assist

us at the local level if or when a catastrophic event occurs along

the Gulf Coast again.

One thing we realize in the State of Alabama and Mobile County

is that we must have a readiness plan in place that will allow us

to function and stand alone for at least 72 hours. As a part of this

plan, we are also—not only are we preparing our agencies and responders to be prepared, but we are urging our citizens to be prepared also. They must take that same outlook of the 72 hours of

preparedness.

We are doing such things with the community as the Citizens

Corps Program, the Community Emergency Response Training

[CERT]. We are providing training to our citizens for the purpose

of having them better informed and prepared for disasters. We are

recruiting volunteers to assist us in shelters and many other segments.

Since the devastation delivered by Hurricane Katrina, Mobile

County has been working diligently to enhance our comprehensive

Emergency Operation Plan, especially as it relates to preparedness,

response, recovery, and mitigation. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina

made landfall, we formed an Evacuation, Logistics, Media/PIO,

Search and Rescue, and a Mass Care Task Force. We did this 2

weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in order to prepare

for the 2006 hurricane season. Through the All Hazards Disaster

Plan, we have purchased generators, organized shelter support

teams. We have a plan in place to evacuate citizens without the

ways and means, upgrading our existing Emergency Operations

Center, using pick-up stations, i.e., community capabilities. We

have improved our interoperability. We have purchased satellite

phones. We have a regional interoperability AC–1000 unit. We

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have revisited and established a dedicated executive decisionmaking team. This team will get together prior to any disaster, especially hurricanes, before we would go in and brief the elected officials on the situation.

Also, we have reached out and brought our hospitals to the table,

our assisted living agencies, and nursing homes. We have established and are working to develop an outreach program. We are establishing shortfalls now, and we are about 75 percent through to

the State EMA because the State EMA, they must have time also

to respond to our shortfalls, and that is personnel, equipment, etc.

Also, we have set up distribution points to handle our commodities. We have the lat. and long. directions in place. We have developed clearance times based on the general population of special

needs, medical needs, and nursing homes, assisted living, and other

segments of our population. We continue to make every effort to

work in partnership with the State and local EMA.

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members, on behalf of the citizens of Mobile County, I would like to thank you for this opportunity, and I will entertain any questions that you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Dickerson follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, thank you. We are in votes right

now, but I think we can go for 10 minutes. I am going to start.

The Federal Government’s capabilities are particularly important

in response to a catastrophic incident like Katrina. On the one

hand, I hear that FEMA and DHS have upgraded their responsibility capabilities through the FIRST teams, the National Operations

Center, and other procedures, technologies, and organizational

changes. On the other hand, I hear Mr. Latham say that these new

forms of support need to be integrated into a unified command

structure through the State and local emergency managers.

The Federal Government was criticized for its slow response, yet

the States seem to want that responsibility dictated by the State

and local requests. So this raises the central question in all this.

When should the Federal Government push resources into the affected area without the request of the State? How will the Federal

Government know when to trigger a push response? How will the

Secretary decide when to activate a Catastrophic Incident Annex

and supplement to respond to a catastrophic event? Do you want

to take a shot at that?

Mr. FORESMAN. Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman, and

I think that there are two issues that we are having to deal with

here. First, I think Mr. Latham was right on point about the need

for integration, and that is the whole point of us having

predesignated the principal Federal officials, the Federal coordinating officers doing the series of regional exercises, doing the communications exercises. And this is going to be an ongoing, iterative

process, and one of the things is that we have made phenomenal

changes to our posture to be there, not to replace but to support

State and local governments. And, clearly, we have to get out even

after this exercise period and make sure that is integrated down

at the local and State level.

The other importance about the exercise process and in having

that visibility into the State and local governments, Robert and his

team over in Mississippi did a fabulous job doing an evacuation, a

very complicated evacuation, doing a very complicated response.

And, fortunately, we had people that were working with him that

knew him personally; they knew the capabilities of the State of

Mississippi. And we have learned two big lessons out of Katrina.

One, we have to have more resources closer to the disaster site, far

enough back that they are going to be protected in the storm, but

able to readily respond, whether it is people or equipment or other

types of stuff. But at the same time, we also realize that in the context of an incident of national significance or a catastrophic event

on the scale of Katrina, if the ability of local government or State

government to be able to assess their situation is compromised, we

need to provide those tools, as we mentioned, whether it is the

FIRST teams, the reconnaissance teams, the satellite technology,

so that Robert as a State coordinating officer, or the Federal coordinating officer or the principal Federal official could say, look, you

know, we can’t get word back from this local community, but we

have to put assets downstream and that we are prepared to implement that Catastrophic Incident Annex to the National Response

Plan.

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But I have to tell you, Mr. Chairman—and we told the Adjutant

Generals this; we have told the Governors this—given the experiences that we all collectively went through last year—and I don’t

think there is a Governor in this country along the hurricane-vulnerable States that is not paying attention to this—that ‘‘hot

breath’’ they are going to feel on the back of their neck are their

Federal partners behind them ready to support them, but at the

same time if there is any indication that the State and local governments are unable to perform the missions that they need to perform, we are going to be there ready to support them, and, frankly,

we will be ready to push resources when necessary.

There are some States—which we intuitively know which ones

they are—that are better than others, and, you know, we just have

to do it based on our years of experience in working with these

folks.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Does anybody else want to respond?

Mr. LATHAM. Yes, Mr. Chairman, certainly George and I have

known each other a long time, so I think that many of my comments came as a result of the very first FIRST Team Conference

that was held in Baltimore just a few weeks ago that I had the opportunity to attend, where they briefed the concept of the FIRST

team. And one of the things that we were uncomfortable with, we

as the State, is that we got the impression that maybe the FIRST

teams may show up at the local level, and then we get a call from

the State—to the State EOC that we have a FIRST team down

here. I think it is important, and I think we corrected that at that

conference.

No. 1, I appreciate FEMA inviting the States because I think the

State perspective in all of that is very important, and that we realize that has to be integrated into the State system; and now that

there are only two going into this system, that those two teams be

put where the most critical need is, and that we not take a broadbrush approach to correcting problems nationwide when they may

only exist in certain cases. And I certainly want my Federal partners breathing down my neck with supplies when I think I might

need them. It is going to be very comforting to know that. And it

is so important that those be integrated into the plans that the

State and local governments have so that we do not have such a

Federal response that the State and local governments cannot

manage it.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Go ahead.

Mr. DICKERSON. Mr. Chairman, real quick, I think one thing we

have to really be concerned with, we talk Category 3 storms and

above, but if you are in a coastal area—that is, in Mobile County,

in Zone 1, which is Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island—to those people that could very quickly, very easily be a Category 3 or 4 or 5

storm, although from the National Hurricane Center they may indicate it as a Category 2 storm or a Category 1 storm. So I think

we look at Mobile County, and in that regard, we would have to

have—more shelters would have to be manned. So we welcome any

Federal support prior to the storm making landfall. I think that is

extremely important.

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. The private sector controls a lot of the

goods and services that are necessary to support the response to a

catastrophe.

Now, we have heard or I have heard from a lot of different suppliers that their experience in the past in getting reimbursed

causes them to hesitate in the future, and they want to be part of

the planning process for a disaster so that they can ensure that

they can be prepared to assist and not worry about the reimbursement procedures.

What are FEMA and DHS doing to involve the private sector in

planning for the disasters?

Mr. FORESMAN. Mr. Chairman, let me take the first piece of it

at a more macro level and then get Mr. Shea to talk a little about

the specific processes as FEMA does its contracting.

We are in the final stages, imminent in the next several days,

of putting out our final version of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, and among the coordination structures that plan provides is a series of cross-sector coordinating processes that will

allow us to be able to reach out to the private sector to give them

a higher level of visibility in terms of the expected scope and nature of the disaster event so that they can protect their own resources, but also so that they have an understanding of what are

the types and nature of resources that are going to be needed to

respond to it.

Katrina was an exceptional event because it demanded that the

private sector and caused the private sector, I think, to offer up a

lot of gratis support because of the sheer scope and magnitude of

the event. The vast majority of emergencies and disasters that

FEMA has those contracts with the private sector, you know, it is

the normal vendor-contractor relationship. But I think one of the

big, big takeaways—and, you know, this is where we are getting

dual use out of the Department. The Sector Coordinating Councils

were really designed to provide structure for intelligence and

awareness as it relates to a terrorist threat. But we have placed

them now in an all-hazards context, and it is going to allow us to

communicate with that private sector community in the full range

of prevention, deterrence, response, recovery, irrespective of what

the hazard is. And I will let Bob talk about the specific contracting

issues.

Mr. SHEA. Yes, Mr. Chairman, essentially we take a two-track

approach to this. In addition to things that George was describing

through the preparedness organization, DHS also has a Private

Sector Office, and so we are working with the Private Sector Office

to explore the full range, really, of capabilities of the private sector.

Based on my experience, there is no way in the world for us to adequately begin to respond to and recover from disasters without the

private sector in this country. They are an important player for us.

In addition, though, we have some serious issues with our contracting capability in FEMA. Part of the solution that we have

come to is that we have gotten significant support from the Under

Secretary for Management. She has detailed people to help us, but

we are also looking at enhanced ways of making sure that those

vendor payments are processed on a timely basis.

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One of the ways that we are doing that is we are reaching out

to some of the Government contracting capability—General Services Administration, also the DCMA, the Defense Contract Management Agency, as an example. So we are beginning to send some of

our workload in those directions.

Finally, part of our work force development is to greatly enhance

our capability in both financial management and our contracting

offices, and we are working very hard. The difficulty is that those

are very highly sought after positions from a governmentwide

standpoint, and so we are in a very competitive environment. We

have some 60 jobs in procurement and probably another 20 in our

financial management area to cover at this point. But we are working hard at trying to get those people on board so we can build that

capability and be responsive.

The last time we did a review—and we meet about every week

to look at these kinds of issues—we were in a pretty good percentage range. Not perfect yet but in terms of processing vendor payments, we are in the 95-percent-plus range within the timeframes

established for Government accountability.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Thank you. We are going to take

about a 5 to 10-minute recess. We only have one vote, it looks like.

Mr. Shays is already over there voting, and he will reconvene when

we get back, and then we will go to Mr. Taylor.

Thank you.

[Recess.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The committee will come back to order.

The gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Taylor, is recognized.

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

My first question would go toward the two gentleman from

FEMA. One of the things that was a huge hindrance in the rescue

and recovery operations immediately after Katrina was the lack of

fuel. And one of the things that hit me was that with electricity

out from roughly anywhere from 150 to 180 miles from my home

county, you were not going to get it, say, out of our State capital,

you were not going to go to Mobile to get it, and you sure as heck

were not going to get it out of Louisiana. And yet we are on several

large bodies of water, the intercoastal waterway. We have two 30-

feet-plus deep channels. And one of the things that hit me was

FEMA apparently did not have contracts in place to have fuel

barged in.

The other thing that struck me—and now I am talking my opinion—we had several jobbers who had tanks full of fuel that apparently were sitting back watching the market price go up a nickel

a day and said, ‘‘I am not going to sell.’’ And so, again, what—and

my hunch is now with, you know, approximately $2.90 gasoline,

that if it were to hit this summer, given the tight supplies, we

would probably see a 50-cent-a-gallon jump in gasoline nationwide.

And so you cannot hardly blame the jobber, even though you want

to, for not sitting back and making the most he could.

So my question is: What kind of contracts do you have in place

right now that would lock in the price, say, on the day of the event?

What kind of arrangements have you made—again, anyplace that

gets hit by a hurricane is going to be a coastal community. What

kind of arrangements have you made to barge in the fuel so you

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are bringing in one barge rather than hundreds of trucks? So that

would be question No. 1.

The second thing—and this falls in your homeland security

role—Federal flood insurance is under your jurisdiction. I know

that thousands of south Mississippians were abused by their insurance companies when they walked to an empty slab and said,

‘‘Your house washed away. You have to prove otherwise. We are

not giving you a homeowner’s check. But, by the way, we will give

you a Federal flood insurance check.’’

Now, you know and I know that Federal flood insurance is paid

for by the taxpayers. That homeowner’s policy is paid by Allstate

or State Farm or Nationwide. But in doing that, they not only

abuse the homeowners; they abused every taxpayer. Has anyone in

your organization taken the time to look and see how much of the

costs that should have been borne by the Allstates, the State

Farms, and the Nationwides were kicked over to be paid by the

taxpayers? Because my hunch is you have not checked in one instance, and my hunch is that occurred in tens of thousands of instances.

So given that we have another hurricane season coming, seeing

how the insurance companies got away with that last year, that is

going to become their mode of operations this year. They are going

to blame everything on a flood if they can. So what are you doing

to protect the taxpayers, No. 1, to try to correct what happened last

summer by bringing some criminal charges against these guys but,

above all, to see to it that it does not happen again this year?

Mr. FORESMAN. Mr. Taylor, let me start first with the second

question, and I am going to ask Bob, since he also ran the National

Flood Insurance Program, to spend a little bit of time on it. And

I am not begging off on this, but one of the important things to understand is that regulation of insurance industries is a predominant State responsibility.

Mr. TAYLOR. Except for Federal flood insurance.

Mr. FORESMAN. Absolutely. And so part of this equation comes

back to the fact that one of the greatest lessons learned—and I got

to tell you, I was in Dade County right after Hurricane Andrew,

and this was an issue back then. And we have to make sure that

we are working with the Governors of those affected coastal States

to make sure that they have the right State statutes and laws in

place, the right requirements are being placed by their State corporation commission or equivalents on their insurance companies

that are doing business in the States.

Now, with regard to the specifics cross-reference—and I will get

Bob to get into the details, but this is part of the ultimate challenge that we run into with the National Flood Insurance Program

because we have to essentially administer it through the insurance

industry. And you raise a legitimate point that we have expressed

concern about internal to the Department, and in the relative priority listing of things, it needs to be addressed. We need to take

a closer look at it. But I will tell you, Congressman, that we have

really been focused on some of the higher—it is a priority issue, but

it is not as high a priority as some of the other life-saving things

we were trying to get done for this hurricane season.

But let me ask Bob to maybe put a little visibility on it as well.

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Mr. SHEA. Thanks. Mr. Taylor, I think one of the challenges in

this area is the National Flood Insurance Program has really got

two major purposes to it. One is it is designed as a mechanism by

which we can actually avoid costs for the Federal Government. It

is designed to be a self-sustaining program, so it is intended that

the premiums that people pay into the National Flood Insurance

Program will eventually cover all the expenses.

Now, in a year like the one that we just experienced, it frankly

is going to be in the hole for a while, so the borrowing goes up. But

it is not funded directly by any specific appropriation of

Congress——

Mr. TAYLOR. That is incorrect, Mr. Shea.

Mr. SHEA. I am sorry?

Mr. TAYLOR. That is incorrect. We have bailed that program out.

You have bailed out my constituents to the tens of billions of dollars this year.

Mr. SHEA. Through borrowing authority, yes, sir.

Mr. TAYLOR. That is correct, which means the taxpayers went

out and borrowed money from the Chinese to pay claims in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Mr. SHEA. But I have to tell you, I have also been there when

the program came to its final conclusion and it was actually even

with the Federal Treasury, and we had paid both the costs for the

program and interest back as part of that effort.

Mr. TAYLOR. Again, we are looking at next season, and on the

second round, I am going to go after the MREs and the fuel. I already mentioned the fuel.

Mr. SHEA. OK.

Mr. TAYLOR. But let’s talk about—this is something that affects

the Federal Treasury to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. This

is something that in my mind, if I was from Kansas, if I was from

Montana, if I was a budgeteer and I wanted to beat the Dickens

out of my National Government and end a program, I would use

the case of what I have just outlined as a case to kill Federal flood

insurance, because you guys in not one single instance looked at

what that claims adjuster from Allstate or State Farm or Nationwide or any of the other list, who was just doing a job for you on

a fee basis, who has absolutely no reason to have the bill paid by

his real employer, has every reason to stick you with the bill. And

I don’t know—I don’t think you can name a single instance when

you came back in all those tens of thousands of claims and said,

‘‘Wait a minute. That was clearly wind damage. That is clearly

State Farm’s responsibility.’’ In every instance the taxpayer got

stuck.

So if I am that budgeteer and I am trying to go after a Federal

program, which, by the way, is extremely important to the people

of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, coastal America, which I don’t

want to see go away, but you guys are giving them the ammunition

to kill that program by not being good stewards of the Treasury.

So, again, that is water under the bridge. You need to be looking

at what happened last summer, but now I have zero confidence

that you have changed the rules one bit going into this summer.

So we get stuck to the tune of tens of billions of dollars again when

it happens, not if it happens.

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Mr. SHEA. Congressman, don’t mistake my comments—I am just

trying to kind of lay the groundwork for where I think the program

is right now. As my colleague Under Secretary Foresman indicated,

there is an interest, I think, on the part of the Department of taking a good, hard, long look at all of this and trying to make sure.

And I frankly think it is going to involve the Congress of the

United States to look before it is all over with as well. And I think

you have hit on the key issues. You have gone right after the

issues.

The second major purpose of that program, though, is to protect

the economic vitality of communities.

Mr. TAYLOR. I understand.

Mr. SHEA. And that is part of—we straddle a fence there, and it

is a difficult fence to straddle. We do try and be good stewards. I

know for a fact we send out third-party auditors, and we also have

independent verification. We get Federal agencies to help us, indicate where high watermarks are so that we can make those determinations about which portion of this should be flood insurance

and which should not be, which should go to the homeowner’s insurance world. But it is a very difficult area, and I think it has

been very vexing, at least from my perspective. I have been out of

that business for almost 3 years now, but it is very vexing to watch

what is happening, particularly in the Gulf Coast area, for everybody.

Mr. TAYLOR. OK. For the record, I want you to name one time

in Hurricane Katrina where the National Flood Insurance Program

turned to a State Farm, a Nationwide, or an Allstate—just one

time out of the tens of thousands of claims—where you said, ‘‘Uhuh, you should be paying that claim, not the Federal flood insurance.’’

Mr. FORESMAN. Congressman, I think we owe you two things.

You have raised a legitimate point here, and what I am going to

suggest is that we give you a response for the record. Let us go

back and get with the folks, because that may be correct, it may

not be, and I just simply don’t know in terms of that level of detail.

And I think the other piece that we will bring back to you as well

is, you know, what are we doing looking down the road in terms

of some of the checks and balances, because Secretary Chertoff has

made to Under Secretary Paulison a top priority to make sure that

when we look at fraud and abuse, we are looking at it across the

entire plethora. And there may, in fact, be a plan in formulation

stages, but we will have to bring it back to you.

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Before I go to Mr. Clay, communications were a disaster of their

own in Katrina. Have the States received their funding and guidance on improving their communications capability? And how will

the National Guard’s communications capability be deployed? And

how will all these capabilities be integrated? If you would start,

General.

Major General SCHERLING. Mr. Chairman, the National Guard

has improved its communication extensively since last year. First

of all, I would say that every State has received an incident command package, which is a deployable communication package. In

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addition to that, the NGREA funds have funded us to enable us to

purchase $55 million worth of communications gear for each of the

States to enable them to have a communication bridge with the

State and local responders. We think that is very, very important.

It bridges DOD’s communication capability with the State and local

responders, can bridge up to 14 different frequencies on a broad

spectrum basis.

We also have the ability for reach-back satellite capabilities as

well as voice over Internet, voice and data over Internet, video teleconferencing, and additional radios. And so we would like to thank

the Congress for enabling us to purchase sets for nine other hurricane States. We have six additional sets outside of the hurricane

States that we can rapidly deploy in, and we are in the process of

fielding the remainder of these sets throughout the rest of the year.

Mr. FORESMAN. Mr. Chairman, if I might just add a little additional perspective to the General’s comments, one of the things that

we have done this year, as we had mentioned earlier, is we did not

understand the architecture of State and local government and

State and local government to the Federal Government in terms of

communications. This was a basic thing that has been woefully inadequate for a number of years.

We have put a combined team down there in terms of national

communications systems, DOD active, the National Guard, FEMA,

the Federal Communications Commission, a wide range of folks

who have gone out and mapped the architecture down at the State

and local level all along the hurricane-vulnerable States.

One of the things that I would underscore is that, of that $18 billion that we have provided to States and communities over the

course of the past 3 years under the State Homeland Security

Grant Program, as well as UASI, a major portion of that has been

available for communications, but it comes to the other issue of as

a result of the Katrina experience, as a result of the mapping experience, as a result of what the Guard has been able to do on the

military side, I think as we go out with this year’s grants on communications, particularly those in hurricane-vulnerable States, we

are going to be a little more prescriptive in the types of communications equipment that they can use those dollars for.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK.

Mr. DICKERSON. Mr. Chairman, from a local standpoint, the General is correct. We do have in Mobile County an AC–1000 interoperability communication unit. With that is six satellite phones.

We have purchased in Mobile County an additional six satellite

phones. I am taking the same concept of the AC–1000 and putting

it inside of my Emergency Operations Center. So there has been

some improvement. Are we totally there? I am not sure if we are

totally there yet or not, but there has been an awful lot of improvement over the last 6 or 7 months in interoperability.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you. Was that paid for or any of

that paid for by the Federal Government?

Mr. DICKERSON. Yes, it has been. It was.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Good. Thank you very much.

The gentleman from Missouri.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding

this hearing. I thank the panel for their participation today.

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My first question is to Mr. Foresman. You know, flooding was a

major problem last year, and I would like to know what have you

done to address the potential of severe flooding and particularly in

the region in and around New Orleans. Can you give us a progress

report on repairing of the levees?

Mr. FORESMAN. Congressman, while I cannot give you a specific

progress report on the repairs of the levee, leaving that to the

Corps of Engineers, who is overseeing that, I thank you for the

question because it brings up an interesting point. The unique nature of the New Orleans greater metropolitan area now is that literally by June 1st, we are going to have more than 100,000 travel

trailers down there, a couple hundred thousands people, meaning

in essence that even in a tropical storm force event, we are going

to have a lot of people having to evacuate who previously, when we

had substantial housing, would have been able to stay in their

homes.

We have embarked—and we offered to the State of Louisiana

about 2 months ago, we said given the fragile nature of the coast,

would it provide benefit to you all in the State of Louisiana to have

a Federal interagency planning team to support an update of the

five parishes essentially south of Route 10? They accepted that

offer, and we have had a Federal interagency planning team down

there helping them update not only their sheltering plan but their

evacuation plans, looking at the communications issues. DOD,

Guard, everybody’s at the table. We are coalescing that group down

there.

What that is going to produce is an updated plan for those local

parishes, an updated plan for the State, and a clearer understanding of where their capabilities are and where their capabilities may

not be. And we want to make sure, whether it is through interstate

mutual aid or whether it is through Federal resource supporting,

that the State of Louisiana has sufficient capacity.

Let me just give you a couple of numbers. Kind of the initial look

at it, they have about 400,000 people that need to be sheltered. The

State right now is having trouble getting past about 70,000 or

80,000 shelter spaces. So, you know, what is the solution? That is

what the team is working through.

They have about 189,000 people that they do not believe that

they have the capability, either at the local or State level, to transport. And so what to do with that? And so the planning team is

working through creative solutions.

Of that 189,000, we have 7,000 special needs population, of

which HHS is helping us look at that have medical complications.

So the question that we are confronted with as the Federal Government is: Do we resource the movement of medically compromised

patients out of the greater metropolitan New Orleans area? Or do

we look at robust facilities in that region where the State and

locals can shelter those folks? That team is working literally 18

hours a day, has been for a month and a half. We expect to have

the draft plan in place by June 1st, but, Congressman, I have to

tell you that the fragile nature of the Gulf Coast presents a very,

very unique challenge this year, and it is going to cause us to really push the envelope on a lot of policy issues. The big thing is we

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are going to have to make declaration decisions earlier and evacuation decisions earlier.

Mr. CLAY. And that leads me to my next question, and I would

like to get this on the record. Who has the final authority over

medical operations this hurricane season? Is it HHS, DHS, or

FEMA?

Mr. FORESMAN. Let me be very clear. Under the National Response Plan, the Department of Health and Human Services is our

Federal ESF lead for health and medical issues. As to such, we will

look to the Department of Health and Human Services for leadership and decisionmaking on health and medical issues under the

broader context of the National Incident Management System and

the National Response Plan for which we are responsible for coordinating.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you for that response.

Mr. Shea, as you know, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration predicts an above-normal hurricane season this

year with as many as 16 named storms and the prospect of four

to six of them becoming major hurricanes. How proactive have you

been in establishing contingency contracts such as transportation,

busing, and housing? Can you explain that, please?

Mr. SHEA. We have actually been very proactive in this arena,

trying to make sure that we are in a readiness posture. I think the

single largest step forward that we made was about a month ago

we signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Defense Logistics

Agency, and because of their inherent capability to assume large

contracting responsibilities on our behalf, we tasked—they fill the

orders. They are basically cutting our overall concern and workload

by over 50 percent. Nonetheless, we are putting in place with our

partners in the Department of Transportation and other elements

of the Government a whole series of pre-scripted mission assignments that ask for help wherever we need it. It could be transportation, it could be the provision of food, it could be whatever. And,

in addition, we have additional contingency contracts for any of the

areas that we are talking about—water, ice, tarps, MREs, whatever

you can think of.

So we have a tiered back-up system available now to address all

of those kinds of needs.

Mr. CLAY. Let me just say, since my time is up, Mr. Shea, that

I just hope the actions that your Department and others take will

be decisive this time. We all look back and do Monday morning

quarterbacking about what we should have done with Katrina. But

I just hope this time that we eliminate the red tape, the confusion,

and the bureaucracy and make some decisive decisions and carry

them out in order to save lives.

Mr. SHEA. We could not agree more, Congressman. We fully intend to carry out all responsibilities and in as aggressive a fashion

as necessary, while we still respect the rights of the States and we

still respect the unified command to try and make those decisions

as early as humanly possible.

Mr. CLAY. So we have all learned something from Katrina, then.

Mr. SHEA. Yes, sir, we certainly have.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Melancon.

Mr. MELANCON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for being

late. I have been meeting with people that are affected by hurricanes back in Louisiana, 8 going on 9 months later.

Back to the question of the trailers, what is the procedure or

what is going to be the directive for the travel trailers? Are they

going to be left behind, or are you going to require them to be

hauled out in the event of a storm? Yes, Mr. Shea?

Mr. SHEA. Yes, Congressman, essentially I think the analysis

that the Under Secretary described, working with the entire team

down there to make that analysis to see what, if anything, needs

to be done. But it is clear to us that, as an example, hauling those

trailers out in advance of an impending storm is not a very sane

way of doing business. So we are looking much more strongly at

evacuation measures to get out of harm’s way.

Now, there is some mitigation work going on in terms of the

trailers themselves, in terms of tying them to the ground and that

kind of thing. But they are not places to be if you have a very serious storm approaching the coastline.

Mr. MELANCON. I am aware of that. There were, and I believe

still are, about 10,000-plus trailers in Hope, AR. Are they still

there? And if so—I talked to one of our parish presidents yesterday, and he still needs 1,000 or more, and he is not in New Orleans.

Mr. SHEA. Yes, there are still some 8,000 to 9,000 trailers that

are in—they are actually mobile homes, is what they are. They are

a little different than a travel trailer. They are a larger kind of

unit. They are often more suitable for folks with disabilities. So we

are trying to judiciously use them, but we also have needs to prestage them in other areas of the country. As an example, they are

much more suitable for use in the Northeastern quadrant should

we get colder weather and that kind of thing. They are stronger

and better insulated for that kind of application.

We are looking very hard at all the areas of the Gulf Coast area

to see if any opportunity exists to place them in a usable place

down there along the Gulf Coast, including Alabama, Mississippi,

Texas, Louisiana, any of those areas. But one of the challenges is

that some of the areas we are talking about are still subject to

flooding conditions, and so you don’t want to put people in harm’s

way by giving them a feeling of safety that they sometimes achieve

in those types of units.

So we are being very judicious in trying to look at that issue real

hard, but wherever we can, we are trying to make good use of

them. As we enter additional seasons, we are basically trying to be

in a readiness posture. Our average annual use of mobile homes is

somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000, so it is probably maybe a couple years away before we are able to adequately use all those resources. But, again, we are exploring every single option in the way

that we are looking at that situation.

Mr. MELANCON. After the storms in Florida, it is my understanding that as the trailers—the travel trailers, and maybe also the mobile homes, I am not sure—were put up at a public auction, put up

for bid. And at the time that the storm hit, Katrina hit, and prior

to Rita, I understand that some of the sales were being finalized

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rather than just take those trailers and move them immediately to

Louisiana. I understand also that right now they are going through

the process of bidding out the sales of the trailers. I mean, I think

FEMA paid $5 million to gravel or limestone 200 and some acres

so that trailers do not sink, and we are just going to sell them? I

don’t know, what are you getting, 30 cents on the dollar?

Mr. SHEA. No. There are times when in the application of this

program we basically attempt to provide that resource to individuals. In other words, we will sell at a fairly reasonable price to individuals who have been living in them and who might be able to

make use of those travel trailers or mobile homes. But if the situation you described is going on, I am not aware of it, and we will

certainly look into it and see if there is an ongoing sale.

A lot of the times when we are talking about these travel trailers, they are not really suitable for reconditioning and reuse in a

lot of cases, and they do not have the capability to travel long distances. They just simply are not strong enough as a unit. So we

are limited somewhat in our ability to be able to do that.

Nonetheless, I think we are looking at every opportunity to make

use of them that we can, and we are, in fact, exploring the possibility of purchasing additional travel trailers, but it is only an exploration as a contingency. It is not an intention to buy travel trailers

at this point that I am aware of.

Mr. MELANCON. Do you by chance know what the inventory is of

trailers, complete, travel and mobile homes?

Mr. SHEA. The mobile homes are primarily in Hope, AR, and as

I said, there are between 8,000 and 9,000 right now. Most of the

travel trailers that we are using are actually being produced on a

case-by-case basis.

The only purchase of travel trailers we have made of recent days

has been within the last 30 days we were purchasing about 300

that were compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act for

specific targeted audiences that we were trying to address.

Mr. MELANCON. I have a parish president that called, and he

needs some 800 to 1,000 more trailers, and specifically he needs

the ADA trailers.

Mr. SHEA. Yes, one of the things we are experiencing right now

is that people believe that they are in a position to move back to

some of these previously impacted areas. One of the triggers is

when school ends, so the school year has ended for a lot of their

children, and they are now thinking about it. So we are beginning

to get more and more inquiries about the possibility of a travel

trailer being available for their temporary housing needs.

So we are trying to deal with those issues as well right at the

moment. We do not have a real clear picture because this is just

an emerging trend that we are beginning to see, Congressman.

Mr. MELANCON. Thank you. My time is up.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS [presiding]. Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I guess this should be addressed to Rear Admiral Vanderwagen.

One of the most chilling things that we witnessed during Katrina

was to see elderly people trapped in nursing homes and dying in

America. And I was just wondering, where are we with regard to

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those kinds of situations for the future? We should never have to

experience something like that.

Rear Admiral VANDERWAGEN. Thank you, Mr. Cummings, for

that question. I think one of the lessons learned was that the reality of people with special health needs was not something that

had been planned for or addressed in a meaningful way. And this

year our approach, depending upon where you are talking about,

we know the GIS codes not only of all the nursing homes in the

State of Louisiana, which is an extremely high-risk concern for us

this year, but through the home health care agencies, through dialysis centers, other social support networks and working with parish officials, for instance, in Louisiana, we have identified who

those at-risk individuals are and the locations of those individuals.

We have developed a three-layer plan, working with the parishes, the State, and our Federal entities, to assure that the parish

has the capacity to do what they need to do. If not, the State can

fill in the gap, and if that cannot be covered, then we have the Federal capacity to fill in that gap.

Part of the way we are going to know whether that is a problem

is we are going to place people in the parish EOCs to assure that

we have clear and timely understanding of whether or not that

task is being addressed in a timely fashion through that process.

So we think that we have learned a lesson in some large degree

and that we are assuring that we have the proper number of ambulances, buses, identified triggers, if you will, that is, when is the

system really going to need intervention? And we are ready to address that issue as aggressively as we possibly can because I am

with you, that 21⁄2 months I spent in Louisiana taking care of people, that was probably the most heart-breaking part of that for me.

Mr. CUMMINGS. One of the things that I noticed in my district,

sometimes I—every year I take half a day and deliver these meals,

Meals on Wheels. And it is always a very interesting experience because most of the people say that the Meals on Wheels people are

the only people they see, you know, in a day, and they really look

forward to it.

What I am getting to is that you have so many people like the

ones you talked about who may not be in a nursing home, may not

be in a senior center. Tell me logistically—I know you said you

have your layers, and that is significant. So just tell me logistically

how you know that Ms. Johnson who lives on that road way up the

way by herself, I mean, how do we know that she is—I mean,

who—how do we know that she is OK? Do you follow me? It is one

thing to have the systems in place but to make sure, you know,

that the person does not fall between the local, State, or Federal

cracks there.

Rear Admiral VANDERWAGEN. Yes, that is why we tried to work

with parish officials in the case of Louisiana and with those social

support agencies that many of those people are quite dependent

on—home health care, dialysis units, and the people who transport

them to and from—so that in each parish we have identified the

list with the GPS location, and we will proceed in a manner that

looks at it as a checklist that has to be accounted for within specified timeframes.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. Mr. Foresman, much has been made of the

broken chain of command at DHS with regard to its response to

the hurricane. Confusion over whether DHS Secretary Michael

Chertoff or FEMA Director Michael Brown should be the go-to person created unnecessary confusion. You may have already answered this, but how is the agency addressing that issue?

Mr. FORESMAN. Congressman, thank you. One of the things I

would offer, having been in this business for 20 years, there is absolutely no light between Secretary Chertoff and Under Secretary

Nominee Dave Paulison. Dave is firmly engaged and involved. He

and the Secretary have an ongoing and regular dialog, and Dave

is showing through his leadership his commitment to be part of the

DHS organization. And we, through the broader aspects of the Department, are showing our commitment to making sure that FEMA

is successful.

So I think this is an issue less of organization and structure and

more of management and leadership. The right management, the

right leadership are at FEMA. Secretary Chertoff is as skilled a crisis decisionmaker as I have met in 20 years, dealing with Governors and senior Federal officials. And clearly there were issues

across the Federal interagency with understanding of the National

Response Plan, one of the things I mentioned earlier.

Today, the Cabinet as we speak is participating in a hurricane

exercise. That is not designed to replace what Robert Latham or

Walter does down at the State and local level. It is designed to

make sure that we have clarity and coordination at the Federal

level to support our State and local partners out there. And I will

tell you, Congressman, it is a different world, and I came in after

Katrina, and I have heard all of the horror stories. I have heard

them from both sides of the street. But we have an interoperable

organization in terms of people, attitudes, and culture right now,

and that is absolutely critical to our success.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. The gentleman’s time has expired. I am

going to claim my time now and welcome all of you. I particularly

want to thank you, Robert Shea. During Katrina, my staff and I

were in contact with you during the height of that, and I knew you

were juggling a hundred balls at the same time, but you were very

responsive and tried to be helpful, and I thank you.

I want to say as a member of the Katrina hearing, it was very

clear from our report that we felt that the President at that moment and the administration was in a bit of a fog. We felt that,

frankly, the Department of Homeland Security was missing in action. And we felt that FEMA, in terms of the top leadership, was

derelict. And we had concerns also, as well as the Governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans.

I had the feeling that what we wanted was we wanted the Department of Homeland Security to add value. I had the feeling that

Mr. Chertoff—I do believe he is a very capable man—made a determination, let FEMA be FEMA, and so he just let it be FEMA without adding value to it, which was the whole point.

And I would just say to you, Mr. Foresman, your comment that

they are going to feel your breath if you think they are going to

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drop the ball, you are going to pick it up, is a very, very important

thing for this committee to hear.

I would like each of you very succinctly to tell me how you would

characterize our state of preparedness. I do not want everyone to

say, you know, we are ready now, we are more ready. But if anyone

says we are ready, they are giving me a line. But I want to know

how you would characterize our state of preparedness, if you could

describe how it might be different than a year ago.

Mr. FORESMAN. Mr. Chairman, I will start, and I will be clear

and concise. The organizational structures between local, State,

and Federal, between public sector and private sector, between civilian and military, are clear, concise, and understood. We are

training. We are exercising. We are preparing together.

Mr. Latham pointed out earlier that we have to do a better job

of communicating some of these changes down to our State and

local partners. But if I were to offer to you the overall assessment,

we are never going to be fully ready because the risk continuum

changes. But one of the things that I said earlier is that in my context, from the President all the way down to a local fire house, I

am comfortable in saying that preparations for the 2006 hurricane

season are a top priority, and the one issue that I mentioned earlier, Congressman—I just have to mention it—is the American public. We are only going to be as ready as the American public is.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Shea.

Mr. SHEA. From my perspective, Mr. Chairman, I think we are

closer to being ready than I have ever seen in the context of my

entire career in FEMA, and that has been spanning since December 1979.

Mr. SHAYS. Describe to me what ‘‘ready’’ means.

Mr. SHEA. Well, I think we have looked across the entire spectrum of issues which confronted us and, frankly, defeated us last

year. And I think we have taken actionable steps to address them.

It is not a perfect picture and we are not 100 percent by any

stretch of the imagination. But when I feel the need to consult with

someone in the Department to get support, I don’t hesitate to pick

up a phone and call. And Mr. Foresman and I have worked some

issues together because of the strength of those relationships that

we have.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

General.

Major General SCHERLING. The National Guard has improved its

situational awareness through increased communication capabilities and interoperability to bridge that gap between the State and

locals and our DOD forces. In addition to that, we have worked

with each of the States in an extensive planning effort with the Adjutants General and their staff to determine which capabilities that

they have, that they would require during the hurricane season.

We have measured those capabilities. We have determined which

States might be missing capabilities due to deployments in

Iraq——

Mr. SHAYS. Is that all 50 States?

Major General SCHERLING. Sir, primarily the hurricane States.

Mr. SHAYS. OK. Thank you.

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Major General SCHERLING. And we have looked at those States

to determine whether the shortages and gaps might be relative to

deployments with Iraq or Afghanistan. And, in turn, we are actually looking for support from the supporting States at this point to

fill those gaps.

So our plan right now has been extensive, and we are sharing

that information with NORTHCOM and with our interagency partners.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you, General.

Admiral.

Rear Admiral VANDERWAGEN. Thank you, Mr. Shays. I would

say—and I am echoing some things that you have heard already

from others, I suppose. But I think that this culture of preparedness and the acceptance that we not only have a mission to perform certain day-to-day activities that are part of our responsibility

in the health arena, but we have a mission to be responsive and

to be as prepared as we can be to meet needs of people in disasters.

That is a major change of thinking in the way I think some of us

in the Federal health partnership have looked at it.

Second, I would say that we are about as actively engaged with

the partners as they can possibly stand, both on the Federal level

but as well on the State and local level. There is about this much

more that they are going to tolerate of us being engaged.

And, last, I think we have taken a much more comprehensive responsibility for an analysis of what the health missions will and

must be and not just viewed it as simply the first 3 to 5 days of

emergency response, but looked at the full spectrum of health

needs that we need to be prepared to address across a longer-term

event, as we have lived with in Louisiana.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you, Admiral. My time is ending, so I would

like fairly short—and you all have been great at trying to be succinct. Thank you.

Mr. Latham.

Mr. LATHAM. Mr. Shays, when you talk about being ready, certainly that is something that is hard to define, but I think you are

talking about leadership, coordination, communication, and the resources. And all of those areas have been improved significantly.

Mississippi has not waited around to fix some of the problems. We

have stepped out on our own. We are doing many of the things that

we should have done before Katrina. We are much better prepared

this year than we were last year, but we feel that because of the

steps that George and Dave Paulison and our Federal partners are

taking that we are going to be even that much more better prepared. But I think we are so focused on certainly hurricane season,

because it is the most impending risk right now. We have to look

at the possibility of something in the central United States in the

New Madras Seismic Zone or something else. So we have to be

careful that we do not focus too much on the hurricane season.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

You will end up, Mr. Dickerson.

Mr. DICKERSON. Yes, locally we have—in Mobile County, we have

accomplished much. We still have a ways to go. We know that. We

have taken some initiatives on our own, such as 2 weeks after Hurricane Katrina, we put an Evacuation Task Force in place. It has

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made us—already we have 15 pick-up stations set up for evacuations of those who don’t have the ways and means to do so. We

have coordinated with local agencies, State agencies, and Federal

agencies as far as buses are concerned. We have identified shortfalls. How many forklifts will we need? How many personnel, how

many security forces will be needed, not just post-storm but prior

to the storm making landfall?

Again, I want to emphasize we realize in Mobile County the National Hurricane Center may tell us it is a Category 2 storm, but

if you live in Dauphin Island or Bayou La Batre, it is a Category

4 storm. And there are 56,000 people that live in that area that we

have to make sure that they are taken care of.

Mr. SHAYS. Have you made sure that Mr. Taylor has a house

yet?

Mr. DICKERSON. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. Still living on the street, Mr. Taylor?

Mr. TAYLOR. Still freeloading off my brother.

Mr. SHAYS. OK. Thank you all for your response.

Ambassador Watson.

Ms. WATSON. Thank you so very much, and if you have addressed this issue, please let me know, and I will go on to my next

issue. But after Katrina, FEMA and other Federal agencies hastily

entered into massive contracts worth millions of dollars, waiving

competition and failing to negotiate money-saving provisions. The

result was that contracts squandered taxpayers’ dollars on a massive scale, and we all know about the Carnival Cruise ships that

cost about $8,000 per person per month.

So to avoid such waste and abuse, the House Select Committee

that investigated the Katrina response recommended that FEMA

negotiate contingency contracts that can be activated when needed

after a disaster. After DHS and FEMA procurement officials agreed

that contingency contracts should be in place, it is not clear what

FEMA has entered into ahead of the hurricane season so that essential services like buses for transportation—I heard some reference to different modes of transporting people, but what contingency contracts do you have in place today? And, also, can you better explain why we purchased all those mobile units and left them

in place without checking to see if they were suitable or if the land

was suitable to place them on? Because when we were down in

Mississippi, we heard from a minister who said she had 8 acres—

this is in Mississippi—and they could place as many mobile units

on her property as possible.

So I would just like to know, didn’t you search that out before

you actually purchased those mobile units and left them in the

mud in Hope, AR, and other places where I understand they are

still sitting, Mr. Shea?

Mr. SHEA. Yes, that is correct, Ambassador Watson. As I said before, there are about 8,000 to 9,000 units still in the Hope, AR,

area that were staged there as a staging point really for delivery

eventually. There were mistakes made early on.

What happened was we began forecasting early into the storm

about the number of impacted individuals, and we used models

that we had been traditionally comfortable with in terms of that.

And it forecasted the needs that are now clearly higher than they

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actually turned out to be. So that is one of the reasons why we are

where we are today.

A lot of that was done, as you said, with noncompetitive contracts. When I came back to FEMA, which was in late February

of this year, my boss, David Paulison, gave me the charge to help

clean that area up. And so I worked very strongly during that period of time to not enter into any other noncompetitive contracts,

and, in fact, we have not.

The other thing that we did was we brought in one of the leading

experts in the Federal Government on acquisition, Deidre Lee, who

was with the General Services Administration, came over as Deputy Director of Operations and Chief Acquisition Officer. And so we

have taken that situation and begun to turn it around. We do not

have all the contracts in place, and part of the reason for that is

that we are going through a very strong competitive process to

make sure that any contracts that we put in place have been fully

competed. In fact, even when we rely on other Federal agencies,

that is one of the things that we are seeking from them, is commit

to us that you competitively awarded the contract that you will be

using to support FEMA with this year.

So we are taking every measure I know of to be able to address

that. There were clearly mistakes made. There is no question about

that, and there is no going back on that. In terms of the specifics

of the minister you were dealing with, I would be happy to look

into that situation and see if there were some possibility of the use

of mobile homes on a group site as an example. We would be happy

to look into that. We are trying to find legitimate uses for all those

mobile homes, and if we can do that and accommodate the temporary housing needs of some folks in that area, we would sure like

to be able to help.

Ms. WATSON. Well, we were with Mr. Taylor down in Mississippi,

and he showed us where a contract was given to put a pole up, and

another contract was given to run a wire up, and another contract

was given to run a tube up to provide electricity and heating and

taking refuse out and bring water in. Three different contracts to

three different businesses, and some of them didn’t work on weekends and some of them didn’t work after 5 and some of them

weren’t given work assignments. A total waste.

So I have to be convinced that we have contingency contracts and

plans out there, because we are just a few months away—a few

weeks away from another season, and if things go climatically like

they have been going, we are going to have another hurricane as

powerful.

All right. Let me ask you another question——

Mr. SHAYS. May I just say that the gentlelady’s time is up. I

would like to get to Mr. Duncan if I could.

Ms. WATSON. OK, and I hope that in the response, if I can just

throw this out, maybe someone can respond.

Mr. SHAYS. Sure.

Ms. WATSON. But why should we not pull FEMA out and make

it its own standing agency like it was before under its own Cabinet

Secretary so it could fulfill the mission of emergency?

Mr. SHAYS. Would you allow me to answer that? [Laughter.]

Mr. Duncan, you have the floor.

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Mr. DUNCAN. Well, I will let the gentleman from Homeland Security and the gentleman from FEMA respond to Ambassador Watson’s question. I would be interested in that also.

Mr. FORESMAN. Congressman, thank you. Three reasons, and,

Congresswoman, you know, in deference to time, I would say I

would like for you to take a look at the oral statement, because one

of the things that I highlighted in my opening statement is the fact

that our preparedness model—and I have been doing this for 20

years. I started at the local government level, the State government level, now at the Federal level. For the past 20 years, we

have had a problem with preparedness in this country. We have

known about the New Orleans problem since the early 1990’s, yet

we were not ready for it in 2005.

Part of what I would offer is I think one of the things everybody

needs to realize is that FEMA was made an honorary Cabinet organization in February 1996. I was at the National Emergency Management Association Conference. It was not a statutory codification. And it did not change FEMA’s relationship with the Federal

interagency. It did not change FEMA’s relationship with the States

and the communities. And FEMA carried their good relationship

with the States and communities to the Department of Homeland

Security.

But, arguably, part of what Secretary Chertoff has attempted to

do with the Second Stage Review, he said in July, prior to Katrina,

that this Nation was not ready for a catastrophic event and that

our old preparedness model where FEMA had a piece of the preparedness pie, if you will, was not working, was not getting us

where we needed to be from a catastrophic standpoint. And he said

we need to amalgamate preparedness functions so that we can leverage the support that we provide to States and communities. We

need to be able to leverage our planning, our training, and our exercising, not only across FEMA but across the Coast Guard. They

have a preparedness function. The Secret Service does. DOD does.

HHS does. And, frankly, the goal here was to create a structure

where we did not react to the last emergency or disaster.

I said earlier Hurricane Andrew, 1992, same lessons we learned

with—many of the same lessons with Hurricane Katrina. And what

it comes down to is the fact that we have never learned the lessons

of the past. We have documented the lessons of the past. The idea

with the creation of the Preparedness Directorate was to allow and

to ensure that we have a focused effort that units funding to the

State and locals, our private sector partnerships, and our forwardlooking vision that does not get interrupted every time we have an

emergency or disaster to have to be able to respond to it.

We have not taken FEMA out of preparedness, nor have we

taken preparedness out of FEMA. When I was given the mission

to make sure that New Orleans—that we provided additional resources to them for the upcoming hurricane season, given the fragile nature of the coast, I went to FEMA. They have a presence

down in New Orleans. And we mission-assigned it through FEMA

and put Coast Guard, HHS, Transportation folks down there.

So I got to tell you, with all due respect, I was here in the 1990’s.

FEMA is a great organization. They were a great organization back

then. But our preparedness focus back then was no better than it

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was prior to Katrina. And we have to find a new model that allows

us to deal with the full range of hazards, and that is really what

we have attempted to do.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you, Secretary Foresman. Before all of

my time expires on Mrs. Watson’s question, let me just say this:

I am sorry I was not able to be here because of other meetings for

your testimony, and maybe some of this you have covered. But she

actually raised another point that I really wanted to get into, and

I am not going to ask any questions, but I will say this: You know,

I had the privilege of leading an 11-member delegation down there,

I don’t know, 6 weeks or a couple months after all this happened

from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and we

met with Admiral Allen and all the top officials. Frankly, we saw

the worst damage in Mississippi, worse than in New Orleans. But

what I am really hoping is something that Ambassador Watson got

into, and that is that I have never—I grew up in a political family,

and I have been in this job for 18 years now. I have never seen

an issue flip so fast as all this business about Katrina did, because

for the first 3 or 4 weeks there was such a—there was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy, more so than anything I have ever

seen. Every fire department, every police department, the schools,

companies were sending people down there or things down there,

and I guess just billions of dollars worth of private aid and manhours and the goods and so forth were donated. But then very

quickly, almost overnight, people started thinking that maybe we

had devoted too much money too fast without watching where it

was going. Editorial writers around the country started criticizing

us.

For instance, I got a call from the head of a trailer manufacturing company in Tennessee who said that his company was manufacturing a large number of trailers for FEMA, but they were having to go through some middleman who was just doing nothing but

adding $4,000 to the cost, when, he said, some official from FEMA

could have picked up the phone and called him, and they would

have dealt directly with them and could have saved millions of dollars.

Then we would hear about these trailers that were not being

used, and then a few weeks ago, we had this hearing in another

subcommittee of this committee about some contractor that was

just getting ridiculous rip-off profits, while other contractors that

would have done the work cheaper could have—were being ignored.

And most of us spend more time at home than we do up here, and

we get hit at the drugstores and the ball games and every place

we go, all the events we go to, with all these scandal stories. And

people are really disgusted about that, and that is what we need

to work on.

You know, my Dad told me years ago about something else. He

said everything looks easy from a distance, and that is so true, and

I know you all have a difficult job. But what I hope is that we will

get ready for this next time so that we do not have these scandal

stories, so that we do not have to go through these middlemen

when some employee of your Department could pick up the phone

and just call these companies directly and save millions of dollars

with one phone call.

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We need to use a little common sense about these things, and

then, too, we need to learn a lesson, look at these contracts and see

did these companies—were they reasonable? Did they make a ripoff profit? If they did, let’s don’t deal with them. Let’s deal with

some of these other companies that will treat the taxpayers a little

more fairly.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Duncan.

Let me just ask, in a catastrophic incident, evacuation of the population can be critical. We found that in New Orleans. If we had

better evacuation, it would have not been near the intensity, near

the loss of life, loss of dollars and everything else. Have the State

and local governments improved their evacuation plans? Does the

new trailer population present new problems in evacuation? And is

DHS/FEMA satisfied with the evacuation plans? Have there been

exercises?

Mr. FORESMAN. Congressman, let me start, and Bob may have

something to offer.

It underscores the issue that evacuations are predominantly

State and local responsibilities on the front end and on the back

end. And one of the things that should not get lost in all of the discussion is we did a fabulous job evacuating 1.3 million folks from

the Gulf Coast out of harm’s way in advance of the storm. And as

tragic as the near 1,300—or more than 1,300 losses of lives were,

it could have been far greater had the State and local officials not

had in place viable evacuation plans.

But as we mentioned earlier, as we met with Governor Barbour,

Governor Riley, Governor Blanco, Governor Perry, Governor Bush,

and others—and we have talked about this—the Governors are intensely focused on making sure that where they have contra flow

evacuation plans, if they had problems with them last time, that

they have fixed those problems. And I have a strong degree of confidence in those evacuation plans, with the exception of two areas:

one, given the fragile nature of Louisiana and the impact on the

infrastructure and the displaced population, I think we are going

to be challenged there, but we are working very aggressively on

that. And the other area, Mr. Chairman, we have not had a significant event up on the northeastern portion of this country of ours

as it relates to a hurricane. Clearly, with all of the predictions, we

are looking at it, and there are a number of scenarios up in the

Northeast where we are going to work closely with those Governors, with the National Guard, with those State emergency management officials, to make sure that we are as good as that.

But one of the things we learned from Floyd and Isabel and a

whole bunch of others is that States have put a lot of emphasis on

hurricane evacuation planning traditionally, and it has been one of

the least weak areas in our national capability.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. During the recent tabletop exercise, the

Department of Energy indicated responsibility for providing portable generators—that it was not their responsibility, but no other

agency stepped forward to take the mission. What is the story?

Mr. FORESMAN. Well, I am not sure which exercise. And, by the

way, Mr. Chairman, I was passed a note earlier. Congresswoman

Norton mentioned the possibility of a hurricane strike on the Gulf

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Coast. That is a fictitious exercise that we are doing, and that is

what she was referencing, and I want to make sure that we are not

creating any stir there.

But with regard to the exercise, this is one of the nuances and

why it is important for people to understand the plans. You would

say, well, generator, that provides energy; therefore, it must be Energy ESF function. That is something that you are going to go to

the resource function, the emergency support function, GSA, DOD,

a host of—well, FEMA, as a matter of fact, has 829 good-size generators in its stockpile. So that is the whole point of the exercises

so that when someone says, ‘‘It is not mine,’’ we clearly make sure

that those folks who are responsible for making resource allocation

decisions know whose it is and that we do not say to our State and

local partners we do not have an answer because—you know, we

are the responder of last resort and we need to be capable of servicing it either through Government inventory or contracts.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Any other Members have questions? If

not, I want to thank this panel. I want to thank you for answering

the questions. And we will take——

Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman, just one thing.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Taylor.

Mr. TAYLOR. Earlier today I had a chance to visit with Mr.

Latham. Let me thank you for the great job you have done. It is

my understanding you are going to retire fairly shortly. You mentioned to me your frustration that Congress and the administration

had cut the Emergency Management Planning Grants. Could you

give us some for-instances of how that would affect you, Mobile

County, the Louisianans, and why it is so important to you?

Mr. LATHAM. Thank you, Congressman Taylor, and before I do

that, first I would like to thank you for both of us that had the opportunity to be in the trenches and the foxholes together immediately following Katrina, and I can tell you that your constituents

should be very proud of you because you have certainly been a

staunch supporter of the needs on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And

it has been an honor and privilege to serve with you, and I hope

I can continue to help where I can.

The Emergency Management Performance Grant is absolutely

the only grant that is provided to State and local emergency management offices to support emergency management. In 2000, when

I took this job, half of our counties had an emergency management

director. Half. Now, what do you think happens in a county when

you have a disaster or something as small as a hazardous material

spill on the interstate or a train derailment or something? Who do

you think handles that if there is nobody there to do that?

Two consecutive years since 2000 we were able to get some very

minor increases in the EMPG, and using that EMPG we have provided funding to those other counties, and as of last week every

county in our State now has an emergency management program

because of the EMPG. It is the single greatest multiplier to developing local and State capability of anything I can imagine. It requires a dollar-for-dollar match, either from the State or local governments. So what better investment is there of the Federal dollars

when there is a State and local investment in how you spend that

money?

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And I don’t know of any grant that has done more to build that

capability, but I don’t know of any grant that could do more. If we

build a strong local and State capability, then there is less of a reliance on FEMA and the folks at DHS. And I think we can do it

cheaper by investing the money before the event. Because if we do

not do it and if we do not have that capability at the State and

local level and there is a void there and there is a collapse of the

local system, then the Federal Government will have to respond,

and it will be costly. So why not invest the dollars on the front end

so that we do not have to spend as much on the back end. Who

do you think goes and talks to the schools, the Rotary Clubs, the

Lions’ Clubs, and all of those people who can have an impact on

local preparedness? It is the local emergency management director.

That is where we should be investing our dollars.

Thank you, Congressman.

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you.

Ms. WATSON. Mr. Chairman, I have a letter I would like included

in the record, and what it is, it is supporting the role of nonprofit

clinics in major disaster areas, and they are requesting that they

be a part of the current disaster response system. And I understand they are not included in it, so I would like to submit it for

the record.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Without objection, it will be put in the

record.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Diane E. Watson and the information referred to follow:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. I am going to again thank this panel. You

have been very helpful to us.

We will take a 2-minute recess and convene our second panel.

[Recess.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We have a great second panel. We have

Maura Donahue, who is the chairman of the Board of Directors of

the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Maura, Thank you very much for

being here with us today.

Joe Becker, the senior vice president, preparedness and response,

American Red Cross. And Patricia McGinnis, the president and

CEO of the Counsel for Excellence in Government.

You know it is our policy, we swear you in before you testify, so

if you would just please rise and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Ms. Donahue, thank you for being with

us.

STATEMENTS OF MAURA W. DONAHUE, CHAIR, U.S. CHAMBER

OF COMMERCE; JOE BECKER, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,

PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE, AMERICAN RED CROSS;

AND PATRICIA McGINNIS, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, THE COUNCIL FOR EXCELLENCE IN GOVERNMENT

STATEMENT OF MAURA W. DONAHUE

Ms. DONAHUE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I am Maura

Donahue, Chair of the Board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,

and president of DonahueFavret Contractors Holding Co. in

Mandeville, LA.

On behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest

business federation, representing more than 3 million businesses,

I am here to offer recommendations on how to prepare for the 2006

hurricane season.

The Chamber and the U.S. business community stand ready to

support, as appropriate, local, State and Federal Government disaster responses. The Chamber’s recommendations for disaster preparedness and response are centered on three key principles: information, communication and collaboration. The first two, information and communication, go together. We must enhance communication and the flow of timely and accurate information to the

general public among Federal, State and local government agencies, and between the Government and the private sector.

With regards to informing the public, the U.S. Chamber, its

members and their individual company networks, support the Department of Homeland Security’s preparation and mitigation

awareness campaign known as ‘‘Ready.’’ The Chamber has preparedness information posted on its Web site, and it shares such

information with the entire chamber federation through various

communications channels. The key to an information campaign is

frequency. DHS needs to continue to communicate the importance

of preparedness over and over again. Also, the Government should

streamline how it communicates information about damage assessments and disaster assistance needs to the private sector.

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During the Katrina and Rita response periods, FEMA, the DHS

private sector office, the Department of Commerce, USA Freedom

Corps, SBA and the Department of Education, all held their own

private sector briefings. With so many agencies involved, communication was not always clear and consistent. We suggest that the

Government establish an information-sharing protocol that ensures

coordination among Government agencies. A separate protocol

needs to be worked out to protect privacy and confidentiality while

allowing refugees and evacuees to gain access to medicines and fill

other needs while they are in temporary shelters.

While enhanced communication and information are crucial first

steps to better preparation and response, they are pointless without greater collaboration between the public and the private sectors.

We commend DHS for taking steps to integrate the private sector

in Government response and recovery planning. Chamber members

are participating in five DHS regional hurricane preparedness exercises, and are also participating in a series of terrorism related

exercises known as TOPOFF.

But we need to take additional steps. The Chamber has identified a number of ways to improve public-private collaboration, and

I would like to just mention a few of them right now.

First, DHS should regularly consult with the private sector to

understand what assets and capabilities the private sector can contribute to immediate and long-term response efforts, capabilities

such as logistics and inventory management.

Second, the Government should require States, as a condition of

DHS funding, to demonstrate how they are integrating the private

sector into State planning exercises and training.

Third, the Government and the private sector should team up to

build a jointly managed Federal disaster aid registry. This system

should specifically include the recovery needs of businesses and

should be co-managed by a private sector entity. The Chamber’s

nonprofit affiliate, the Business Civic Leadership Center, managed

such a registry during Katrina and Rita to great effect, matching

donations from across the country with needs in the devastated region. Building a single, national registry would be appropriate, and

we urge DHS to begin work on that immediately.

Fourth, we recommend creating an Assistant Secretary position

for Private Sector Preparedness and Response Coordination at

DHS. The Assistant Secretary would coordinate with the private

sector to ensure business integration into preparedness, mitigation,

response and recovery efforts at the State and Federal levels. The

Assistant Secretary would lead a team that would be operational

in nature, and would outreach to the private sector before, during

and after a disaster.

Finally, to ensure the revival of communities following a disaster,

we believe strong consideration should be given to creating what

might be called the Red Cross for Business. While humanitarian

agencies such as Red Cross are extremely important for assisting

individuals, we must build capacity to restore entire communities.

We must ensure that people have infrastructure and jobs to go

back to, and that requires a rapid recovery by the business community.

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The existing menu of Federal programs, such as the Small Business Disaster Loan Program, simply is not up to the task of expeditiously providing the necessary assistance in the wake of a largescale disaster such as Katrina.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, the start of the

hurricane season just days from now is a reminder to all of us that

we are not truly prepared for the next disaster. We must take practical, concrete steps now to avoid more chaos, destruction and suffering later.

I will say to you that I was born and raised in New Orleans, LA,

and proud of it. Hurricane Katrina and Rita dealt us a serious blow

in the Gulf Coast, and what an appropriate year for me to serve

as Chair of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Have you on the committee visited the region? Has everybody

visited the region? Congressman Melancon lives there, and so do

you, Congressman Taylor. Thank you.

The one word that people come away with from visiting the region is it’s overwhelming, and 10 months later it is still overwhelming. And we encourage anyone who has not been in that region, to

go to the region and visit. It is unbelievable and it is overwhelming. We know recovery will be slow. We expect recovery could last

as long as 10 years.

Emergency preparedness and planning for the private sector is

crucial. Many businesses and small businesses had emergency preparedness plans, but the assumption made in many of those plans

was an intact infrastructure. One of the first things many plans

called for was enacting the phone tree to make sure their employees were OK. The big surprise was there were no communications,

the cell towers were down. There were no communications. That

entire area felt a feeling of isolation from the rest of this country.

We tell people who do not have an emergency preparedness plan

for their company, shame on them. We tell those who do have a

plan for their company, they need to rethink it because they probably made assumptions of that critical infrastructure that we did

not have during Katrina and Rita. But it also brings to light the

fact that it is not only important for the private sector businesses

to be prepared by themselves for an emergency, it also brings to

light the fact that the local, State and Federal Government were

not prepared for the disasters of this past hurricane season.

Let me add in here that the private sector did step to the plate

during this season with $1.2 billion in contributions and donations.

Our message to the evacuees from that region are, come home.

We need you to help us rebuild our communities.

Our message to the rest of the Nation is: don’t forget us. Don’t

forget us. Don’t go on to the next disaster because we will be a long

time repairing. We are coming back. The Gulf Coast is tenacious.

We will come back better than before, probably smaller but better,

but we have some broken systems, public housing, health and education. But the tragedies of this past hurricane season present us

with a handful of challenges, but also a great opportunity to come

back better than before, and that, we guarantee, will happen.

This needs to be a wake-up call. The last hurricane season needs

to be a wake-up call to the rest of this Nation, that this is not just

about hurricanes. This is about emergency preparedness on the

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local, State and Federal levels for any emergency that happens

across this country, or disaster. This could happen in California

next in the form of an earthquake. We need to be prepared.

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Donahue follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Becker.

STATEMENT OF JOE BECKER

Mr. BECKER. Good afternoon. My name is Joe Becker, and I lead

the American Red Cross Disaster Service, preparedness and response, and I thank you for the invitation to be here to share what

we learned from Hurricane Katrina and what we’re putting in

place, and I was also asked to share about our responsibilities in

the National Response Plan.

The Red Cross placed two important roles in time of disaster, one

that’s well understood by most Americans, and one that’s more difficult to explain. The first role, we serve people in time of need. We

serve victims of disasters every day, about 70,000 a year, from a

house that burns, to the current New England floods, to very large

disasters.

What do we do? We feed, we shelter, we give away the items that

people need to start their recovery, toiletries, clean-up items. We

provide small amounts of financial assistance to cover those things

best not given away. We provide mental health counseling. Our

nurses provide first aid and address minor health issues, and we

help unite families with their loved ones. We help people recover.

We do this in partnership with a large number of nonprofit organizations, each with their specific missions. This is pretty well

known, and America very generously supports our work in this.

You asked me to speak about our second role. In the National

Response Plan we are the primary agency for Emergency Support

Function 6, the mass care part of the NRP. Emergency Support

Function 6 is mass care, housing and human services. The Red

Cross is primary for mass care. FEMA currently is primary for

housing and human services, and FEMA is the coordinating agency

over all three.

In the words of the plan, this means that we coordinate Federal

mass care assistance in support of State and local mass care efforts. That means we work within the Federal Government structure to help bring resources from Federal agencies to States. Under

our role in Emergency Support Function 6, our Red Cross staff in

that function, don’t manage or direct service delivery. They don’t

manage and direct Red Cross service delivery, or that of the other

folks in mass care. We don’t, obviously, direct State or local governments.

Rather, in that role, we act in an administrative function. We receive requests from States or other NGO’s, and we work them into

the FEMA systems. FEMA then assigns them to other agencies as

mission assignments, as you know. The Red Cross doesn’t give mission assignments, nor are we given mission assignments. We’re not

a Federal agency.

We also relay mass care information from the ground to all levels

of State, local and Federal Government, to make sure that people

have appropriate information to make good decisions.

Our role in Emergency Support Function 6 in the National Response Plan has been cause of a lot of confusion, particularly since

Katrina. Many have assumed that in that role we command and

control the mass care of the country. We tell other organizations

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where to serve, how to serve, when to serve, churches, the Southern Baptists, the Salvation Army. That is done on a very local,

local level, as you heard from the first panel, not the Federal level.

Our NRP role is much more limited. We serve in that administrative capacity.

Since Katrina, we’re working to better clarify expectations because we understand that role needs to be performed very, very

well, and the close partnerships are the key.

Back to our first role of serving people in disasters. We learned

a lot last fall. We’re proud of the work that our volunteers did, but

we know that we need to do more. Since then we’ve undertaken a

long list of critical projects, many of which are outlined in my written testimony. But to sum them, we’ve been about two things,

short term and long term.

In the short term we’re dramatically increasing our stockpiling

of supplies by prepositioning in hurricane prone States and other

disaster prone States the supplies that it would take to feed and

shelter 500,000 people over a 6-day period, what it would take to

meet their needs until the supply chains could be resurrected.

That’s buying another half million cots, half million blankets, 6

million prepackaged meals, all the things that we need to care for

the people who have nowhere else to turn.

We’re also rebuilding our IT systems, one of the areas we stumbled last fall. If you add up all four storms that hit Florida in the

2004 season, we provided financial assistance to about 73,000 families. In Hurricane Katrina we provided financial assistance to over

1.3 million families, more than $1,000 a family, but it took us too

long. It took us about 7 weeks to do all the detail of that because

our systems weren’t big enough. In the next weeks, we will have

rebuilt those systems to handle up to 2 million cases, and we will

have created new cost centers to handle 100,000 cases a day, or

meet the needs of a million families over a 10-day period of time.

We intend to use those call centers only in a catastrophic disaster. We want a family to be served by a volunteer working with

them directly, not just about the money, but making sure that

we’re meeting their mental health needs, meeting their health care

needs, getting them into the FEMA system, tying them into other

nonprofits who can also serve their needs. We’ll only go to the catastrophic scenario of technology answers as required.

Are we ready? We’re on schedule. We’re on track with each of our

short-term critical projects. They will be done in the next weeks.

But for the longer term, we have a long way to go. We’re undertaking an organizational change in how we approach partnerships.

Our local chapters have been asked to reach out to new partners,

organizations that aren’t usually in the community’s disaster response, organizations that can help the community serve people

who have been hard to reach in the past, people who served the

diverse community well.

Again, we’re looking for where do people go in non-disaster time

for assistance, and how does the Red Cross step up to the role of

bringing them into the community’s disaster response, and very

significantly, how do we resource them to do that, and how do we

give them access to our supplies ahead of time?

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In closing, can we be even more ready this hurricane season?

Yes, by a lot. Will we be where we ultimately need to be? Just as

Mr. Foresman said from FEMA, no, we need to keep getting better.

And I thank you for this opportunity to share, and I would appreciate the chance to answer any questions you might have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Becker follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Ms. McGinnis, Thanks for being with us.

STATEMENT OF PATRICIA McGINNIS

Ms. MCGINNIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the

committee. The Council for Excellence in Government, my organization, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that focuses on

three things: improving the performance of Government, building

public-private partnerships, as Ms. Donahue spoke about, and engaging the public to improve Government results and make Government more accountable.

Over the past 3 years we have focused on homeland security and

emergency preparedness as a key challenge that really draws all

of our goals together in one place. We’ve worked in partnership

with public, private, academic and civic leaders, and the way we’ve

done this is through first a series of town hall meetings around the

country, and public polling to find out what the public wants and

needs in terms of emergency preparedness and homeland security,

and then we brought public and private sector leaders together,

and experts, to take that public agenda and turn it into recommendations that we published in a report in 2004.

One of the things that we heard over and over again was the absence and need for critical benchmarks of how ready are we, how

prepared are we? We really can’t answer that question very well

now, and I know it was asked of the last panel. And the answers,

unfortunately, were somewhat anecdotal because we don’t really

know.

So the effort now is focused on preparing the public, metrics,

metrics, metrics, really focusing on how to measure readiness, and

regional coordination. And I think this regional approach holds a

lot of promise for getting better in terms of preparedness.

One of our major initiatives, with support from the Sloan Foundation, is creating a Public Readiness Index that we’re doing again

in partnership with the American Red Cross, with the Department

of Homeland Security, with State and local officials and emergency

managers. The idea is—PRI, we call it—that this is like the Consumer Confidence Index. It is a survey-based tool that would tell

a community or a metropolitan area or a State or a region or even

at the national level how prepared individuals and families are. I

think the main application will be at the local level and at the regional level.

The survey that we’ve developed, it’s a 10-minute survey, which

will ultimately be boiled down to an index, like the Consumer Confidence Index, and just include a few questions so it could be used

anywhere to track progress and establish a baseline. It’s being

pilot-tested nationally and in four metropolitan areas right now,

Miami-Dade, New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. We’ll

have the data, we’ll have all the data by the end of the month, and

we’ll certainly make it available immediately to Miami-Dade and

others who can use it at the beginning of hurricane season.

I’ve looked at where it is now. About half of the surveys have

been done, and I actually looked at it last night before coming here.

And if the patterns hold, the information about how prepared the

public is, is not much different than it was a month ago, 6 months

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ago, or even a year ago. And that, to me, is just astounding, given

what we all saw in Hurricane Katrina.

The success of the Public Readiness Index will depend on whether it’s regularly used at the local, regional, national and other levels. So one of the challenges we face now is how to institutionalize

this, and we would welcome your ideas about this, because we plan

to release the survey, the index tool, and talk about the results of

this pilot in the summer, and we would like to be able to make a

transition to an institutional home.

What have we seen in our work that we think is significant?

We’ve seen the same things that the Select Committee saw and the

House report described, the gaps in information, communication

and collaboration that Ms. Donahue described.

One of the features that seems striking to me—and we worked

very directly with the directors of emergency management in seven

large at-risk cities—is that—and we saw this in the Gulf—many of

the necessary working relationships between and among the various Government actors and with the private sector were simply

not established before the emergency. And systems are important,

communications are important, but relationships are at the heart

of how it’s all going to work.

Practicing these scenarios and exercises are critically important,

and I’m so happy to see that they are doing this on a regional basis

now before hurricane season or as hurricane season gets underway.

But it’s my understanding—and this is a little insight we’ve

learned from people all around the country—that elected and appointed officials seldom participate in these exercises. And even in

Hurricane Pam exercise, the mayor, the Governor, the director of

FEMA, the Secretary of DHS, not present. So when you actually

have an emergency happen and the key decisionmakers really

haven’t been part of this kind of exercise and working together, I

think you really see what can happen. So that’s an insight that I

think can be corrected and I think in these regional exercises is

being corrected.

Another tremendous gap—and I mentioned it before—is that the

American people are still not prepared and not motivated to take

steps to prepare themselves and their families. We conducted polls

before and after Katrina, after Katrina in partnership with the

American Red Cross. And I’m not going to go through the data because I’ve given it to you in the testimony, and I think you’ve seen

this data or other similar data. And the fact is, most people are not

prepared, they’re not more prepared after Katrina than before

Katrina. Astoundingly, in terms of having a family communication

plan, which is so basic—how would I communicate with my family

in an emergency—the numbers actually went down after Katrina.

The supply kit issue actually stayed the same. We saw some increase in these in the southeast, but really, no place else.

Why don’t people prepare? That’s the question. And we don’t

have the answer, but we do have some insights from the research.

Most people think this will not happen to me, no matter where

they live. There’s something about this American optimism that

causes people to think it won’t happen to me or my family. That’s

the No. 1 reason for not preparing.

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Another significant reason is, I don’t know what to do to prepare,

and I think that is—both of those, hopefully, are correctable with

the right motivation and the right information. So to create the culture of preparedness for the public, we need a concerted effort to

inform and motivate them. We need to know what the right messages are, who the right messengers are, and how to distribute

those messages. This should be a large-scale well-funded campaign

across the country that is consistent and synchronized among different localities and States, and at the Federal level.

If you look at all the different campaigns now, the Ready campaign, the Red Cross’s campaign, New York City, the State of Louisiana, I mean you could go to Web sites for hours and hours, and

you would see that they’re not consistent, they’re not synchronized,

they’re not co-branded, and it takes many clicks, if you’re on a Web

site, to find out exactly what you should do, so you can understand

why the public is confused. I just looked at the new Web site for

pandemic flu, which is another part of the whole emergency scenario, and it’s not connected to ready.gov or really connected to any

of these emergency preparedness sites yet.

The right messengers. We do have some insights about how effective children can be as motivators, and we’ve seen that in other

campaigns around seat belts and recycling and fire protection. So

we need to embrace that, and work through the schools and other

ways of reaching children who can motivate their parents to take

the steps they need.

Another very effective messenger would be employers. Employers

who do have emergency plans in the workplace, they need to be revisited, they need to be improved, but they also need to connect

those workplace plans with what the families and individuals who

work there are doing at home and outside the workplace, or else

the workplace plans certainly won’t work. So that’s another possibility.

Faith-based organizations and other organizations in communities that are trusted. Multiple media is needed to communicate

these messages, not just Web sites and PSAs. I would ask anybody

in this room who has seen on their television set one of these

PSAs? I haven’t. And I’m very aware of all of them and all of this

campaigning. So we need to be serious, and take this to radio and

television and other methods of distribution, and actually pay for

it, I think. I don’t think we can count on, you know, pro bono PSAs

to do this job.

So we need to make a concerted effort, and we need to fund it.

And this is not a skill set of most Government agencies, so recognize that and be creative about investing in ways that we can bring

this together and reach the American people effectively.

Second, in terms of moving forward, focus on metrics. We’ve

worked to provide this Public Readiness Index, which we hope will

be used. We think that the same should be done in other areas,

business readiness indices. There should be readiness indices for

local, State and Federal Government, and schools and other institutions. There are metrics out there, but they’re multiple, they’re

complex, and they’re not boiled down in a way that is accessible to

the public or others who are leaders in this enterprise. So focusing

on understandable, accessible, usable metrics.

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And then finally, the regional approach that I mentioned before,

the threat, consequences and resources needed to address any

major emergency go far beyond any local or State boundaries. And

so bringing people together on a regional basis, public and private

sector leaders, to focus on how they can coordinate together in

terms of the emergency planning, the metrics that they choose to

use, which can be consistent across the region, commit to joint

training and exercises on a regular basis, and plans to achieve and

use—and this requires some decision protocols and governance—

the interoperable voice, video and data communications that are

being developed. It’s not just about hardware. Expedited and accountable crisis procurement processes can be developed ahead of

time for regions, coordinated emergency financial plans, and then

the public messaging and campaigns. If this were done on a regional basis, I think it would have a lot more effect.

Unfortunately, the funding doesn’t flow that way and there’s not

much incentive for collaboration, sharing of resources ahead of

time, getting these things in place ahead of time. So I think that’s

an issue that needs to address.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

[The prepared statement of Ms. McGinnis follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Let me thank all of you for being here. At

last week’s hurricane preparedness exercise in New Orleans—I am

going to address this to Ms. Donahue—representatives from the

private sector were disappointed that they spent much of their time

in breakout sessions talking with each other with other private sector representatives rather than with State and Federal officials. I

understand the U.S. Chamber had personnel in New Orleans at

these meetings. Do you know, has the Chamber participated in

other training sessions?

Ms. DONAHUE. The Chamber has been active and involved in

training sessions and seminars, conferences, to address emergency

preparedness for the next hurricane season, as well as any disaster

that takes place, and had an active role in New Orleans and will

continue to have an active role in New Orleans.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. What has your experience been with

these? Are they helpful, or could they be better organized, and do

you think we could utilize your resources better?

Ms. DONAHUE. I’m sorry. Say the last part again?

Chairman TOM DAVIS. What’s your experience with these been?

Could we better utilize your resources? I mean, have they been useful to you, think they could have been better planned?

Ms. DONAHUE. I think they’re useful. I just think it shows that

the public-private partnership needs work, and we need to encourage the development of more private-public partnership.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Can you think of any specific improvements that you would recommend to better integrate the private

sector on the front end of disaster planning?

Ms. DONAHUE. Part of my recommendations, as far as part of our

recommendations as far as sharing information, having a single

source of information shared with the private sector, including the

private sector in planning sessions, perhaps making it mandatory

that the States include the private sector in planning sessions in

the form of DHS funding being contingent upon that participation.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. There is a private sector office at DHS.

Are you familiar with it?

Ms. DONAHUE. Yes, sir.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. How does that work?

Ms. DONAHUE. We have worked closely with the private sector office of DHS since post-Katrina. They came in on the ground and

held sessions in New Orleans to help people recover, help businesses get back, very focused on the private sector. I wasn’t personally aware of them prior to that time, but was very impressed with

what they were able to do post.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The issue of credentialing medical and

private sector first responders has been brought up several times

at the tabletop exercises last week. A FEMA representative said it

was up to each State to determine if it wants a standardized system that works with the local and Federal Government. You said

FEMA has a ‘‘you tell us what kind of credentialing system you

want and we will work with you to build an approach.’’ How is the

Federal Government, particularly DHS and HHS, coordinating

with State and local governments, as well as the private sector to

ensure first responders are given credentials that are easily identifiable and acceptable? The Red Cross as well.

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Mr. BECKER. Our own organization experience is that the

credentialing system that we have for our own people is recognized

by the other first response community, so in a lot of ways it is easier for us to be where we need to be when we need to be there. But

the point that you’re making is a very valid one, because the first

response community often needs to engage the for-profit sector.

One of our biggest experiences in Katrina last fall was when the

supply chain and when the Federal structure had difficulties in delivering, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do with the for-profit

sector, but we had to be the ones that were actually on the scene

on the ground in too many cases because of the security concerns,

so the credentialing is a key issue.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, in the course of the Select Committee’s work in looking at Katrina, the Red Cross provided documents

that demonstrate that much of what was requested by the Red

Cross through FEMA went unmet, that they were never able to

satisfy what you would ask for.

Going forward, what will the Red Cross do differently, knowing

that FEMA may not agree with your estimates or need for ice, food,

water or other emergency supplies, and to what extent do you have

to work with FEMA to get what you need?

Mr. BECKER. I think there are two approaches to this. The first

is working very closely with FEMA, as they improve their systems,

and we have a great deal of confidence in their ability as we go forward.

Having said that, that’s why we have prepositioned what we’ve

done, and in some cases there’s redundancy there, but we felt the

need to put in the 6 million meals ready to eat, to go ahead and

have a half million cots, a half million blankets. We’ve gone with

a robust $80 million prepositioning because we don’t want to be in

that situation again where we put in requests and aren’t able to

see them delivered.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Pat, in May 2004, the Council released a

report containing over 50 recommendations to improve preparedness and response, as you noted. What progress have you seen implementing these recommendations? What do you see easiest to get

done, toughest to get done? In your testimony you said there remains—I think you said opportunities for improvement in coordination and collaboration among the various levels of Government. Do

you want to give some examples of what can be done to achieve

this?

Ms. MCGINNIS. The recommendations, we were very pleased

when we made them, that they were well accepted and embraced

really by the Government leaders and private sector leaders who

were part of building them. What I would say about them is that

they have just simply not been fully implemented, and some of the

key recommendations would be around interoperable communications, which interestingly, the public saw as a big issue too. I think

that was surprising to all that were in the town hall meetings.

A lot of hardware has been purchased, and we’ve made progress,

but in order to have these interoperable communications really

work, there need to be the protocols, the communication protocols,

a kind of governance structure which has not yet been developed

to a large extent, so I think that’s a huge issue.

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In terms of public preparedness, we found tremendous gaps in

communication and understanding on the part of the public, and

the reason that we moved toward developing this Public Readiness

Index was because we felt strongly that, you know, to offer some

leverage, some ways for people at the local, State and Federal level

to see what the problems were and to provide the motivation to do

a better job communicating. I think everybody wants to do the

right thing, there’s no question about that. And everybody’s working hard, I have no criticism of that. But we have not closed that

communication gap at all, and so I think we need to be serious

about doing our homework, trying some different things, evaluating

them, and investigating some money in improving the communications.

The collaboration among Government at different levels, public

health, law enforcement, fire, the emergency management, and including the private sector, I think there is more collaboration, but

it’s not systematic enough. Again, we’re looking at, you know, this

notion on a regional basis, if you could get people to commit to

doing things on a joint basis, establishing agreements in advance,

those kinds of outcomes, you know, that would be concrete progress

toward what we’re trying to accomplish.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Taylor.

Mr. TAYLOR. Ms. McGinnis, I have to admit I found it interesting

that an organization that would be called the Council for Excellence in Government didn’t have one critical word to say about the

way FEMA, for example, the contract for the delivery of the trailers

with Bechtel, I think a text book case of waste in Government, the

prearranged contracts on the debris removal. Even now, the point

I made to Homeland Security—and I would imagine Ms. Donahue

would be familiar with this—how the taxpayer got stuck with the

bill for almost every insurance claim. The private sector that had

$44 billion in profits was the one who got to be the judge whether

that claim was paid by the Federal Flood insurance, you, or by Allstate, State Farm and Nationwide, coming out of the stockholders.

I mean any objective group that looked at the financial dealings

after the storm has got to walk away shaking their heads, saying

there has got to be a better way. And what I don’t see, what I

didn’t hear from any of the panelists today, was how they are going

to do a better job next season.

Now, the one star on that first panel was the National Guard,

but as far as the other agencies, you know, I, for one, wasn’t all

that pleased.

Mr. Becker, in the case of the Red Cross, let me begin by saying

I am very grateful for the help we got, and I hope in no way we

ever let you think anything other than that. But I think the people

who contribute to your organization also want to know that it is

going to the truly needy and not folks who are gaming the system.

I think one of the ways that any objective person would have to

admit the system was gamed, that there were actually two of us

organizers who were taking people from parish to parish, county to

county. That is not what you wanted to see. It is certainly not what

I wanted to see, and I can assure you, it is not what the folks who

contribute to your great organization wanted to see. And believe

me, no one has to remind me how horrible communications were,

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and I commend both of you ladies for talking about the importance

of families having some way of getting in touch with each other.

But, you know, after 2, 3 weeks, the cell towers were back up,

some of the phone lines were back up, and I just have to believe

that your agency could have established some sort of registry to

where when a person showed up, you could find out if they had already filed a claim in Plaquemines Parish and Orleans Parish, and

Jackson County and Harrison County and Hancock County. Again,

in trying to be fair to the people who contribute to you, but above

all, being fair to those people who tried to play by the rules, who

felt like in many instances they were saps because they didn’t go

milk the system. So since we have you, since we are talking about

next season, what if anything is your organization doing to address

that for next time?

And, again, getting back to the name of your organization, I

would certainly hope that someone out there would be the honest

broker in that, yes, we need to provide these services. That is what

nations are all about, but we also have to do them in a cost effective manner.

Ms. MCGINNIS. If I could start, and then Joe.

Mr. TAYLOR. Yes, sure.

Ms. MCGINNIS. The reason—what I have focused on here is the

future. If you ask me to characterize the preparedness and response to Katrina, I have said and would say, it was a failure of

leadership at every level, and a failure of execution. I mean we

could spend hours talking about that, and I think all of us have,

you know, are absolutely clear about learning from those lessons

and not repeating those mistakes, and we are simply, you know,

given sort of where we sit in the scheme of things, trying to find

ways we can help improve the situation in the future for the public,

for Government, and frankly, not just to focus on hurricanes, but

to keep an eye on all hazards, because fighting the last battle is

a risk that I think we—it’s a danger now.

So, you know, we’re simply looking forward and trying to be constructive at this point, rather than criticizing.

Mr. TAYLOR. And that is fair, but I would also remind you, a lot

of the committees—well, I am not even a member of this committee; Mr. Davis was kind enough to let me visit because the storm

hit my area. But since I serve on Armed Services, and I have sat

through 16 years of hearings where the generals and the admirals

are paid to scare the dickens out of us, I have to tell you in the

aftermath of Katrina, I am looking and saying to myself, this is

what an attack on the United States is going to look like. We are

not going to be able to talk to each other. There is going to be no

electricity. There will be no running water. You are lucky if you

can find a Portolet.

Our first responders are going to have torn loyalties. Do they go

take care of their family, or do they do their job? And in the case

of Mississippi, I cannot brag on our first responders enough because they did their job in every instance. But it is going to look

a lot like that. It is going to have something called probably electromagnetic pulse, which is going to fry everything electrical, so

cars don’t start, generators don’t run, you can’t talk to anyone on

the phone. There are no ATMs, there are no scanners. You are

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back to sending messages and notes by a runner who can somehow

get a vehicle to run, keeping in mind that the starter has probably

been fried. Any good potential foe of this Nation is going to blow

the levees in New Orleans. Ms. Donahue and I could do it tonight

with a gasoline-powered auger and a couple of sticks of dynamite.

So we are going to see a lot of what we saw if there is an attack

on—when there is an attack on homeland, or even if it is an act

of terror or if it’s state sponsored.

So, again, I would—hopefully as a friendly criticism—I, for one,

think that—I would hope that there are more agencies out there

holding FEMA’s feet to the fire. I am a fan of the Corps, holding

the Corps’ feet to the fire on every dime that we spent to make

sure that it was well spent. And, again, I thought the name of your

organization kind of would lend me to think that is what you all

are all about.

Mr. BECKER. Mr. Chairman, if I——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Please, go ahead.

Mr. BECKER. I’m sorry, Mr. Chair. Mr. Taylor asked a question

about people gaming our system. Would I have time to address

that, please?

Mr. TAYLOR. I would hope so.

Mr. BECKER. Thank you for asking that, and at the very beginning of Katrina, we recognized that our current way of doing business wasn’t going to work. A high school gym with a volunteer in

it to give people assistance, we’d never get it out there. We had to

create an entirely new way. We brought together all the technology

companies, gave them days and created what we ended up doing.

But what we were balancing there was controls and speed of service, and we had to have a bias toward the speed of service.

What we’ve done since then are two things, looking back and

looking forward. We knew that people might be able to game the

system, but we also knew that we could figure out who they were.

And out of the 1.3 million families that we helped, about 7,000

families gamed the system. And we’ve been able to go back, and

we have had great success working with law enforcement to lower

the threshold on what would be prosecutable so that we could go

after these families. And we have a whole team of people working

with law enforcement to go back, and we have recovered large

sums of money from people who gamed the system.

Looking forward, the challenge was, how do we—now that we’ve

learned what we’ve learned, how do we create the system that has

those controls from the beginning? And that was what I was describing earlier, were we now going to have a system where we can

do 2 million families, we can do 100,000 families a day through a

call center mechanism that has the appropriate controls from the

beginning? You call the call center, they have a list of questions

that you have to answer correctly to prove who you are, not just

where do you live now, but where did you live before that, or some

very personal question where they would have that information,

use specific vendors for that. And out of that come a set of controls

that we know who we’re giving money to, and we verify that they

have disaster caused need.

What we did last year was far less than perfect. The cost of serving so many people as quickly as we did was not having all the conVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00234 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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trols we wanted to have in place. What we’ll have for this fall, it

will have a much higher level of control. Will it be perfect? No.

We’re still working on getting all of the controls, but we feel a lot

better about where we’ll be in the next catastrophic disaster.

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

After Katrina, Carnival Cruise Lines made some of their vessels

available to house first responders. They had never previously done

this before. They hadn’t put it in their business plan. In fact, they

had fully leased these cruise lines to other customers. But when

they were asked by the Federal officials, they were willing to make

their ships available at some loss of goodwill to customers who had

come in and they had to cancel reservations.

Almost immediately after entering into that arrangement, they

got criticized for charging too much, even though this was done

competitively, and this was put on the street for anybody to respond. What do we do to improve the contracting environment for

companies that in good faith offer their goods and services on short

notice to respond to an emergency, only to get punched in the face

over it?

Ms. DONAHUE. It’s unfortunate that’s the case. And as Mr. Becker was saying about American Red Cross, it was wonderful that

American Red cross got money into the hands of individuals as

quickly as they did, and yet, got criticized for some of the abuse

of the system. I think we go back to Katrina and Rita being a

learning experience for us, a wake-up call for this country, and

hopefully, lessons learned in the whole process. It shows the need

for all of us to rethink our planning on every level of the Government. I don’t know how to answer that other than to say that Carnival Cruise Line, bless them for doing what they did.

I think Katrina being the worst disaster in this Nation’s history,

left everybody gasping and not knowing how to handle the number

of people coming into them and the need for housing along the

coast. It was a quick solution. It was an easy solution, a very generous solution on their part, and you know, you’re going to have

criticism of those systems, but it just makes us know now that the

private and public sector need to come together and think about

the plan for the future, and learn from those mistakes, hopefully.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We looked at the numbers on this. I mean

there is no evidence that Carnival made a nickel more than they

would have made had they not bid on this thing and not made

their ships available. They just tried to be—said, can you make us

even, and we will give you a commodity and a service that you

wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. And the congressional critics

jumped on the thing right away for various reasons. Contracting is

never pretty in an emergency situation. I think we all understand

that. But you, when you have an emergency, you want to get the

best goods there as quickly as you can get it, and sometimes you

ask the questions later, and I just think sometimes we are our own

worst enemies.

Ms. DONAHUE. What Carnival doesn’t get the credit for is the

fact that a lot of the people that were put up in the Carnival ships

in New Orleans were actually the policemen, the firemen, the servVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00235 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ices that we desperately needed to keep the city safe and under

control. God bless them for having that there for us.

Mr. BECKER. Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes?

Mr. BECKER. I think part of a solution here is our ability as a

country to imagine scenarios, and our ability, for example, in our

organization to sit down with the right businesses ahead of time

and preplan different scenarios, and preplan what the needs would

be, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do for the last 7 or 8

months, is work with different companies so that you can think

that through ahead of time. We—not Red Cross—but you might

need a cruise line, but what would that look like? And I think as

a country we’ve got a long way to go in just imagining——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes, nobody ever thought of what you

needed before.

Ms. DONAHUE. It’s made everybody think outside of the box in

this situation.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The box has gotten bigger, hasn’t it?

Ms. DONAHUE. The box has gotten a lot bigger.

Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman, if I may?

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Taylor and then Mr. Shays.

Mr. TAYLOR. But to that point, we have leased cruise ships on

several occasions, when we had a refugee overflow at Guantanamo.

We have leased very large quarters barges during the first Gulf

war in places like Saudi Arabia, so we as a Nation can’t pretend

that this is the first time we ever did this, and as a matter of fact,

early in this administration, two cruise ships that were under construction in south Mississippi, the guy who was supposed to sponsor it backed out after September 11th. The Nation canceled the

contract for that instead of finishing it. We sold those hulls for

about a penny on a dollar. And if we had finished those ships, what

we paid in rent to Carnival, we could have paid for the ships and

had them available for next time.

So, again, we as a Nation weren’t totally surprised, and, yes, I

think we could have done a heck of a lot better on that. And remember, Carnival did pay to run the generators, but they did not

have to fuel those very expensive ships at sea, and that’s a huge

savings.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Shays.

Mr. SHAYS. I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

The bottom line to my feeling about what happened was that it

was so overwhelming, that the storm was of biblical proportion,

that it was overwhelming, and you had craziness like a mayor who

was saying publicly that, you know, there were murders taking

place, and gangs roving, and rapes, and so on. When we unraveled

it all, it was horrible that we weren’t able to get to people in time,

but it was nothing like what was said. But we saw tremendous incompetence.

Yet I marvel at how many people, particularly in Mississippi,

were saved. I mean, when I saw storm damage 10 miles in, water

20 feet high, I saw what it looked like from the air, when we were

going over Mississippi, a tornado that wasn’t a quarter mile long

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and two football fields wide. It was 5 miles wide, and it was 90

miles long. It was just literally unbelievable to behold.

So, obviously, some people get it. They must be trained. In Mississippi they must be really experienced at this stuff. What was the

difference, in your judgment, between Mississippi and Louisiana?

Was it that everyone just never had to get out because they were

protected by the dikes and so on? What is your sense of it? Why

was Mississippi so much better off ultimately than Louisiana?

Ms. DONAHUE. As a Louisianan, can I answer that, please?

Mr. SHAYS. Sure.

Ms. DONAHUE. The situation in Louisiana was certainly different

from what Mississippi experienced, and you said it in that the flood

wall——

Mr. SHAYS. Can I ask you to speak a little louder?

Ms. DONAHUE. The experience in Mississippi and Louisiana were

somewhat different in that New Orleans had actually escaped the

bullet of the storm until the levees broke down, and it was a different situation completely in that the storm surge that came in

and hit Mississippi flattened Mississippi. There was no question as

to whether a house was salvageable or not because the house was

nonexistent. All that was left was a slab. Is that right, Congressman? A different situation in New Orleans.

Mr. SHAYS. You are talking about the clean-up issue. I am talking about people just seemed to anticipate the storm better in Mississippi than Louisiana, and I think it really relates to the fact the

dikes in the past have held, so, you know, they were protected. But

I felt that elected officials, be they Republican or Democrats, just

had a different attitude in Mississippi than they had in Louisiana.

I mean it was like two very different cultures when I spoke with

folks. I mean when we went to Mississippi, one, you don’t call them

counties. What do you call them?

Mr. TAYLOR. Counties. Louisiana has parishes.

Mr. SHAYS. Parishes. Well, OK, counties in Mississippi. We had

one county executive—at least that is what we call them up in our

area—he said, ‘‘We had 28 policemen and they all lost their home.

They showed up for work the next day. We had 35 firemen, 27 lost

their home, and they all showed up for work the next day.’’

In Louisiana, I was next to a police officer on Saturday after the

Tuesday storm in New Orleans, and he wouldn’t answer any questions I asked and said he wasn’t allowed to talk with me, and he

snickered at me. And then I had someone from New York who had

brought hundreds of firemen, and he said, you know, a lot of the

firemen simply weren’t there in Louisiana. They just disappeared.

It is just amazing to me just in two different States I could see

such a different feeling. Now, was it just an unusual day of my life

that I just got a distorted view, or was it just a different way of

trying to cope?

Anybody have an answer?

Mr. BECKER. I would suggest, in agreement with Ms. Donahue,

that they were almost two very different events when you look at

what happened. But by having said that, I would also suggest we

work with local government, we work with State Government, we

work with the Federal Government, quite closely. It was a very difVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:06 Nov 20, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00237 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\28573.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ferent decisionmaking apparatus. It was a different environment in

decisionmaking between the States, and it played out that way.

Ms. DONAHUE. And I think a lot of what you’re saying goes back

to what was in the media and not actually what you saw on the

ground, because for every terrible story you tell about one person’s

experience, I’ll tell you 100 about the wonderful people who stepped

to the plate, the neighborhoods who came together and helped each

other get out of the situation that they were in. So I think a lot

of it is just the public perceptions.

Mr. SHAYS. So once they got into that story in New Orleans that

was negative, it was hard for them to also tell positive stories is

what I think you’re saying to me. Is that right? OK.

Let me just end by asking you this. What did you react most favorably and what did you—all three of you—react most

disfavorably in the previous panel discussion? Was there anything

that you disagreed with, anything like, yeah, sure, I’ll believe it

when I see it kind of reaction, or were you not in your head saying,

you know, I think they are pretty accurate in their description?

Mr. BECKER. I’ll lead. My observation—and through the panel,

and it’s from working with quite a few of those people—I’m most

impressed with the quality of the leadership that’s in place and the

caliber of the people that are now entrusted with some very important responsibilities.

Mr. SHAYS. At all levels of the Government?

Mr. BECKER. I’m sorry. Speaking particularly with Homeland Security and with FEMA.

Mr. SHAYS. OK.

Mr. BECKER. I’m not sure it’s a disappointment as much as we

all have to just deliver. We can make promises. We can make commitments. We’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of attention building

systems and building all new things, but the bottom line is we all

have to deliver.

Mr. SHAYS. And that says to me that you want to make sure that

people show initiative instead of standing on the sideline waiting

for someone else to act. That’s kind of the answer for me on that

one.

Mr. BECKER. And I have a high degree of confidence that the

leadership team in FEMA will behave in that manner.

Mr. SHAYS. I am just going to finish up real quick because I

know we need to get on our way here, but, Ms. McGinnis?

Ms. MCGINNIS. I would say on the positive side I think the new

Under Secretary for preparedness at DHS, George Foresman, is

just—I mean the experience that he brings and the commitment,

and the sort of collaborative style I think is a real plus.

On the negative side—and this is not to say that I think all of

this could be in place in such a short time—but when the question

is asked how ready we are, we really don’t know because we don’t

have adequate indicators of how much progress we’ve made on the

important issues. It’s all anecdotal. So I think that’s my disappointment.

Mr. SHAYS. Why don’t you end up, Ms. Donahue?

Ms. DONAHUE. The Coast Guard, National Guard, God bless

them and hats off to them because they did a fabulous job, and you

heard in their testimony they truly did a fabulous job. I think all

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of the other departments need work. FEMA needs work. SBA needs

work. DHS, we’re working closely with. It’s just been a learning experience. Hopefully, this never happens to us again, and hopefully

we’ll come out with it with some lessons learned for all departments.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

I want to just thank this panel. It has been very, very helpful

to us, and we appreciate your continued work in this area. It has

been a very helpful hearing to us. And, of course, continue to prod

the Government to make appropriate changes so we will be ready

for the coming hurricane season.

No other questions from the Members, so the hearing is adjourned. Thank you.

[Whereupon, at 4:37 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:]

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