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24–236 PDF 2006

S. Hrg. 109–445

RECOVERING FROM HURRICANE KATRINA: RESPONDING TO THE IMMEDIATE NEEDS OF

ITS VICTIMS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island 

ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah 

PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico 

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia 

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK DAYTON, Minnesota 

FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey 

MARK PRYOR, Arkansas

MICHAEL D. BOPP, Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

THOMAS R. ELDRIDGE, Senior Counsel 

JOYCE A. RECHTSCHAFFEN, Minority Staff Director and Counsel 

MICHAEL L. ALEXANDER, Minority Professional Staff Member 

TRINA DRIESSNACK TYRER, Chief Clerk 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Collins ................................................................................................. 1

Senator Lieberman ........................................................................................... 3

Senator Pryor .................................................................................................... 17

Senator Carper ................................................................................................. 26

Senator Akaka .................................................................................................. 33

Senator Levin .................................................................................................... 35

Senator Warner ................................................................................................ 38

WITNESSES 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

Hon. Robert A. Eckels, County Judge, Harris County, Texas ............................. 6

Hon. Melvin L. Holden, Mayor-President, Baton Rouge, Louisiana ................... 10

Hon. Robert V. Massengill, Mayor, Brookhaven, Mississippi .............................. 14

Hon. Dan Coody, Mayor, Fayetteville, Arkansas .................................................. 17

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Coody, Hon. Dan: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 17

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 100

Eckels, Hon. Robert A.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 6

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 49

Holden, Hon. Melvin L.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 10

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 84

Massengill, Hon. Robert V.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 14

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 95

APPENDIX

George Rupp, President, International Rescue Committee, prepared statement ...................................................................................................................... 111

(1)

RECOVERING FROM HURRICANE KATRINA: 

RESPONDING TO THE IMMEDIATE NEEDS 

OF ITS VICTIMS 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

U.S. SENATE, 

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, 

Washington, DC. 

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:36 a.m., in room 

SD–342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M. Collins, 

Chairman of the Committee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Collins, Voinovich, Coleman, Warner, Lieberman, Levin, Akaka, Carper, and Pryor. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS 

Chairman COLLINS. The Committee will come to order. 

Good morning. Today this Committee holds its second hearing on 

what is being done to meet the immediate needs of the people of 

the Gulf Coast whose lives have been devastated by Hurricane 

Katrina. This Committee is undertaking an in-depth investigation 

into the inadequate preparedness and response to the hurricane, 

but our immediate focus is on ensuring that bureaucratic roadblocks, inflexible policies, outdated laws, and wasteful practices do 

not impede the prompt and compassionate delivery of needed assistance. 

On September 16, I joined a group of Senators, including Senator 

Lieberman and Senator Warner from this Committee, on a tour of 

the stricken region. The scenes of destruction that we have all seen 

on television only hint at the reality. Tragically, our first look at 

the wreckage Katrina left in its wake coincided with the first look 

many people of the region got of their destroyed homes and communities some 2 weeks after the storm had hit. For many, a waterstained family photograph, a mud-caked Bible, or a cherished heirloom unearthed from the rubble is all that is left. For others, there 

is not even that. 

In Pass Christian, Mississippi, Mayor Malcolm Jones, walked 

with us through the rubble of his community. I did not see a single 

undamaged home. Reopening the schools and restoring water and 

sewer services are but a few of the massive challenges that must 

be met for Pass Christian to emerge from the rubble and again become the pretty community it once was. 

Today the Gulf Coast is at once a region of tears and a region 

of great determination. It is also a region that needs help and has 

2

encountered frustration in getting answers and assistance. Rebuilding homes, jobs, schools, utilities, and everything else that make a 

community are urgent priorities. But as the rebuilding for tomorrow proceeds, we must meet the immediate needs of today. Mayor 

Jones expressed to us his frustration in trying to get permission 

from FEMA to proceed with urgent infrastructure repairs. Senator 

Trent Lott has told me that FEMA has been far too slow in distributing basic supplies, even food. 

Throughout the country, and especially throughout the South, 

communities have shown great compassion in taking in hundreds 

of thousands of Americans who have been displaced. This compassion carries a great cost. Communities that have provided shelter, 

schools, and medical care to displaced families wonder if they will 

receive any financial relief anytime soon. 

Our witnesses today represent four of these generous communities. Harris County, Texas, which includes the City of Houston, 

had at one point some 27,000 evacuees in such facilities as the Astrodome, the Houston Arena, and the Expo Center. It is essential 

that these thousands of people be moved from such mass shelters 

to more suitable housing. This process is underway, but the pressure on local resources is great and made even greater by Hurricane Rita. 

The population of Baton Rouge has exploded by 50 percent since 

Katrina. It is now the largest city in Louisiana. The city continues 

to grow daily, and some of this growth may be permanent. The demands this unexpected growth has imposed on police, fire, and 

EMS personnel, on schools, hospitals, utilities, and every other aspect of community life are enormous. 

Just 130 miles from New Orleans, Brookhaven, Mississippi, suffered major damage from Katrina. It is now on the front lines of 

the recovery effort as a major relief center, including as the Red 

Cross staging area. Despite their own needs, the people of 

Brookhaven have opened their homes, their churches, their schools, 

and their stores to others in even greater need. Brookhaven is 

clearly a town of very special people. 

Arkansas has received more Katrina evacuees per capita than 

any other State, in excess of 75,000 at the peak, primarily in Fayetteville and the surrounding area. Today as many as 50,000 remain, a great many in private homes, church camps, and even a 

vacated jail. These displaced families are being cared for by one of 

the poorest States in the Nation. Schools are stressed beyond capacity, yet they are committed to educating these thousands of new 

students. 

The communities represented by our panel today have been shining examples of generosity and caring. As I said at our first hearing, Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster followed by a manmade debacle. It is essential that we first concentrate on overcoming that initial failure and providing effective, efficient, and 

speedy relief for the victims of Katrina. Once that is done, we must 

learn what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what we can do 

to fix the problems. 

Meeting the needs of the victims is our first priority, but we are 

also concerned about protecting against waste, fraud, and abuse. 

We need to make sure that resources are not squandered when the 

3

needs are so great. This concern about wasteful spending is not 

merely hypothetical. Last week, for example, dozens of truckloads 

of ice ordered by the Federal Government for Katrina victims at 

great cost arrived in the Gulf Coast region, only to be diverted 

more than 1,600 miles away, where they ended up, in all places, 

in my home State of Maine, a State that is not short of ice. 

The American taxpayers, and especially the Katrina victims, cannot endure this kind of wasteful spending. With billions of dollars 

being appropriated for recovery efforts, we must ensure that the 

money is spent wisely. Creating a chief financial officer and establishing a special Inspector General are essential safeguards that 

cannot wait. 

Before calling on our witnesses, I want to provide a brief update 

on our investigation. Today we will send the first document requests to Federal and State entities. They are extensive. We are 

also working closely with the Government Accountability Office 

and the Inspectors General. Next week our investigators will be on 

site in Louisiana, and also next week the Acting FEMA Director, 

David Paulison, will testify before our Committee. 

I very much appreciate our witnesses joining us today, and it is 

now my pleasure to call upon the Committee’s Ranking Member, 

Senator Lieberman. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks to the 

witnesses for being here. It strikes me that I no longer have to use 

the overworn metaphor, ‘‘carrying coal to Newcastle.’’ From now on 

I can say it is like ‘‘carrying ice to Maine.’’

Chairman COLLINS. That is right. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I thank you for your leadership in convening 

this second hearing of the Committee’s efforts to improve the government’s preparation and response to natural disasters. 

In the time since our last hearing, as we well know, parts of the 

Gulf Coast and Texas were hit and hurt by Hurricane Rita, although Rita, fortunately, was less powerful than Katrina was. It 

does appear that State, Federal, and local governments performed 

better the second time around. Nonetheless, we clearly still have 

much work to do to fully restore the public’s confidence in the ability of their government to protect them in time of disaster. 

Texas officials appear to have moved quickly to start evacuating 

before Hurricane Rita hit and then worked to get many people 

without means of transportation out of the danger zone. Hospitals 

were apparently better prepared for power outages and flooding, 

and New Orleans wisely halted the flow of people back into the city 

until after the danger from Rita had passed. 

The Federal Government also appears to have been better prepared and responded more quickly than to Katrina. National Guard 

troops were prepositioned early. The Defense Department was on 

alert to provide humanitarian aid, medical care, and logistical support, to distribute food and water. Communications teams were deployed with satellite capabilities, clearly missing in those desperate 

first days after Katrina struck. This preparation paid off during 

and after the storm, but unfortunately there were still problems 

and lessons that we all have to learn from Rita for the future. And 

4

clearly one of them was the challenges of evacuating a major city 

in a very short period of time—nonetheless, a period of time in 

which there was a warning, as compared to a circumstance, God 

forbid, where there was an unexpected terrorist attack. 

As we all know, gasoline supplies ran out, stranding motorists on 

roadways and creating unnavigable traffic jams. Airport evacuations were handicapped by the sheer volume of travelers and because some airport employees just couldn’t get to work. Had this 

storm been larger and more powerful, had it hit Houston and Galveston head on, I fear that some of the suffering that we saw with 

Katrina would have been repeated. 

While we were better prepared for Rita than for Katrina, I say, 

in sum, that our emergency preparedness and response system is 

not what it has to be. We have a lot of work to do, and in this Committee we are going to try our best to do it together. For our Committee, that work, as Chairman Collins has just indicated, has now 

moved into higher gear with the issuance of document and information requests to Federal and State emergency management agencies, with further document requests and information requests to 

follow to heads of government at all levels of government, and with 

the dispatch of Committee investigators first to Louisiana. 

We follow the work of our colleagues in the House and the testimony of Mr. Brown yesterday. There is something to learn from it. 

It seemed to me that Mr. Brown blamed the governor. I expect 

today the governor will blame Mr. Brown. And what is necessary 

is the kind of thorough and very comprehensive building of a factual record, which we on this Committee intend to do, and then go 

to a hearing stage. You have to know what happened before we can 

conclude how to fix it, and I know under your leadership, Madam 

Chairman, that is exactly what we intend to do. 

As you indicated, today our attention turns from the response 

and preparation for Katrina to the efforts at relief and recovery. 

And this is also a very important responsibility we have as an oversight Committee, particularly the Committee that has jurisdiction 

over the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. 

There are several Federal agencies that have a role to play in the 

Gulf Coast recovery, but, clearly, the one that is most directly 

involved is FEMA. Our Committee’s staff investigations have, unfortunately, uncovered reports that indicate that the relief and recovery effort has not been adequately or effectively carried out and 

coordinated thus far. In cases that are too frequent, promised assistance has not arrived or arrived at the wrong place, or as the 

Chairman just indicated in the ice story, frustrated volunteers or, 

in fact, contract employees have tried to help but got caught up in 

webs of red tape and bureaucracy, and help did not arrive. 

Weeks now after Katrina, there are many communities affected 

that we gather have still not been contacted by FEMA representatives. Inspectors have not yet assessed the damage to a large number of homes, and thousands of evacuees have been unable to get 

through to the FEMA help lines. Our staff had, for instance, conversations with officials from East Biloxi, Mississippi, where we 

found that residents are trying to survive in houses that were 

flooded, full of mold, mildew, and bacteria, without power or teleVerDate 0ct 09 2002 13:49 Jun 28, 2006 Jkt 024236 PO 00000 Frm 00008 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24236.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
5

phones. They have no jobs, no means of income, and no way to call 

for help. 

These are communities of mostly poor, minority residents, and it 

is very troubling that they have still not received the help that we 

believe they deserve and need at this time. 

The real problem continues to be—and I look forward to hearing 

from our witnesses on this—housing for the evacuees. And there is 

no easy answer here. I was troubled when I heard of the enormous 

sums of money that FEMA was planning to spend on temporary 

dwellings, trailers, perhaps RVs. I also am troubled now in a different way to find how little has been done to provide for temporary housing for the evacuees, but I welcome the input of the 

local officials here today on this and other matters before us. 

We had originally hoped to have the Acting Director of FEMA 

here today. He is in the region so he could not be here, but I am 

glad that he has said that he will be here next week to respond 

to some of the concerns and complaints that our staff has found 

from local officials and others in the affected region, and perhaps 

from some of the reports that the distinguished panel before us will 

bring to us today. 

I thank you all very much for taking the time to be here, and 

I very much look forward to your testimony. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator, and I welcome all of the 

Committee Members who have joined us here today. 

We are now going to turn to our panel. Judge Robert Eckels is 

the presiding officer of the Harris County Commissioners Court, 

the governing body for Harris County, Texas. 

For those of us who are less familiar with the Texas system, from 

what I understand, Judge Eckels’ position is the equivalent of what 

in Maine we would call the Chairman of the County Commissioners, just to give some context here. 

With a population of 3.6 million in 34 municipalities, including 

the City of Houston, Harris County is the third most populous 

county in the United States. 

Our second witness will be Mayor Melvin ‘‘Kip’’ Holden. He is the 

mayor of the City of Baton Rouge and the president of the East 

Baton Rouge Parish, which includes the city. 

Our third witness is Robert Massengill. He is a native and the 

mayor of Brookhaven, Mississippi. Brookhaven, located in the 

northern evacuation route from New Orleans, has received, sheltered, and fed thousands of evacuees from Louisiana. 

And our final witness this morning will be Mayor Dan Coody of 

Fayetteville, Arkansas. The Arkansas area also has taken in thousands of people displaced by the hurricane, and I would note that 

the mayor and his wife themselves have taken in a couple from 

New Orleans. 

I welcome you all to the hearing today and thank you for joining 

us, and we are going to begin with you, Judge Eckels. 

6

1The prepared statement of Judge Eckels with attachments appears in the Appendix on page 

49. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. ROBERT A. ECKELS,1 COUNTY JUDGE, 

HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS 

Judge ECKELS. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I appreciate your 

clarification of my role in what the judge does. People often ask, 

‘‘Why is that judge here talking about these things?’’ We do have 

judicial responsibilities, but my primary role is that of the Chairman of the supervisors, or county executives in some other parts 

of the country. Perhaps it is our size, too, as Harris County is 3.6 

million people, somewhat larger than 23 States in the Nation. That 

enabled us to absorb more folks than some other communities. 

As judge, I am charged by statute with the responsibility for 

emergency management and planning operations for Harris County. That comes through the President to the governor of the county 

judge and also the mayor. Most of the departments in our community have emergency management functions in addition to their 

normal duties, and they play key roles in our emergency operations 

strategy. All of these departments work together to coordinate services and prepare for an emergency or disaster. 

I do want to thank this Committee for asking me to testify on 

the role that Harris County played in providing shelter and comfort 

to the Hurricane Katrina victims in what became at that time the 

largest mass evacuation in U.S. history. I would say that it almost 

became a mass exodus, and I will get into some of the details of 

how that worked. More than 373,000 evacuees came to Texas with 

more than 150,000 in the Houston area alone, largely in Harris 

County. Our response was an unprecedented coalition of the Harris 

County Government, the City of Houston, the State of Texas, the 

Federal Government, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, 

and citizen volunteers. 

The mission of the coalition was to provide temporary shelter, social services, and relocation services for the citizens displaced by 

Katrina. In less than a day, a city was created that, at its peak, 

offered 27,000 people shelter, health care, mental health services, 

housing assistance, travel vouchers, employment, and much more. 

We had our zip code. But even with that zip code, people could not 

find each other as the shelters were not linked around the Nation. 

There was no single national database for people to find friends 

and family who had been separated in the disaster. 

As we seek to make our communities more prepared for any kind 

of disaster and resilient to those disasters, it is clear from our experiences that all government relations functions are interrelated. A 

healthy and robust community is better prepared for emergencies, 

and I believe that local governments that work well together and 

work well with State and Federal Governments in day-to-day operations will be much better prepared for types of stress. 

A number of issues stand out as we look at Katrina and, more 

recently, Hurricane Rita that hit the Texas and Louisiana coasts 

just this past weekend. I will cover a few of those in this oral testimony, but I go into much more detail in the written testimony I 

previously submitted that was prepared largely before Rita came in 

east of Houston. 

7

First I will tell you that Harris County and the Houston area are 

a very caring community. We welcomed our neighbors in need 

where they had nowhere else to turn, and Harris County, through 

its Reliant Astrodome, provided the shelter, and later expansions 

into those related venues absorbed the sudden shock of these evacuees, as they came in from Louisiana and provided a couple of days 

for the rest of the country to start putting in shelters as well. 

We had a plan that we executed. It was not a plan for the Dome. 

People said, ‘‘How did you plan to do the Astrodome?’’ It was just 

a plan of action. We could have set that up in any facility. It was 

just a plan of action, and we learned from it as we went along. But 

the structure of that plan was sound and our people knew their 

roles and responsibilities. 

We dealt with the problems and forces beyond our control and 

kept a giving spirit. I believe that the Katrina victims were a blessing to our city and that today our community is stronger for our 

service to our neighbors. That said, there are many lessons to be 

learned from our experiences. First, in health care. At more than $1 billion, Harris County’s 

single largest budget item is health care. The Houston region’s 

health care surge capacity is today at its absolute limits. Louisiana 

and, to a lesser extent, Alabama and Mississippi, through their 

Katrina evacuees, and now Beaumont, Port Arthur, and East Texas 

through the Rita evacuees, sent their most medically dependent to 

Houston. The ability to respond to a disaster depends upon a robust system, and America does not have a robust health care system. The reasons are many and subject to another hearing, but the 

Harris County Hospital District and the health care providers of 

our community were stressed before these disasters with high numbers of uninsured patients and uncompensated care. Short-term 

needs are addressed in my written comments, but in the long term, 

Katrina evacuees will continue to stress our over-burdened system. 

A sustainable system to deal with the long-term needs in future 

disasters will require at least a state-wide initiative—probably logically a state-wide initiative, but Federal programs that support 

long-term solutions. Our hospital district spent more than $4.5 million at the Reliant Arena Astrodome shelter system. We treated 

15,000 patients and provided thousands of inoculations and prescriptions. We operated a full-scale hospital with orthopedic, mental health, obstetric, pediatric, and internal medicine. The full extent of our operations are discussed again in the written testimony, 

but it is an incredible story of dedicated professional staff, volunteers from across the community, from around the Nation and from 

around the world. 

Critical infrastructure needs in our community—that includes locally critical infrastructures such as water, power, transportation, 

and communications, the things you normally think of, but also national strategic infrastructure, such as in Houston our refining and 

petrochemical complex, which represents as much as 15 percent of 

the Nation’s capacity. These interests can coincide with each other. 

After Hurricane Rita passed through, Baytown lost power to its 

water treatment and distribution system. Its primary power supply 

was struck by lightning, and its back-up generator caught fire. 

That problem was well on its way to being solved, but they still 

8

had only 4 more days of water in the system. It turned out that 

the pumps for the canal that carried 12 million gallons of water 

each day for Baytown had also lost their power supply in the hurricane. Upon further inquiry, I learned that the canal supplied 80 

million gallons a day to the Houston ship channel refining industries for industrial processing. Without the processed water, the refineries cannot produce gasoline for Maine, Connecticut, Michigan, 

or California. That canal also supplies drinking water to Houston 

and other cities in the area. 

The Nation was faced with the possibility of severe strain on refined petroleum production, and over 600,000 people were faced 

with the loss of their primary water supply because of a power outage at a single pumping station. Though the problem does appear 

to be resolved, and I want to tell you I particularly thank the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and the Corps of Engineers, who are all engaged in that, but it reinforces the need to 

identify potential single points of failure and build redundancy into 

the systems. It also shows why a Senator from the East Coast 

should care about Houston’s request for security and resilience in 

our critical infrastructure needs. And I am sure you have some examples in your part of the country, Madam Chairman. 

Increased funding and relaxed regulations for flood control 

projects. Again, in my written comments there is extensive talk 

about flood control issues and lessons from Tropical Storm Allison 

in 2001. It is important that Congress continue to provide more 

funding to operate and maintain those flood control systems as well 

as to deal with the regulatory scheme that comes in there. Often 

with the Corps of Engineers and our Federal partners, the process 

delays action, the methods of allocating funds and the cost/benefit 

analysis should take in, as well, not just pure dollar values, which 

tend to favor more affluent areas, but also the impact and the 

agony caused to people that are involved in floods. 

The gridlock, as Senator Lieberman mentioned as we were talking at the beginning of this, that was caused in the evacuation of 

Houston was totally unacceptable. My wife, Jet, and our daughter, 

Kirby, were caught in a traffic jam that was 20 miles long because 

a subcontractor had not received the word that there was no construction on the road that day. The next day, the contractor was 

gone, but the traffic jam was much worse, largely because of little 

things well beyond our control, like a traffic light in a small town 

a hundred miles outside of the city. 

Yesterday, our medical examiner released a list of 31 people who 

died during the evacuation. Now, most of these folks had underlying medical conditions, and it is not clear that they died as a result of the evacuation, but they were the very people that needed 

to be evacuated the most, the very people that we see stories of in 

New Orleans and other areas where they stay behind in a nursing 

home, and without power and without food and water, they wound 

up in much worse shape than had they been on the road. 

Our transportation infrastructure, again, must be robust. In 

Texas, evacuations occur over a long distance. Dallas is 220 miles 

away from Houston; San Antonio and Austin likewise. We do need 

support for the Interstate 69 corridor and for the I–35 and I–45 

corridors running north out of our coastal areas. They are part of 

9

Governor Rick Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan to finance new 

highway construction and rail capacity. We also need help with the 

Texas High-Speed Rail Coalition that I chair that links the East 

Coast through Atlanta and New Orleans with Beaumont, Houston, 

Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. This project takes on a new significant importance as we look at our experiences in Katrina and 

later Rita. 

The same problems occurred in Louisiana. Evacuees coming into 

the Astrodome took 17 hours or more. After spending days on the 

roof of a house or in the Superdome in New Orleans, those folks 

arrived in bad shape. They were standing up. They had had no 

water. They were dehydrated. They had serious medical problems, 

largely as a result of that evacuation. 

To close, and touch a little bit on the Citizens Corps, President 

Bush’s Freedom Corps efforts calling on citizens to spend 4,000 

hours in service to others. Through that program, we launched one 

in Harris County in 2002. Our CERT team had folks from around 

the country, Community Emergency Response Team. We had 

CERT volunteers from Mr. Voinovich’s State that because we were 

on a national plan, could drop directly into our local response. 

There are tens of thousands of volunteers—in the end we had 

60,000 volunteers through the relief efforts. 

There are a few areas where the rules actually discourage us 

from doing our job. One of those rules is that FEMA does not reimburse us for our everyday expenses. The logic is that the normal 

operating expenses of the county for regular time pay for police officers, fire fighters, EMS technicians, and other first responders 

who normally work within our community should not be reimbursed because they would be providing those services whether 

there was a disaster or not. The services we are providing today 

are not for people within our community. They are being provided 

for people outside the region, and so it’s more or less like being a 

contractor for the national system. So these first responders are 

being taken away from the people in our community who would 

otherwise be served. It is a strong disincentive for communities to 

accept evacuees, that we will not be reimbursed for the regular 

time of our employees that are out there doing their jobs. 

The second key area is a lack of reimbursement for revenue lost 

at places like our convention center. Harris County opened the Reliant Center, which is a convention center complex. The City of 

Houston opened the George R. Brown Convention Center. San Antonio and other cities did not open their convention centers because 

they could not afford to. They found other locations, but there are 

many places, large convention center-type facilities that could very 

well be opened as a shelter for evacuees, but again there is no reason for a municipality to do so if it is not their residents who are 

being served, and if it is a financial loss to their local taxpayers. 

Finally, FEMA has been a great partner. Interestingly, I have 

watched, as people around the country have had problems. Tom 

Costello and the Houston FEMA operation understands what it 

takes to be helpful and responsive. Perhaps it is our long-term relationship with them and our experiences in Tropical Storm Allison 

that have provided guidance and assistance to let us transport and 

shelter folks through local contracting. They have been very flexiVerDate 0ct 09 2002 13:49 Jun 28, 2006 Jkt 024236 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24236.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
10

1The prepared statement of Mr. Holden appears in the Appendix on page 84. 

ble in hotel reimbursement and apartments for families that have 

been disclosed and worked with our Harris County and Houston 

Housing Departments. While both Mayor Bill White and I would 

like to see direct funding of local governments that experience 

these type of events, Governor Perry and the Texas Emergency 

Management Office have been helpful and understand how to make 

the system work, and we already have obligated funds to reimburse 

us for those costs. 

It is all part of the National Response Plan to build capacity for 

State and local levels in partnership with the Federal Government, 

and I can only re-emphasize the importance of that national plan. 

I do see reports of an effort to have a Federal plan of first response, 

and there are places where that would work where locals are overwhelmed. I could have used that in our evacuation when I was trying to get gasoline to folks on the road. I needed someone to help 

direct traffic 100 miles away from the city where I could not project 

our local forces. 

But any Federal response play needs to be in connection with 

that National Response Plan that continues to build capacity for 

local officials and local communities. The first responder on the 

street may not even be the police or fire, it is the guy who is there 

when the incident occurs. The Citizens Corps, followed by the local 

first responders, followed then by the national officials, can make 

a real difference in our community. 

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to be here today. We 

had a great story in Harris County, as I know you have here, and 

I am sure you will see stories of heroism and sacrifice as this story 

unfolds of all of the folks throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and 

Alabama in Katrina. 

Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Judge Eckels. Mayor Holden, 

you may begin. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. MELVIN L. HOLDEN,1 MAYORPRESIDENT, BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA 

Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you, Madam Chairman, Senator Lieberman, 

and Members of this Committee. My name is Melvin L. ‘‘Kip’’ 

Holden. I serve as mayor-president of the City of Baton Rouge and 

the parish of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

It has been estimated that approximately 45 percent of the survivors of the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina relocated to the 

Greater Baton Rouge Metropolitan Area. 

With Hurricane Rita devastating parts of South Louisiana and 

causing additional flooding to the City of New Orleans, our emergency response systems have been strained yet again. 

Our citizens have opened their hearts and homes to those who 

suffered great loss, and we are working with FEMA to expedite 

temporary housing for displaced families who are living in shelters, 

churches, and homes throughout the city. 

The City of Baton Rouge dodged the bullet of major devastation, 

the most serious being over 600 downed trees. This exceeded our 

11

losses by Hurricane Andrew and damaged homes and power lines, 

making our streets impassable. 

We remain severely impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 

We have sharp increases in enrollment of students into the public and private child care centers, Head Start, schools, colleges, and 

universities throughout Baton Rouge. Our education officials have 

worked around the clock to get children back in school as quickly 

as possible. 

Our city-parish is also experiencing increases in requests for economic assistance through our Division of Human Development and 

Services. This office is working to assist families, process emergency unemployment claims, and recruit workers for FEMA to assist with the needs assessments of hurricane survivors. 

One of the most obvious impacts of the displacement of people 

from New Orleans and South Louisiana to Baton Rouge has been 

our increase in traffic. We estimate more than 250,000 additional 

people in Baton Rouge based on formulas for traffic counts that 

have shown a 35- to 40-percent increase in traffic on our streets, 

causing frequent gridlock on surface streets. As a matter of fact, in 

2 weeks we experienced a 25-year projection already in the amount 

of traffic that we have. 

Additionally, with the interstate system used as a major evacuation route, our parish is seriously impacted by that traffic as well. 

Despite the increased population, many small businesses report 

a negative impact on sales as a result of traffic, interruption of supplies, and loss of customers from the most seriously impacted 

areas. 

Our airport, which usually serves 700,000 passengers annually, 

expects to see an increase of upward to 3 million people. For the 

past few weeks, with constant relief and recovery flights in and 

out, it has remained the second busiest airport behind JFK International. And for those of you who have never flown into Baton 

Rouge, we only have ten gates, so we are considerably smaller. 

The public service providers within our community are overloaded, and with your help and support we can address some of our 

most critical needs: additional police officers, firefighters, emergency medical service providers, and public works employees as a 

start. 

Our police have been working double shifts, leaving vulnerable 

areas that require regular patrols. The strain of accommodating 

the rapid influx of people into a large shelter in our governmental 

complex at one point led to a government shutdown in order to 

assure the safety and accommodation of both evacuees and cityparish employees. Emergency circumstances such as this indicate 

a necessity to streamline and expedite National Guard for law enforcement patrols and crime prevention. 

Our city-parish infrastructure was already in serious need of improvements, and I am currently seeking voter approval of a proposition to extend a half-cent sales tax, over one-half billion dollars, 

to allow us to bond revenue and jump-start projects immediately. 

We have welcomed the local governments of Jefferson, St. Bernard, Orleans, and Plaquemines Parishes to operate in our facilities, holding council meetings as well in our council chambers to 

assist them in re-establishing local government authority quickly. 

12

Additionally, we are providing logistical support to the many 

Federal agencies, like FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Transportation Safety Administration, staged in our 

community. 

I am especially proud and grateful to our first responders of East 

Baton Rouge Parish—our police officers, firefighters, EMS, and the 

staff at our Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. 

The professionalism and compassion shown by the men and 

women who responded to two hurricanes on behalf of our community was exemplary. 

Our parish has many heroes, among them an urban search and 

rescue team that went into New Orleans the day following Hurricane Katrina and rescued over 1,000 trapped victims. Working by 

boat, they were in areas where no other rescue teams were working 

at the time. 

For many people, we are a shelter from the storm. For some, we 

represent a new beginning. With a rapidly changing population and 

serious infrastructure needs to meet pre-Katrina growth, our administration is now seeking relief to accommodate our increased 

population. 

We are also beginning to study our records of emergency response to determine areas we need to improve. There is no question that one of the major factors frustrating and delaying those 

who were responding to Hurricane Katrina in Baton Rouge was difficulty with communications. 

Regional, State, interstate, and Federal communications must be 

improved, and there must be clear lines of authority as to who is 

in charge of various operations. These individuals must be accessible to local officials. 

At every step of our response efforts, a breakdown in communications hindered our abilities to respond more effectively and efficiently. 

Our parish, with a need to communicate with multiple first responders, labors under incompatible communications systems and 

insufficient technology and software to provide seamless information flow in times of emergency. 

Our communications systems broke down when cell phones became inoperable due to network congestion and downed towers. 

Satellite phones are too expensive and also failed during Katrina. 

Software programs and Web-based programs should be made available to local agencies and hospitals, including such software which 

tracks beds and hospital resources. 

With standardization, these programs can be implemented locally 

and statewide. In disasters such as Katrina and Rita, these programs could be utilized for tracking patients and coordinating 

triage from ground zero to the staging area. 

Equally frustrating were the communications breakdowns due to 

burdensome red tape. 

Because of our location and relative efficiency, East Baton Rouge 

Parish in many cases served as a State agency for inquiries, guidance, and resources for other jurisdictions within Louisiana. 

The National Incident Management System was established by 

the Federal Government as the standard line of communication. A 

13

lack of knowledge and understanding by many agencies paralyzed 

the efforts to facilitate order and efficiency in response efforts. Further requirements for paperwork and form completions hindered 

immediate action and deployment of people and materials to assist 

in rescue and recovery efforts. 

Our parish also lacked sufficient communications with Federal 

authorities, and we were unsuccessful in establishing early communications with FEMA representatives despite their actions impacting our local operations. 

East Baton Rouge Parish created its own internal systems to coordinate sheltering, medical care, triage, mental health services, 

mortuary, family assistance information, and help for evacuees 

with addictive disorders and other needs to quickly fill the void created by the constant influx of evacuees from South Louisiana. 

As of this week, we still do not have a designated FEMA contact 

for individual assistance for those seeking help. 

We have an immediate need for a FEMA coordinator to be located within our Emergency Operations Center to expedite available resources and alleviate some of the ongoing issues our cityparish is currently facing. 

Poor communications also affected our ability to deliver medical 

treatment to Hurricane Katrina victims in Baton Rouge. While the 

volunteer medical response to Katrina’s victims was unprecedented 

in Red Cross history, they were severely hindered by inadequate 

communications, limited resources, and red tape. 

Medical volunteers from all over the world began arriving in our 

city because of an inability to get through to anyone to determine 

our needs and a lack of a system for deploying medical volunteers 

and much needed supplies. 

Prepositioned Federal assets critical to the operations of our area 

hospitals were never received. Resources from the Strategic National Stockpile, despite requests, were never locally deployed and 

were derailed due to paperwork issues. Area hospitals are faced 

with serious reimbursement needs for their depleted resources. 

I know I am out of time, so I will just skip a little bit and just 

say we need to understand that the financial drain on all of our 

resources is enormous. Many of the patients who received treatment are uninsured or underinsured, and it will be costly for the 

six area hospitals that are already overwhelmed. Displaced persons 

in shelters need access to medical care, counseling, and privacy. 

Our superintendent of schools shared my concern that children who 

have seen things no child should witness desperately need a quiet 

place to heal. 

Decisions based on shelters were made by the American Red 

Cross based on numbers and not the conditions of the shelter. The 

River Center in Baton Rouge, operated by the city, has a major roof 

leak that curtailed space available for evacuees. 

I am working closely with FEMA and HUD to provide temporary 

housing arrangements for families to at least get them some privacy, a place to reunite families, a quiet place for children to study. 

We seriously need to focus on the creation of satellite clinics in 

areas that will now serve as housing for these evacuated families 

and areas where we anticipate growth. 

14

1The prepared statement of Mr. Massengill appears in the Appendix on page 95. 

The quickest route to privacy for these families may not be permanent housing, but it will be private. It will provide the privacy 

they miss, the privacy to protect dignity, the privacy to begin having those quiet moments families need in order to heal from a traumatic event. 

These living arrangements are not a solution. A travel trailer 

does not solve anyone’s housing needs, but at least they allow us 

to begin moving toward a better environment for restoring families. 

Short term, we should also look at parallel tracks for housing, including rehabilitation of existing housing stock, putting adjudicated 

property back into commerce, mixed-use development, restoring 

rundown apartment complexes, and prefab housing. 

To those who have relocated to Baton Rouge from hurricane devastation, our message has been this: You are our family now. Our 

hearts go out to you, our homes are open to you, our businesses 

will serve you, our city will care for you. 

We are Baton Rouge. And this is the way we respond to neighbors in need. 

I have come to ask you for your help. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita was too much for one community, 

too much for one parish, too much for one State. 

America always responds when her people are hurting and suffering. Senators, the good people of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, 

and Alabama are hurting. We need you. 

God bless you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Mayor Holden. Mayor Massengill. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. ROBERT V. MASSENGILL,1 MAYOR, 

BROOKHAVEN, MISSISSIPPI 

Mr. MASSENGILL. Madam Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, let 

me give you a brief background about our community and how we 

were affected. 

As was mentioned earlier, we are 130 miles north of New Orleans. We are a small community of 13,000. We are located on Interstate 55. Prior to Katrina, we had only experienced minimal damages from hurricanes in the past, such as Camille in 1969. We met 

prior to the hurricane with city and county officials and with the 

civil defense director so that we were somewhat prepared for the 

events, and by Sunday afternoon, evacuees had begun arriving in 

our community. All motels were immediately filled, and the churches, which served as shelters, were beginning to be filled. 

Bear in mind that we are town of 13,000, and yet we had 1,600 

evacuees in six shelters. We had another 1,200 to 1,500 who stayed 

in the motels and stayed with family and friends. So we had a 20- 

to 25-percent increase in our population in just a few short days. 

But all the evacuees were signed in by Red Cross personnel at 

the various shelters and received some—and I emphasize ‘‘some’’—

personal care and assistance. But all of the meals that have been 

prepared for these individuals have been prepared by the churches 

in our community. On some occasions, the restaurants have been 

helpful in preparing the meals, but the churches have been the 

15

ones that have fed the evacuees and have housed the evacuees. 

They have made them feel welcome. 

The Brookhaven Recreation Department building was used for 

shelter for the power company people because on Monday, August 

29, the community received winds of in excess of 85 miles an hour 

and sustained winds of greater than 50 miles an hour for several 

hours. And so power was lost throughout the community. Numerous trees fell throughout the community, and I would say somewhere between 750 and 1,000 trees. So every street was closed. 

Approximately 25 homes were hit, with at least half of those receiving considerable damage. Six or eight were totally destroyed. 

No lives were lost, nor was there any serious injury due to the 

hurricane. So we are indeed thankful for that. 

We were unable to obtain much outside information with no 

power, so we did not know the severity of what was going on 

around us. But we knew immediately that we needed to begin 

doing things, and so the city and county officials met with civil defense, and we knew first of all we had to restore power. The energy 

people and I met, and we prioritized our top four needs. First was 

a hospital. Second were the streets on which the major retail stores 

are located and those streets on which the shelters are located. The 

third was the city’s water wells because we only had two generators that worked. Nevertheless, we did prioritize. We began getting 

power back to the people on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

We knew having water for the individuals was key, and I learned 

a valuable lesson. Don’t go on the radio when you can and say conserve water. That means everybody goes home and fills their bathtub. [Laughter.] 

Don’t do that one. I did learn that. 

But we did not lose our water, nor did anyone have to boil water. 

We knew that safety was a key. We never had to impose a curfew, 

and our chief of police was certainly in control of that. 

We knew that safe travel was important, so Monday evening, the 

day of the hurricane, we had people out—when it became safe, we 

had people out to begin cutting trees. We opened up the streets so 

that by the weekend people were able to travel all through the 

community. 

Garbage collection was another major problem, so we arranged 

to have Waste Management trucks in central locations for people 

to bring their garbage, which was excessive and considerable due 

to the fact they had lost their freezers and coolers. And then by the 

following week, they began making their regular routes. 

We went on the radio and we went to the newspaper to keep people informed because the rumors were rampant. By the third week, 

things were basically back to normal. 

Let me mention several other things that I think you need to 

know. Let’s get to the evacuees for a bit. The evacuees, many of 

whom have left our shelters, some to return home, while others 

have found local residences, either apartments or mobile homes or 

something to live in locally. Some have moved to family in other 

parts of the country, but at the present time, we have approximately 220 evacuees still in our community in these shelters. We 

have consolidated into four shelters at this time. These shelters 

16

had never housed anyone for more than 4 days at a time, and they 

are now into their fifth week. 

I talked to the individuals in the shelters. I went to each shelter 

and talked to individuals. There are 71 family units still in our 

community; 35 of those could move back to Slidell or to their home 

if they had a trailer or a camper in which to stay. They want to 

get back into their communities so that they can begin working on 

their house. That is the main and really the primary concern that 

they have. They want to be able to get back home, and in Slidell, 

they can do so, but their homes have been flooded with 6 feet of 

water so that at this point they really cannot go back into their 

home. They need a place in which to stay while they repair their 

home. 

The other thing that they are concerned about primarily is employment. They do not know where to go employment-wise. For 

many of them, their company has been wiped out. They do not 

know when that company will open or if it will open. So the two 

primary needs they have—they have had their basic needs taken 

care of. They have a roof over their heads. They have meals, three 

good meals a day. I know at our church, for instance, we fed over 

700 meals a day to people. But they need a place to go. They need 

to know something about employment. Where can they go for employment? 

Let me move to another area that I want to touch on for just a 

minute. We know a lot of attention needs to be given to how the 

efforts can best be coordinated for a future event. There will be another event. It may not be a hurricane. It may be a terrorist attack. 

But there will be other events, and we need to have coordinated 

efforts, and we need to have checks and balances to ensure that the 

funds and goods that are being distributed are done on a mostneeded basis. 

Obviously, I have had a firsthand experience with the hurricane, 

and I am thankful for the caring people of our community—a community that was affected somewhat—that have opened their 

churches, have opened their homes, have opened their pocketbooks, 

and especially have opened their hearts, because these people that 

still needed help themselves, these people that had no power themselves, went out of their way to make our visitors feel at home and 

to take care of them. 

Our community has responded well, but there are several things 

that we must recognize as the keys to seeing that this type of disaster can be dealt with in the future. The first of those is proper 

planning ahead of time. The second of those is open lines of communication. And the third of those is leadership. And my suggestion is that we have task forces formed in each of the 12 Federal 

Reserve districts or in some other division of the country so that 

we have experts in the area of food distribution, communications, 

banking—because these people lost their ability to do banking—

utility companies, medical and health care, transportation, fuel distribution, and perhaps others, but task forces in each of these areas 

planning for events. It is so much better to plan and not need the 

plan than to never plan at all. 

Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Mayor. 

17

1The prepared statement of Mr. Coody appears in the Appendix on page 100. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PRYOR 

Senator PRYOR. Madam Chairman, may I have a moment here? 

Chairman COLLINS. Absolutely, Senator Pryor. I should acknowledge that you were the one who recommended the mayor to the 

Committee, and we appreciate that. 

Senator PRYOR. Well, thank you, and Madam Chairman, let me 

thank you and Senator Lieberman for your leadership after 

Katrina and leadership of this Committee generally. Once again, 

the Committee is demonstrating how it can function in a very nonpartisan way, and I think that is what we need after Katrina. 

A couple of weeks ago, when I was home in Arkansas, I did what 

we called a ‘‘find and fix tour’’ of the State after all the evacuees 

had arrived in Arkansas, and estimates were we had around 

75,000. I went around and talked to various people about what 

happened after Katrina and how we could do things better next 

time. 

One of the real all-stars—even though I saw churches, community leaders, businesses, nonprofits, State Government, the National Guard, everybody working together and really doing some 

great things—one of the real all-stars was Mayor Dan Coody of 

Fayetteville. Fayetteville has about 58,000 people. Its claim to fame 

is it is the home of the Razorbacks. It is where the University of 

Arkansas is. The first time I ever heard of Mayor Coody was several years ago when he ran for mayor, and I was over at my aunt 

and uncle’s house, and I noticed that my uncle had put his ‘‘Dan 

Coody for Mayor’’ bumper sticker on his canoe. I knew if he had 

done that on his canoe, Dan Coody must be a pretty good guy. And 

he is a good guy, and one of his great strengths is he brings people 

together, and certainly he did that after Katrina, and he really 

pulled Fayetteville and that region of the State together and really 

did some great things. 

So, Mayor Coody, thank you. Thanks for being here. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. DAN COODY,1 MAYOR, FAYETTEVILLE, 

ARKANSAS 

Mr. COODY. Thank you very much, and I appreciate the Committee’s willingness to invite us here to hear all we have to say, because we all appreciate your efforts in fixing these problems that 

we have all experienced. And, Senator Pryor, thank you for your 

kind words. I appreciate it. 

I want to first say that I am humbled as mayor of Fayetteville. 

We have a wonderful community. But we were relatively unscathed 

compared to the scope and magnitude of the damage and disaster 

that my colleagues here experienced. I do not have the stories to 

tell about the wind damage, the influx of such huge numbers of 

folks coming to town unexpectedly, and the infrastructure problems 

that have precipitated the reason that my colleagues are here 

today. 

What I have to offer is how Fayetteville responded in the hopes 

that we can take this experience and make this a national model 

for other small communities in regions across the country. 

18

As the crisis unfolded with Katrina, I instructed my staff to assess our resources and coordinate with local emergency efforts to 

develop and implement a response plan as soon as possible. Earlier 

this year, Fayetteville had purchased a 126,000-square-foot industrial building to convert into a joint police department, fire department, and emergency response center. The closed and empty facility offered tremendous warehouse space with loading docks useful 

for regional collection, handling, and distribution center. It also 

contained plenty of office space where local nonprofits could assist 

survivors of the hurricane that had made their way to Fayetteville. 

We felt this would be an ideal site to coordinate local response efforts. 

Even though the communication and information systems established by Federal and State emergency plans were not functioning, 

and in some cases being abandoned altogether, we had to move forward and prepare for an influx of evacuees and assure that our 

local communications were strong and sustainable. After all, we 

would ultimately be responsible for evacuees in our area. 

County and City officials met with emergency responders, the 

Red Cross, the Salvation Army, local churches and church camps, 

regional transportation officials, local media, and everyone else we 

could think of. While county officials tried to establish communication lines with State and Federal officials, our city staff worked to 

prepare the industrial facility for occupation. The entire abandoned 

building was cleaned, electrical transformers and phone lines were 

reinstalled, office equipment and furnishings were brought in, as 

were forklifts and pallets. Two days later, the facility was prepared 

to ship and receive, house local nonprofits, or be utilized for any 

other activity that was needed in the region. 

Coordinating with Congressman John Boozman’s office as well as 

Senator Pryor’s office, several tractor-trailers that had been strategically located throughout the region by various officials and organizations to collect local contributions were sent to our warehouse 

for collection and distribution. However, a clear plan for the organized collection of such a huge volume of goods, in addition to the 

sorting, storing, and distributing to the local shelters or to the Gulf 

Coast was not in place. 

When the first of 14 packed trailer-loads arrived at our facility, 

we unloaded the first two and quickly realized that much more assistance was needed to efficiently process the donations and prepare them for distribution. We requested assistance from WalMart, and they immediately responded by sending two engineers to 

create a warehouse system for our facility, a distribution center supervisor, and two additional employees to oversee the operation. 

During peak hours, we had over 100 volunteers, city employees, 

Wal-Mart employees and county laborers working side by side to 

organize the donations. The trailers were unloaded by Saturday, 

September 10, and the donations were completely sorted by sex, by 

size, by quality, and ready for shipment 5 days later. 

Survivors that had made their way to Fayetteville to stay with 

family or friends began to stop by the distribution center in search 

of financial aid, food, clothes, and other assistance. We had not anticipated receiving evacuees at the distribution center. 

19

We were not sure how to provide appropriate assistance. One by 

one we heard the stories of survivors being bounced from place to 

place and from town to town, so we took it upon ourselves to find 

answers, information, and assistance for everyone who needed it. 

We pulled boxes off pallets and made food and clothes available to 

these individuals and moved all the relief agencies in the offices to 

create a one-stop location where evacuees could access various 

types of assistance and support. Distribution center staff were instructed the next morning to begin setting up a store environment 

where people could ‘‘shop’’ for what they needed—free, of course. 

In addition to food and clothing, many of the evacuees still needed to register with the Red Cross and other agencies. Others looked 

for possible housing options. 

We made office space, tables, chairs, copy and fax machines, telephones, and Internet access available to organizations such as the 

Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Department of Human Services, the Health Department, and FEMA. The city also staffed a 

front office Help Desk to help direct over 400 to 500 evacuees—we 

are not sure—to the right place and provide information as needed. 

FEMA maintained a presence and assisted people in the center for 

2 days. A local volunteer provided ongoing assistance with this endeavor after FEMA left. OpenYourHome.com also works from an 

office at the center. This local organization is operating nationally 

now and has matched over 3,100 survivors with housing opportunities in desired locations. 

We shipped material to the Salvation Army staging warehouse in 

Corsicana, Texas, to the stricken areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. Many of these shipments were sponsored by local businesses and churches and were arranged by making direct contact 

with community members in the affected areas. One example of 

city-to-city communications occurred when the City of Fayetteville 

connected with Louisiana State Senator Ben Nevers. We established what supplies were needed at which locations, arranged the 

transportation, and shipped supplies directly to that location. We 

learned many of the rural areas were not receiving adequate support and were still in desperate need of various items that we had 

in stock. So we focused our large-scale distribution efforts on the 

more rural areas of Louisiana. While we had food, water, wheelchairs, baby supplies, and about everything else you can imagine 

palletized and ready to go, our efforts to communicate and coordinate the movement of our supplies to those areas that needed them 

the most was our biggest challenge. 

The center has experienced many great success stories, and I believe this is due to the fact that all of the leaders at the local level 

cooperated, communicated, and responded to the needs that were 

presented to us. 

It is our obligation as government officials to provide the leadership and resources needed to reinforce the approaches that worked 

and reinvent those approaches that failed. These lessons learned 

must be clearly articulated, incorporated into our local, regional, 

and State emergency response plans, and implemented in the event 

of another disaster. As Fayetteville continues its plan to build a 

state-of-the-art police, fire, and emergency response center, we will 

incorporate what we learned from this experience. We will preserve 

20

in our facility the capacity to ship and receive large quantities of 

material when necessary. These warehousing areas can be used for 

a variety of community functions and city operations in such a way 

that they could be quickly prepared for disaster relief. The county 

and the city will be partners in an emergency operations and communications command center. 

But no matter how hard we work, we will not be as effective as 

we could be without direct communication and information between 

all levels of government. If the established, practiced, and wellfunded statewide emergency response system is circumvented so 

that local governments, emergency managers, and agencies are left 

to rely on guesswork, we will again witness unnecessary suffering, 

confusion, and frustration. City and county governments all across 

America stand willing and able to do whatever is necessary to help 

our neighbors in crisis. Those of us in local government will not 

stand idly by as tragedy unfolds simply because we were not told 

what to do. We will act. We will focus our resources and we will 

figure out what needs to be done and how we need to do it. But 

without coordination with our State and Federal Governments, our 

effectiveness will be limited and the suffering of our friends, our 

neighbors, and our families will be prolonged for no reason. 

The Fayetteville Disaster Relief Center could serve as a model 

for coordinating local resources. Centers such as ours could be strategically located, grounded in public-private partnerships, and be 

ready for activation on a moment’s notice. This center would not 

have been possible without the influx of city resources, the 

logistical assistance from the private sector, the dedication of our 

local volunteers, and the strong positive relationship between county and city officials. It is also important to recognize that such a 

system should already exist within the established emergency response infrastructure. 

Our efforts were successful for three reasons: First, we had a facility in which to work and coordinate the movement of goods and 

services; second, our local leaders, agencies, and nonprofits communicated well; third, our community pulled together to help our 

neighbors in need. 

I would like to thank Fayetteville and Washington County residents for opening their homes and checkbooks and giving their very 

important time. Without dedicated volunteer help, unconditional 

support from our community, and tireless work from our staffs, 

local officials, and first responders, none of our efforts would have 

succeeded. Our goal was to create an operation that would provide 

as much benefit as possible very quickly. My hope is that all government officials share that same goal, as I know you do. 

Thank you all very much for having us out here today. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you very much, Mayor. 

I am struck, as I listened to your testimony, that the experience 

that at least two of you have had with FEMA has been very different, and this is typical of what I am hearing when I talk to State 

and local officials throughout the region. Some communities have 

had a very positive experience with FEMA, have found the agency 

to be responsive, prompt, and effective, while other communities 

have had exactly the opposite experience. They have found that 

21

FEMA officials have been inaccessible, slow to respond, and difficult to deal with. 

This is a key issue for this Committee, and it is helpful to get 

your firsthand experience as communities who have taken in a 

large number of victims of Katrina, but also in some cases as communities who have been directly affected by Katrina’s winds or 

rains. 

I want to ask each of you to give me a better understanding of 

your experience in dealing with FEMA so that I can try to identify 

why various communities have such different experiences. In the 

case of Judge Eckels, I would also like you to let us know whether 

you had communication from FEMA prior to Hurricane Rita, giving 

you advice, asking you whether you needed help in evacuating 

Houston and other areas. So, Judge Eckels, I will start with you. 

You in some ways answered my question in your testimony. But 

what about prior to Hurricane Rita? What was the communication 

like from FEMA? And were you satisfied with it? 

Judge ECKELS. Well, as I mentioned earlier, FEMA has been engaged in our community very actively. We had some miscommunications between the local officials and the Washington officials. In fact, the problems that we had in our shelter operations 

would probably have been tracked back to decisions made in a vacuum, not responding to the needs of the folks at the local community. 

Tom Costello and his FEMA crew in Houston have been wonderful to work with. We have established programs where the county 

can contract for shelter space with various churches and the faithbased community, and the faith-based community has been really 

stepping into the breach in dealing with the evacuees in our region. 

We have great relationships with FEMA and the Federal housing 

officials. In fact, we have a virtual office from New Orleans. Their 

housing office director was bused into Houston as part of the evacuation, so we’ve set up with our folks as well. So between the HUD 

Section 8 and FEMA assistance, housing has worked very well. 

We had an issue with the initial evacuation where we had no 

communications. We have heard some discussion about communications, not just the interoperable communication systems I think 

the mayor here mentioned between radios and other issues, but the 

communications coming from Louisiana and from the FEMA presence in Louisiana were seriously lacking. Whether it was FEMA or 

the State of Louisiana, I don’t know, but as the evacuation proceeded, we had no clue to what was going on. We were expecting 

to have buses relocating people from the Superdome to the Astrodome. That did not happen. Our Texas State troopers showed up 

in Louisiana and there was no escort nor troopers from Louisiana 

to guide them to get to the Superdome. When they got to the Superdome there were no buses. Where that failure occurred, I do not 

know. 

Once they got to Houston though, we had ultimately geared up 

to process close to 40,000 people through our shelters. Many would 

be reunited with family and others would backfill into that space. 

Things worked pretty smoothly with our FEMA folks. They had set 

up, prior to Rita, the first disaster recovery center. They partnered 

with Houston and Harris County, largely because we had been 

22

through this in Tropical Storm Allison before. We had a good working relationship. We know what to expect from FEMA. 

I had a lady on the radio yesterday calling in that had a tree on 

her house, and she was upset. ‘‘Where is FEMA? They are not taking care of me.’’ Well, first where is your insurance company? It is 

a disaster to her, but it is not really where you need those FEMA 

assets, and people do not really understand FEMA. I was listening 

to a sheriff in Louisiana who was complaining that FEMA had sent 

no money. At the same time I had just received an allocation of 

committed funds from our State Emergency Management Office for 

$9.7 million that we could directly draw down to pay for Katrina 

expenses. It was because we had understood the system. We had 

worked the system. We had drilled and trained on the system. Was 

it Lee Trevino who said, ‘‘your luck follows upon how much you 

practice.’’ So we got lucky with FEMA. We practice with them and 

we drill continuously so we know what to expect from them. They 

know what capacity we can deliver. The warehouse that was mentioned here, the City of Houston delivered the warehouse, but 

FEMA set up the Disaster Recovery Center. 

As we get into Rita and the issues with Rita coming in, yes, we 

were in contact with FEMA because they were already there dealing with Katrina, so their officials were there. The Astrodome had 

since been emptied as a shelter space. It now served as the prepositioning location for the Texas Task Force One, FEMA Search 

and Recovery, the Coast Guard, all of the officials to then project 

into East Texas and Louisiana. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Mayor Holden, it is troubling to me that 3 weeks after Hurricane 

Katrina, you are still unable to get the name of a point person from 

FEMA for individual assistance, as well as you pointed out the immediate need for a FEMA coordinator to be located within your 

emergency operation center. So it sounds like you have had a different experience. Could you elaborate on it? 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, I have. I have had a different experience, but 

let me tell you, for the first time last night I got a call—I do not 

know whether they knew I was testifying before you—— [Laughter.] 

Chairman COLLINS. I suspect that might have something to do 

with it. We have found that before when we have held hearings. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Let me go and say that the point person is needed 

because our office actually became an arm of the State, and that 

is not said lightly. Many people could not get through to the State’s 

Office of Emergency Preparedness, and so when they looked for the 

office, then virtually they called our office, so thank God we have 

a staff and all of the players located there, including State Police, 

State services, the local communities, Red Cross, you name it, everybody is there. 

But when those phone calls started coming in, for example, 

Chalmette, Louisiana, which would have normally gone to the 

State, and they are saying, ‘‘Hello, we have people trapped in our 

school building. Can you send somebody to help us?’’ Well, that call 

should have gone to the State, but the call came to us, and we 

therefore had to fill in the void to try to get somebody to save the 

people trapped in the building. 

23

What you saw was just government that was really management 

by crisis would be the best way I could put it. So you saw, for example, the second night after the levy broke or the breach, then we 

started receiving these calls from the State, ‘‘I need 66 buses right 

away. Can you round up these buses to send to New Orleans in 

order to get people evacuated?’’ Well, there was a problem because 

some rescuers were taking fire, I mean gunfire. So I said to the 

gentleman in the governor’s office, ‘‘I cannot in good conscience 

send a bus down to New Orleans unless at some checkpoint you 

put an armed guard on that bus to protect these people’’ because 

I had firefighters willing to volunteer in order to drive the buses 

and help in the evacuation. They waffled on it unfortunately, but 

later they brought in our head of our transportation system to then 

manage the whole bus system. 

Let me go back to FEMA. There were two people initially that 

dealt with FEMA housing, a guy named Brad Gair and Walter 

Melnick. For 2 weeks we met, including up until midnight on the 

Sunday after the storm, thought we had an agreement worked out 

on four proposed sites. None of those sites have been open as of yet. 

In the meantime, Mr. Gair has been relieved of his duties. Now 

here is the guy who worked out the agreement with the parish, and 

all of a sudden FEMA takes this guy out of the picture, and then 

appoints a new guy a week and a half ago, so you do not have any 

communication that is continuous. So you have the other partner 

that is out there trying to put this together, but in light of that 

fact, we got one community where they are putting in infrastructure this week. In that community they are saying, ‘‘We are providing transportation, food, and we will provide security.’’ Well, the 

little community that it is in in our parish, nobody has thoroughly 

communicated with the police chief of the small community or the 

mayor or the fire department, to talk about, well, what happens if 

a fire breaks out in this area, which is just outside of their border? 

Who is going to take care of that? What dollars are you going to 

give us to maybe look at more personnel when you are talking 

about maybe 1,000 or 1,500 more people moving into your community? What are you going to do about police protection when individuals go outside of that confined property? I mean all of those 

things are going on. 

Distribution of dollars. If you looked at the paper last week, yes, 

FEMA gave away a lot of money, but then we have our State Department of Health and Hospitals saying, ‘‘Whoa, you know, you 

have given us all of this money. We cannot spend all of this 

money.’’ Then you have us saying, ‘‘Well, can we just have this little piece here,’’ that is much less than what they gave, ‘‘Can we 

have this little piece because we have some critical infrastructure 

needs because somebody has to begin to not only look at the point 

of impact where the hurricane hits, but they have to look down the 

line to see what else is happening.’’ They did not look far enough 

down the line to look at the impact on other cities. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Mayor. 

My time has expired, so in the second round I will ask the two 

remaining mayors to respond to my question as well. 

Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

24

Thanks to the witnesses, very helpful testimony. It strikes me 

that part of what we are going to find out in our deliberations and 

want to help clarify is something that Judge Eckels said, which is 

that there is a lot of confusion about what FEMA can and cannot 

do. We have a lot of concerns about what they should have done 

and did not do, but as in your story, there are some things that 

people should not be turning to FEMA for. They should turn to 

their insurance companies, for instance, or themselves. 

I must admit that I share Senator Collins’ concern in Baton 

Rouge, so obviously the recipient of an enormous number of evacuees from New Orleans, that with this period of time up until last 

week that you did not have a designated FEMA contact. I wonder 

if part of the problem here—Judge Eckels, if I get it correctly you 

have a FEMA regional headquarters in Houston or am I wrong? 

Judge ECKELS. I do not know the regional headquarters. I know 

Tom Costello shares our Emergency Operations Center at TranStar. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So he is right there. 

Judge ECKELS. He would drill and practice in the offices with our 

folks, and anything that comes up——

Senator LIEBERMAN. All the time. 

Judge ECKELS. Not all the time, but when we have an emergency 

they are there. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Not true in Baton Rouge? 

Mr. HOLDEN. No, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I thought I heard you say, Mayor Holden, 

that there was a point at which you were dealing with somebody 

from FEMA, Mr. Gair, on housing sites, and that began before 

Katrina hit? 

Mr. HOLDEN. No, sir, after. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. After. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. But he was not the designated contact for 

individual assistance that you just got last night or at least——

Mr. HOLDEN. That is correct, he was not. All they dealt with was 

housing. They primarily said, OK, we will go out and evaluate 

sites. They began to sit with us and say, well, what are some potential sites? We talked about the potential sites, brought ministers 

in in the areas affected so they too could be a part of it. And they 

made commitments to us including——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes, but nothing has happened. 

Mr. HOLDEN. No, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Just to clarify it for the record and maybe 

for all of us, on the question of the designated FEMA representative for individual assistance, you really mean that, that there is 

no single FEMA person in Baton Rouge for the—how many is it, 

200,000 evacuees? 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Do the 200,000 evacuees know where to go 

to find out what FEMA can do for them? 

Mr. HOLDEN. And that is where the other breakdown came. They 

did not know where to go. It was not communicated to people who 

were living with other families. It was not communicated in the 

shelters. So when they said, ‘‘OK, we will open a disaster recovery 

25

center,’’ what they did was virtually almost start a riot because 

there is no contact with law enforcement to say, OK we will be 

opening up this recovery center, and therefore we will need X 

amount of law enforcement there. But then if it would just go to 

a system, maybe the first 3 days, just do A–B in the alphabet or 

give some people a numbering system, because what you have are 

elderly people, people with young children, and all of these people 

standing out in lines all day. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. So that the 200,000 evacuees, if they 

want to figure out, totally dislocated from their homes presumably, 

most of them from New Orleans, what kind of help FEMA could 

give them, there is no central place that they go to, so what, they 

call the FEMA line? 

Mr. HOLDEN. And that is where the problems continue to mount 

because nobody can get through. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Heard about that too. I am interested—correct me if these numbers are not right—what I have heard is that 

you have 200,000 additional people, evacuees in Baton Rouge on 

top of a previous population of about 400,000? 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I am really struck that of that number only 

8,000 to 11,000 were initially living in shelters, and that is now 

down to about 7,200. Is that correct? 

Mr. HOLDEN. That is correct, because some people now——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Where did everybody else go? 

Mr. HOLDEN. Well, some relatives have come in and found their 

loved ones, and we have had some people now that have also migrated to other shelters. We have had people trying to send us people, but people who also have gone to other shelters. So you have 

a decrease in the number of people actually in the shelters because 

even in the faith-based community where they had shelters, they 

also began to place people, but some people actually took up employers on the job opportunities to go to other States, and we do 

not know exactly what that number is. 

But now what we are watching is people are now trying to bring 

people closer to New Orleans. The closest big point to New Orleans 

is Baton Rouge, so they are bringing people back into Baton Rouge 

even today. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Judge Eckels, on this specific point which 

is—because you are the head of the two areas that have the largest 

number of evacuees——

Judge ECKELS. We had about 200,000 as well in the Houston 

area. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I know you have had cooperation and coordination with FEMA on different parts of preparation and response, but is there, to your knowledge, a designated FEMA representative for the evacuees, displaced people to go to to figure 

out——

Judge ECKELS. FEMA has opened a disaster recovery center. It 

was opened much more quickly this time than it was in the previous Tropical Storm Allison experience. We went in—the mayor 

actually seized a facility. Later it was released through the State, 

and it had several hundred thousand square feet. We have park 

and ride service, but we only had one central location. Ultimately 

26

we would like to see more store front offices around as well, but 

people can go to that location. They know where to go. We had 

similar issues during some of the shelter operations with FEMA 

announcing, mostly from Washington programs, and causing concern, such as crowd control issues because we were not able to 

meet those expectations. But, yes, we do have a big center in Houston. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Let me ask you this final question. You 

talked about one of the reasons Houston did well is that you had 

a plan. Was it a plan that was constructed in the immediate time 

before Rita hit or Katrina hit, or was this a longer-term plan, and 

if it was longer term, to what extent did FEMA or any other Federal agency help you construct the plan? 

Judge ECKELS. The plan started in 1995, shortly after I was 

elected as county judge, working with now three different mayors 

going through the process. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Was it in response to a particular crisis or 

were you just——

Judge ECKELS. I could not get to a speech during my campaign 

in 1994 because we did not know what the roadway conditions 

were, but ultimately it was Hurricane Mitch going through the Yucatan, Andrew coming through Florida, and we modeled what those 

would do in our community. 

As we looked at those various issues and what impact that would 

have, we started developing this plan. After September 11, substantial Federal funds were put into the National Plan Model to 

beef up local capacity, to increase our ability to deal with the surge, 

to deal with the training. In fact, our county is about the same population as Connecticut, so we have the resources and ability to absorb some folks. But it is still building that plan substance with the 

local officials so that we can deal with that, and the county, the 34 

cities in our county, the eight-county region, we practice every year 

for this, as part of that national plan and with those training dollars that come in. 

Now, what we do when we practice for a hurricane coming in, 

we throw a WMD in the ship channel so we can get some extra 

funding for it, but we do plan and practice every year. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I hear you. Thank you. I want to come back 

to that. My time is up. 

Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Senator Carper. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER 

Senator CARPER. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Let me say to our witnesses, we have a lot of hearings here on 

Capitol Hill during the course of the year, and occasionally have 

witnesses who just do an exceptionally great job in presenting information we need to know. This is about as impressive a group as 

I have seen and heard. We thank you for being here. We thank you 

for your testimony. We really thank the folks that you are here 

representing for the extraordinary good work that they have done 

in their communities, for a lot of people that they in many cases 

never knew and otherwise would not have known but for these 

tragedies. 

27

Each of you have covered a whole lot of territory. I read through 

part of your testimony as you were going along and tried to listen 

to it. In terms of what we need to do, it is not overwhelming, but 

there is a lot to digest and to understand and to assimilate and to 

try to put into some kind of plan of action. 

You have all been working and dealing with these issues for 

weeks now. I am going to ask you to put yourself in our shoes for 

a moment, take off your hats, put on our hats, and be thinking as 

what you have each presented to us is what needs to be done, and 

if you were in our shoes, what are some of the things that you 

would put at the top of our to-do list? 

Judge ECKELS. Specifically directed? 

Senator CARPER. That is for anyone who would like to lead on. 

Can be a judge or not. 

Judge ECKELS. Senator, the mayors here from the other jurisdictions that have been more directly affected might have some specific interests. 

Again, as we look at the healthcare issues, it is developing shortterm solutions to reimburse our immediate costs. FEMA has told 

us they will do that, but some of the costs we are not sure of is 

the impact that we have from the Katrina evacuees on our community. We have had, again, several hundred thousand come into an 

overly stressed system already, one that has a large population of 

uninsured, uncompensated care, undocumented immigrant population in the Houston area. So there is a lot of stress on the system 

already. 

When you add in the most medically needy populations from 

Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coming on through into the 

Houston area as well, people who may have had no one to help 

them at home, we see a tremendous increase in mental health 

cases, substance abuse cases, folks who have chronic illnesses such 

as diabetes and other chronic illnesses. Of the chronic illnesses, we 

had one gentleman I was talking to about needing a kidney transplant. He was on the list in New Orleans, now in our community. 

So disproportionately we will have received a large number of folks 

coming into the community. 

We need additional assistance for things like our federally qualified health centers, the other clinic operations, the hospital district 

and the way funds are allocated to pay for uncompensated care. 

The key is that in these areas there will be many folks who will 

relocate. They have over a year, as Mayor Holden, or Mayor 

Massengill mentioned, looking for shelters, perhaps they are talking about trailers to get back into Louisiana. A lot of folks are not 

going to do that. There are no jobs. There may be nothing to go 

home to. 

The Washington Post poll recently showed that close to half of 

the folks were going to stay in Texas and the majority of those 

were going to stay in Houston. So there will be tens of thousands 

of new residents. Not all of them will be healthy. They will be the 

medically needy who are there. So we have a huge issue with 

healthcare. 

I think in the longer term you have an issue of transportation 

and infrastructure on how you move people around, and I am 

thinking in terms of the interstate system. We are celebrating next 

28

year the 50th anniversary of the interstate system. We ought to 

look at how we make that a more robust system to be able to handle these kind of mass evacuations, not so much in massive capacity, but something that makes economic sense as you link the 

major economic and population centers along the Gulf Coast so 

that we can move more easily between them in those mass evacuation types of instances. 

FEMA is probably more of an administrative issue, and you will 

get into what failures might have occurred around the country, but 

the structure is there. The key I think from your perspective is to 

not fall into the trap of building a Federal first response that says 

you are going to come in here and solve the problems. The key is 

to have Baton Rouge and the other cities robust and strong and 

well coordinated so that they can respond. And then you can come 

in with your assets so you do not get failures in some spots. 

The President’s national plan that they came up with working together with the Congress on homeland security, as it was created, 

was a good plan and I believe it will be something that should be 

strengthened and supported with the overlay of the national assets. 

The Army coming in with traffic direction, with fuel trucks, with 

water, a quick response when a local community such as Baton 

Rouge or New Orleans is overwhelmed, even Houston could be 

overwhelmed. Had that storm hit Houston, it would have been 

massive. We had 700,000 customers lose power, probably a million 

and a half people without power just in the gale force winds coming 

through from Rita. It would have been much more dramatic had 

we had a direct hit. 

Senator CARPER. Thanks. Mayor Holden. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you, Senator, and thank you for your remarks as well. I hope they are listening back home. 

Senator CARPER. I bet they are. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Let me just say that there are a number of things. 

From the medical perspective, we found an active case of tuberculosis in one of the centers. That person may have been there 2 

weeks. We do not know how many people have been exposed. So 

there is a medical side that has to be looked at somewhere down 

the line even if it is like the medical alert bracelet, or something 

needs to be set up that if a person is undergoing some type of treatment, we need to be able to identify what has to be done to make 

sure that person is not integrated into a population that could 

spread a disease. 

The second thing is that when you are doing evacuation, there 

has to be a system set up whereby you cannot put people who have 

to have medical assistance on the same bus as people who need to 

go into a main shelter. There has to be some way of separation. 

Right now, I think as far as our area, we are going to go back and 

do an assessment of the vulnerable population through census 

tracks, find out who are people in nursing homes, where the hospitals are, and then from there we will begin to look at maybe can 

we set up a shelter that is closer to the census track, rather than 

taking people across town. We are working on that. 

We have a problem in our school system. A couple of weeks ago, 

again, a child shows up at school. That child, nobody knew that 

child’s medical record. The child shows up at school, you have a 

29

1The information from NACo submitted by Judge Eckels appears in the Appendix on page 

80. 

nurse that is there, but a lot of those nurses go from one school 

to another. There has to be some check and balance as to the medical records of those children, again, before they enter that population. 

The transportation aspect, as Judge Eckels has mentioned, you 

have to look at mass transit, how we can move people around. You 

have to look at the evacuation routes and what else can be done 

in order to enhance moving people from Point A to Point B quicker. 

Then the other part is this: We have talked about communications. Communications is a must, compatible systems, that is a 

must, nonnegotiable to any of us because of the necessity. From 

there, it is then, how do I go in—as I walked in the shelters people 

are asking the question, ‘‘When am I going to be able to move out 

of here into some temporary shelter?’’ There has to be some clear 

and defined timeline to tell people when they can look to be moved 

out of those shelters because the other thing that is happening is 

whereas you do not see a lot of people complaining, but the longer 

people stay in the shelters, the less patient they become. We have 

to begin to look at those needs and address them, and then see 

what else you can do while they are in the shelter to make sure 

that they are comfortable. 

Senator CARPER. My time has expired. I am going to ask, if I 

could, for Mayor Massengill and Mayor Coody, if you would not 

mind responding for the record, I would very much appreciate that. 

I would just say to my colleagues, I am struck again, especially 

listening to the comments of Mayor Holden talking about the medical issues that were faced, and comparing the situation that we 

had with veterans who were being treated by the VA. For almost 

every one of them we had an electronic medical record, and as they 

were moved from facility to facility, from State to State, wherever 

they went we knew what medicines they were taking, we knew 

what their MRIs, their lab tests were, their x-rays, and we had just 

a much better opportunity, as they were received at a new location, 

how to treat them appropriately. I think Secretary Leavitt has said 

if we ever needed a demonstration as to why information technology needs to be harnessed and implemented in the provision of 

health care, we have seen it right here. And I am just reminded 

of that, particularly in the comments of Mayor Holden. 

Judge ECKELS. Senator, Secretary Leavitt came to Houston. In 

my written testimony we talk about them and some of the things 

they did. They did a great job for us there. I would like also to submit to you in written form from the National Association of Counties (NACo) who has gone through these issues and asked for specific items. They asked for $300 billion, and I will not personally 

vouch for that number because I do not know where that came 

from, but I am on the NACo Homeland Security Task Force Committee and operationally I will give this to the Committee as well 

as part of our written comment.1

Chairman COLLINS. Without objection, it will be included in the 

record, as will your full written statement. 

Senator CARPER. Our thanks again to each of you. 

30

Chairman COLLINS. Senator Pryor. 

Senator PRYOR. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Mayor Coody, I know that in your testimony a few moments ago 

you mentioned the city and the surrounding area took in a lot of 

evacuees, but also you set up a center there in Fayetteville, and I 

would like to ask you about the Fayetteville Distribution Center, 

and first why you did that, and then how you did that. 

Mr. COODY. Thank you very much. As soon as the disaster started to become apparent, and we saw what it was that everyone was 

having to deal with, we in Fayetteville knew that we needed to do 

whatever we could to help alleviate as much suffering as possible. 

We looked at all of our assets, and the best asset we had was this 

giant defunct warehouse that we knew we could turn into a really 

productive center for collection, distribution, and for offices. Whatever we needed to use it for, it was at our disposal. Of course it 

had been completely shut down. The electricity had been completely gutted from it, and we had to work with the utility companies, Ozarks Electric, the phone companies, to reinstall electricity 

and phones and all of that during the holiday weekend, which was 

not easy, but they worked with us, and we got it done. 

We wanted to do everything we could, and that was the best tool 

we had at our disposal. I would like to, if I could—I know that Senator Collins had a question about FEMA, and also Senator Carper 

had a question about what we think an appropriate response would 

be. Would it be OK to answer that as well? 

Senator PRYOR. Sure, please do. 

Mr. COODY. Thank you. These gentlemen have been able to discuss FEMA on the macro level. In Fayetteville I would like to discuss just for one minute FEMA on the micro level. 

What we experienced, even from our small perspective—we did 

not have the big needs that Baton Rouge, Houston, Mississippi, 

and Louisiana had. We did not have the tremendous influx. We 

had a lot of folks around Fayetteville, and they used Fayetteville 

as a hub. Fayetteville is the largest city in Northwest Arkansas, 

and we had a lot of church camps in our region that took in a lot 

of folks. 

It was 21⁄2 weeks before we ever heard from FEMA. We kept 

hearing rumors that they were in the area, but we never heard 

from them, a county judge and myself, we never heard from FEMA 

at all. We knew they were around because we kept getting little 

snippets of information that they had gone here and they had done 

this over there, but we could not communicate. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. What were they doing? In other words, what 

did the rumors suggest the FEMA folks were doing? 

Mr. COODY. Well, one of our largest encampments is at Siloam 

Springs, 30 miles west of Fayetteville. And we understood that 

FEMA had gone over there to register people, but for some reason 

had been turned away, and we were not quite sure if that could 

possibly be true. So when we finally did get with FEMA, they came 

to our facility well after it was established. Five or six FEMA people came in, good folks. They were firemen. They really want to do 

a good job. They were completely out of the loop, and they were as 

frustrated as anybody else I have ever seen in the whole process. 

31

I asked was it true that—was this the team? Were you the guys 

who got turned away at Siloam Springs? If so, what happened? The 

leader of that team said, ‘‘We do not know. We do not know who 

that team is. It is a different team.’’ I said, ‘‘Can you call them to 

see who, what happened?’’ He said, ‘‘We do not know who they are 

or how to get in touch with them.’’ This was the second FEMA 

team in our area. 

These gentlemen had been sent here from Rhode Island. Most of 

the team was from Rhode Island, firemen from Rhode Island. They 

complained that they had been in Atlanta for 3 or 4 days with sensitivity training, when they really wanted to go out and do their 

jobs. 

So we visited about that for a while. It was clear that while they 

were being sent from Rhode Island down to Fayetteville to basically hand out pamphlets and do a little bit of paperwork, which 

our Red Cross folks essentially did as well, we had firemen in Fayetteville that could have done that job just as easily and they were 

already there on site. It only took one person to do it, not 5 or 6. 

Whereas a lot of these gentlemen had too little FEMA response too 

late, we almost had too much too late because these gentlemen did 

not need to be in Fayetteville. They were great guys, but we had 

people on the ground that could have done the job for them. They 

should have been sent to the regions that needed them the most, 

and they should have been able to communicate between teams. 

That was one thing that was kind of bothersome to us. 

As far as what we could do—what my perspective is that I think 

FEMA could do to make its job more effective is that I have always 

believed that any program or process will succeed or fail based on 

the leadership in that program. I think that from the very top to 

the very bottom, speaking of the micro level, there needs to be a 

system put in place where we hire the most qualified, most knowledgeable people for the job that want to do the job and put them 

in a position where they can lead, and to work closely with local 

municipalities and the counties because we are where a lot of the 

rubber met the road in this whole disaster, and for the localities 

to be left out of the loop, I think, is a major oversight that could 

have avoided a lot of suffering from folks. 

Senator PRYOR. Thank you. Mayor Coody, one of the things you 

did in setting up this center, this distribution center, is you 

reached out to the community and to the resources in the community, and given the fact that Wal-Mart is some 15 miles from the 

city courthouse, you talked to Wal-Mart and they helped you organize this distribution center. Then how did you use the distribution 

center? How was that actually used? 

Mr. COODY. Well, there were huge loading dock areas and big 

storage areas because it had been a big food processing factory, the 

Tyson Corporation. Once we started seeing that we were going to 

have this enormous influx of material, we knew that there was no 

one better in the world for distribution and collection than WalMart Corporation. So we made some calls and they immediately 

sent down some folks, and they showed us how to arrange a warehouse and they made it spin like a top. So we called on our private 

partners, private business partners in the region to help us do this. 

32

And with their help and the volunteers that we called in, we 

were able to have a lot of volunteers unload these semis that were 

pulling up. They sorted all this material that came in, and it was 

a broad range of material, from microwaves to baby clothes to 

wheelchairs, you name it, we had it. It was all sorted by gender, 

by size, by function. We threw about 6 percent of it away because 

a lot of people just cleaned out their closets and cleaned out their 

garages. Those we took to the dumpster, but 94 percent of pretty 

much everything we got is usable and folded, and it is palletized, 

and it is labeled to where when you get a pallet of material, you 

know that it is a boy’s baby clothes, or it is medium size women’s 

wear. It is all folded, ready to go. It is water, it is baby food. 

We were able to work with—we did not get much help. Now, 

Congressman Boozman, you have been very helpful with this, but 

we have not had any communications from the State or Federal 

level about the needs in these areas. I would love to send what remains of our product—it is good material—to these areas that need 

it in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. But for us to actually 

communicate with these folks because communication lines have 

been down, to find out what their needs are and how we can get 

it there is a problem. 

We asked J.B. Hunt and other trucking firms, can you please donate your time and some drivers to load up this trailer that we 

have loaded up and ready to go, and take it to a particular town 

in Louisiana? And they said, sure, they would come pick them up, 

and they dropped them off. 

There was one gentleman who came in from Kansas City. He had 

a semi-load of water and baby food, and we got a call from Bogalusa, Mississippi, that said, ‘‘We need water and we need baby 

food.’’ And Susan Thomas, who ran a spectacular program, was 

about to go to Wal-Mart to buy some stuff out of her own paycheck 

to send down there because the stories were so heart-rending. As 

she was leaving this semi pulled in, said, ‘‘I have a load of baby 

food and water, and I am told to get off the road because I am overloaded. Everybody was telling me I cannot park there. They said 

try you guys.’’ Soon as we saw what we had, we gave him a map 

and we said, ‘‘This is where you need to go,’’ and we sent them on 

their way. 

As they pulled into Bogalusa and off-loaded food, baby food, adult 

food, and everything else, people started opening packages and eating food directly off the truck because they had not had any food 

in 3 days. 

To know that we had material sitting there ready to go and no 

knowledge of how to get it there and no real infrastructure to get 

it there, it broke our hearts. 

Senator PRYOR. Thank you, Mayor. 

Mr. COODY. I hope I answered your question. 

Senator PRYOR. You did. It was fantastic. I need to mention that 

Congressman Boozman, who is from the 3rd District in Arkansas 

and represents this area, was here a few moments ago, but he had 

to go to one of his committee hearings. 

Also, Senator Lieberman, to follow up on what you said, when I 

was touring the camps, and other places in Arkansas, I heard that 

story more than once, where mostly firemen from other States had 

33

gone through some FEMA training for maybe 3 days in Atlanta, if 

I remember correctly. Then they came to Arkansas, and they wanted to volunteer, they wanted to help, they wanted to be hands on. 

And all they were allowed to do is go around and hand out flyers 

with a toll free number and a website. 

In fact, in one camp in the other part of the State, they told me 

that when FEMA finally did show up, everybody was angry because that is all they had to offer: A website and a flyer. They did 

not have any real resources that they could give, so clearly we need 

to look at that and continue to work through that. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Mayor, thank you for answering my question so well. And thank 

you for doing it on Senator Pryor’s time. [Laughter.] 

I particularly appreciated that also. Senator Akaka. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

Mayor Coody, I thank you for your testimony, and all of you, welcome to the Committee. 

Mayor Coody, you talked about the importance of strong and sustainable communications—all of you did—in your response to the 

emergency. This was a major problem on the Federal level, but it 

appears you had some communication problems at the local level, 

as you have stated. I would appreciate it, Mayor, if you could explain how you solved this issue at the local level, and also ask the 

others to make comments about that. 

Mr. COODY. How we solved it on the local level was that I had 

the phone number for the county judge and the local emergency responder, John Luther, for the county. And we just stayed in contact. We also knew the local folks that worked with the Red Cross 

and the Salvation Army. Department of Human Services, all the 

county agencies were under the county judge and the nonprofits 

and the service organizations. We had access to everybody because 

we had each other’s phone numbers, and we were able to communicate with the town through the media. Of course since we were 

not damaged by the storm, all of our telephone communications infrastructure was still in place. 

But it was as if there was a wall around Washington County in 

Fayetteville from the outside world. We did not hear anything, and 

that was the most disturbing thing to us because we had to keep 

our knees flexed and just prepare for the unknown. We had no idea 

what was coming our way, what was happening. We would hear, 

‘‘Well, there are 9,000 more people coming in,’’ and they would not 

show up, and then all of a sudden we would look up and there 

would be people coming from a direction we had not expected. We 

just never got any solid information. And that continues to this 

day. We still are not in the loop on what exactly is going on. It has 

been almost a month now. 

We have had plenty of opportunities to fine tune our own internal services communications, but we still have a lot of work to do 

outside our locality about how we can better communicate. 

Senator AKAKA. Mayor Massengill. 

Mr. MASSENGILL. We had a meeting every morning. We had the 

supervisors from the county. We had the city officials that would 

34

meet. We had the department heads. We would then try to get the 

word out to the people as best we could. When we got electricity, 

which began coming back late Tuesday, and on Wednesday after 

the hurricane we went on the radio every opportunity we could to 

let people know what to expect. We tried to keep people well informed. We had trouble with the phone. Our cell phones, it is 

unreal how many calls—I know on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, for 

instance, normally they will have probably several hundred thousand calls in a day, and they had 5 million during this particular 

time. So they were overworked. But we did try to communicate by 

cell phone as much as possible, and got on the radio as soon as we 

could. 

Senator AKAKA. Mayor Holden. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. We basically had to take the situation into 

our own hands, and we went in and took the calls. We had all 

agencies around the table in our Office of Emergency Preparedness. 

We do hourly briefings when we are in the crisis mode, try to find 

out exactly what is going on from each agency, get their report, and 

then map out an orderly response to that. Where we found a lot 

of problems, again, came on the medical side, whereby at LSU they 

set up a center to triage patients, and let me commend the Army 

staff and the medical staff from the Federal Government and LSU, 

working together to try to take care of a number of people whereby 

they converted the Pete Maravich Center into a hospital. 

All of these individuals worked well together, but again, the communication came the same as the gentleman here, is, OK, there is 

a bus load of people that just showed up, and how do you actually 

get those people in without any notification of what you will need 

in order to take care of patients, some who have been virtually 

starving for 3 and 4 days, many elderly. What do you do? So that 

communication there was really a major problem. So what you had 

were professionals making the assessment on the spot, in spite of 

line or breakdown in communications, they made very good moves 

on the spot and were able to save a lot of people based on their 

wisdom and their efficiency. 

Senator AKAKA. Judge Eckels. 

Judge ECKELS. Two things that we did in Houston, maybe, a little different. We were operating a joint emergency management 

center through our TranStar operation. It is a joint project of Harris County, the City of Houston, Texas Department of Transportation, and the Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority. We 

do traffic management daily in that facility, and in emergency situations we also had representatives from FEMA. During Rita we 

also had a representative from the U.S. Army and from the State’s 

Division of Emergency Management. We have all of those folks in 

that office. 

During Katrina we had a meeting every morning at 8 a.m. at the 

Reliant Park Complex with the mayor and I together with the various providers such as Guy Rankin and John Walsh from the housing departments, Harris County and the City of Houston, respectively. On the medical side, Dr. Palacio from the Harris County 

Health Department from our hospital district, Dr. Maddox of Ben 

Taub Hospital, and Dr. Persse from the City of Houston. We had 

interfaith ministries, Catholic charities through Archbishop 

35

Fiorenza from Houston. We had representatives from the Second 

Baptist Church, and from various African-American coalitions of 

churches from the faith-based community that provided a lot of 

services. And Senators Cornyn and Hutchison both had representatives there to meet every morning at 8 o’clock throughout the disaster to avoid exactly the problems that are here. Just a communication fusion center, if you will, where we could help each other 

and share the information. 

The one thing that you could probably do here more than anything else to help with some of the technical sides of the communication from our side is to provide funding for our Harris County 

Communication Radio System. It is an 800-megahertz trunk system. It is a ‘‘Smart Zone’’ Motorola system. It has over 700 entities 

participating so we can share and build a dynamic communication 

system for the community, with one exception—the City of Houston. Their airport system is on, but we could use some grant funding to help them get their police and fire departments on the system. It is expensive to move tens of thousands of radios from the 

police and fire onto our regional system. We need grant funding for 

the City of Houston, it would also be very helpful to open up those 

700-megahertz channels so we can get the digital and streaming 

video as well, it would be very helpful. From a Federal perspective, 

those two areas are things you could do to help us. But the mechanisms are in place for these joint centers for communications 

among jurisdictions. And the FEMA representative that had my 

cell number called me yesterday morning to give me an update. 

Senator AKAKA. Madam Chairman, let me ask one question just 

to finish this with Mayor Coody. 

You talked about FEMA, but a question in my mind is, if you 

could answer briefly, why did FEMA leave after 2 days at your relief center? 

Mr. COODY. I can answer that briefly. I do not know the answer 

to that question. [Laughter.] 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator. Senator Levin 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LEVIN 

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

First going back to your description of the needs in the communication area, Judge Eckels, would those needs be there with or 

without this current situation? 

Judge ECKELS. Yes. 

Senator LEVIN. So that is an ongoing——

Judge ECKELS. We have built a system that can be scaled up and 

respond to other disasters. When the Shuttle Columbia crashed 

and during the recovery efforts in East Texas, we projected our 

communication system up there and worked with NASA to use our 

system for helping that recovery effort. So, yes, we do use this on 

a daily basis, and it improves not only our capacity but our potential as well. You cannot build a system for a disaster that might 

come once every 10 or 20 or 40 years. You can build a sustainable 

system that works every day and can be scaled up and respond 

when you have this kind of mass disaster. 

36

Senator LEVIN. The effort to get what is called interoperable communications around here, which is being led by this Committee 

under the leadership of our Chairman and Ranking Member, is a 

major initiative that is going on here, and I think that would be 

true in all your communities, that there is the need for that kind 

of communications equipment, which is obviously more desperately 

needed in a situation where there is an emergency, but is needed 

on a day-to-day basis. 

Judge ECKELS. We have today, Senator, over 700 agencies that 

have joined together. It is not just Harris County. We form the 

backbone for a 15 county regional communication system now. 

They are all on the system. If we need to set up special talk groups, 

we can do that dynamically through our central locations. The only 

hole in it right now is the big hole of the City of Houston. They 

are patched into the system, but that is a big expense for the city, 

and on their behalf I would mention that. 

Senator LEVIN. This testimony hopefully will help us get this 

Committee’s initiative acted upon. 

Let me ask each of you the question about what the expectation 

is in terms of reimbursement, if you have not covered that area already. Are you given a description of precisely what expenditures 

will be reimbursed and which ones will not? Do you have that in 

writing or is that on a website somewhere? 

Judge ECKELS. We have a list that we got from FEMA on that, 

and when there are questions, they have been very flexible on how 

we can deal with those issues. They have been very clear on what 

is reimbursable and what is not. 

We did accelerate the housing issues, for example. The city went 

forward and issued housing vouchers, assuming the paperwork 

would catch up. 

Senator LEVIN. There is no ambiguity in your mind as to what 

you are reimbursed for and what you are not? 

Judge ECKELS. Small ambiguities but not serious. 

Senator LEVIN. Mayor Holden. 

Mr. HOLDEN. We have submitted the early documentation behind 

Hurricane Katrina, have not received a dollar as of yet. 

Senator LEVIN. In addition to not receiving the money is there 

any ambiguity as to what you are eligible for reimbursement for? 

Mr. HOLDEN. I think the judge brought it out earlier, in regards 

to people who now would be performing one task, but due to the 

influx of people coming in, they have to do multi-tasking, as to 

whether or not some of those charges should be taken care of as 

well. 

Senator LEVIN. Is there any other ambiguity other than that one? 

Mr. MASSENGILL. There is some ambiguity. The city cleaned up 

a tremendous amount of debris. We cleaned up in excess of 10,000 

cubic yards of debris. We are told that we will only be paid for 

overtime hours for that, yet we needed to get that cleaned up so 

that school buses could travel the streets, so that the streets could 

be made two-lane rather than one lane. We now have FEMA and 

the Corps of Engineers—and by the way, the Corps of Engineers 

has been extremely professional in the way they have approached 

this. 

37

They have come in to handle the overall cleanup of the remainder of the debris, which is over 10 times what we have. But we 

cannot understand why we are only being reimbursed for overtime 

hours when we have put in a tremendous amount of effort to get 

our city operable. 

Senator LEVIN. We can forward these ambiguities to FEMA and 

ask for clarification and get you their answers so we can carry on 

that dialogue with them. 

Mayor Coody. 

Mr. COODY. I have the same response. 

Senator LEVIN. We read that there are—I do not know how many 

thousand adults who are—the number we have been given is that 

people are looking for 4,300 children. We are trying to figure out 

how many children are out there—I am trying to figure out anyway—the number of children who do not have a guardian with 

them or a parent with them or somebody with them who can identify them, who knows who they are. In your communities, are there 

children who are not with a parent or a guardian or some adult 

who knows who they are? 

Let me start, Judge, with you, just kind of a yes or no, and if 

so, how many. 

Judge ECKELS. I cannot answer. I know that we did initially 

have that problem. In New Orleans, as they were leaving, they 

were splitting families up and putting them on buses, which was 

very traumatic. I have no idea why that loading was done in that 

method. I cannot tell you any numbers that we do have now, but 

I will get that information for you. We have done that match, and 

I will check and see if there are any left. 

Senator LEVIN. It is amazing to me that we cannot get this information yet. 

Judge ECKELS. There needs to be a single point to have all that 

gathered, and there is no single national point for that. 

Senator LEVIN. We have tried to find that point, and it is hard 

for us to imagine why there is not a point. We know how many 

adults there are that say they are missing children, but we cannot 

find how many children there are that are not connected to an 

adult. 

Mayor Holden. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir, my response is the same as the judge. We 

know that there are some, especially in the Red Cross shelters at 

Southern University and at the River Center, but again, the numbers, because you have the faith-based shelters as well, so we do 

not know exactly how many children are without a parent at those 

shelters. 

Senator LEVIN. That are unidentified. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator LEVIN. So you have unidentified children in your community. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator LEVIN. OK. 

Mr. MASSENGILL. We do not have. 

Senator LEVIN. Mayor Coody. 

Mr. COODY. Not that I know of. 

38

Senator LEVIN. So there in those two communities at least, if you 

could get us those numbers. 

Judge ECKELS. We will look into that. Our Children’s Protective 

Services office is getting that. 

Senator LEVIN. We have tried to get this from the Missing Children Office as well, and they do not have——

Judge ECKELS. There may be some that have not been identified, 

but I will find out for you, Senator. 

Senator LEVIN. All right, that will be helpful. I am out of time, 

thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator. Senator Warner. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR WARNER 

Senator WARNER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

My deep respects to each of you for your public service, some of 

you under most extraordinary circumstances. By coincidence, the 

four of us here are on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The 

government, our government, the Federal Government, is currently 

reviewing the framework of laws that enable our President, at 

times, to exercise authority with the Federal forces at his disposal, 

namely, the regular Army as opposed to the National Guard, to assist and give support when crisis situations descend upon our Nation. The study embraces the concept of use of weapons of mass destruction, which we all pray will never occur, but we must be prepared, to situations not unlike what we experienced with Katrina, 

where local law enforcement is simply overwhelmed or the chain of 

command in local law enforcement breaks down, and whether or 

not to provide clarity of law, Federal, to give our President, whoever it might be, the authority to utilize the military in what we 

call law enforcement roles. 

I am not a proponent of any particular move at the moment, but 

I have undertaken to encourage that we study it. But we need the 

input from persons like yourself as to what you have experienced 

in terms of the breakdown of law enforcement, usually in the immediate aftermath of whatever tragedy occurs, and whether or not 

the ability of the regular military, should they be brought to bear 

in a crisis situation, should have or have not the ability to work 

with local law enforcement in actually the arrest, detention, and 

otherwise of those who have the terrific misfortune of trying to engage in crime in the wake of such situations. 

Now, among you, anyone who would like to volunteer an opinion? 

We have a great respect for sovereignty of a governor, the local 

governments, State and local governments, and this is a question 

of the sovereign jurisdiction of the State. But there are situations 

in which that authority might have to be exercised, and it indeed 

could be some of your fellow office holders in other areas of the 

country or your area might wish it to be there. 

Judge ECKELS. Senator, I have had some chance to comment on 

this in the past, only to say that I think that there may be a role 

for that, but you should guard that it is not a trigger pulled by 

DOD, but by the President or Homeland Security. The key is still 

that the officials on the ground need to know and need to be built 

into a more robust system. The National Response Plan can work 

unless it is an overriding disaster and that plan is gone. When it 

39

comes to the issue of sovereignty, that is something that endangers 

other folks. 

We have, again, potential for Federal assistance in our evacuation plans, which occurs over vast distances, when you are going 

hundreds of miles, and a small-town police officer or the mayor decides he does not want all those folks from Houston coming 

through his town, and tries to route them around or just to the 

traffic light. In theory, the State could over-ride that decision, but 

if it was across the border, in Louisiana or Arkansas, they could 

still be backing up people for hundreds of miles. 

I could have used a Federal support for a situation like that, and 

we did in fact have the Army in our emergency operations center. 

Senator WARNER. Is that National Guard or regular force? 

Judge ECKELS. Regular Army. And we brought in fuel trucks and 

support for our office operations from the regular Army refueling 

trucks that were available at one of the bases in our community. 

At the same time, we also had National Guard presence as well, 

but it was U.S. Army personnel that were in our building. We had 

a 2-star, I think, in the building initially and a 3-star came in 

eventually. 

But ultimately I share your concerns about sovereignty and the 

ability of local officials to control the situation. 

Senator WARNER. No, sovereignty of the States. 

Judge ECKELS. Yes, sovereignty of the States, over how we operate. But at the same time, in an overwhelming natural disaster or 

terrorist attack, there may well be a place for Federal assistance. 

I would just encourage you, as you are doing so, to have controls 

in place so that you are not having people who think they know 

better what to do locally than the people locally might know to do 

in dealing with their particular situations. 

Senator WARNER. The input from people who have had the experience, such as each of you, is very important as this decision is 

being made in our Committee. Should the Administration come forward with some revisions to—they are very old laws, one called 

Posse Comitatus, which is from the 1870s, and the other is the Insurrection Act. At least we ought to rename that, that is at a minimum. 

Judge ECKELS. I have had a few of those on the Commissioners 

Court. [Laughter.] 

Senator WARNER. I just think that we have to be prudent in this 

country and recognize there could be situations. 

Now, those two framework of laws—Insurrection Act also is in 

the late 1800s—has served America well because the men and 

women in the armed forces essentially are not for law enforcement 

domestically, and historically there has been sound reasons why 

they should not be employed. 

Now, on occasions Presidents have exercised under the Insurrection Act the right for our troops to go in and participate in the law 

enforcement, but it should be very limited and only in extraordinary circumstances. I think what you are saying is that to the 

extent there is some residual of local, State authority, from the 

governor on down to the county commissioners and mayors, they 

should have a voice if they are able to function still under that situation. 

40

Judge ECKELS. Yes, sir, a strong voice, that the main place we 

need the Army is not for law enforcements but logistical support. 

They have tremendous capacity——

Senator WARNER. No question about it. 

Judge ECKELS Logistical support, supplies for troops. Those supplies can supply the local community. 

Senator WARNER. And the lift capacity with its helicopters, or air 

or truck or so forth. Someone else have a view on our panel? 

Mr. HOLDEN. We actually asked for military police to come in 

and be a part of our operation because we had police officers working double shifts, so primarily many of the personnel were deployed 

at one of the major evacuation centers, and that is the one that is 

our convention center, and that worked out fine. 

Senator WARNER. Were they Federal regular troops or National 

Guard? 

Mr. HOLDEN. They were Federal regular troops. 

Senator WARNER. And they did supply then some trained individuals to work with the police? 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. Let me back up. We had National Guard 

from different States, so they were probably National Guard. 

Senator WARNER. They, under law, have the right of law enforcement. 

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes, sir. 

Senator WARNER. That is one of the reasons it is so confusing. 

They are both wearing the same uniform, the fatigues, the standard Army, in most instances, fatigues, and the system does not 

know which to say, ‘‘Come help me because I am suffering from 

criminality over here.’’

Mr. HOLDEN. That is what I would suggest. There has to be some 

integration of the services, and look to see what laws need to be 

tweaked to allow them to have the same power, but again, with the 

caveat that the judge mentioned, there has to be coordination with 

the local people as well, including law enforcement, but if you 

started with our National Guard, since they are stationed in Louisiana or whatever State, they can best say that we need the following resources in Area X, Y, Z. Then allow them to position the 

people out of the regular Army to supplant the additional personnel 

that they would need in order to carry out a detail. 

Senator WARNER. Madam Chairman, my time is over. Should the 

other witnesses be afforded an opportunity, that they——

Chairman COLLINS. Certainly. 

Mr. MASSENGILL. No real comment on that, other than the National Guard did work very well with our local folks, and at this 

point that was satisfactory. I really have no other point other than 

what has been made. 

Mr. COODY. I would think that if the National Guard could work 

well, if FEMA could work well, we might not have to go to the 

measure of changing the way we react with the military in the 

country. 

I think the first option and first priority should be making the 

system that we have in place work. 

Senator WARNER. Good. I have looked into it and had the opportunity with my colleagues right here, a week or 10 days ago to go 

down, and I asked this question of a number of our military people, 

41

and they said the situation worked this time, but there could be 

another situation. I think all of us wish to commend the men and 

women of the U.S. Armed Forces whether they were regular or 

Guard or Coast Guard. There was a magnificent chapter in the history of our uniform people that we turned to to help out. 

I thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator. 

Mayor Massengill, you have had a long time now to think about 

the question that I posed to you about your relationship with 

FEMA. Your response is from an interesting perspective because 

you are mayor of a community that was hit by the hurricane and 

also took in a large number of evacuees. So I am interested in your 

experience in dealing with FEMA from both perspectives. 

Mr. MASSENGILL. I would like to give you that. First of all, let 

me tell you that I went to the shelters, as I mentioned earlier, I 

talked with the people, and I said, ‘‘Tell me your thoughts about 

FEMA and the way you have been treated and the response you 

have had to your needs.’’

The people feel they had been forgotten or ignored, as they felt 

more attention was given to areas that had been struck harder. Yet 

they were in our community, and they had been struck as hard as 

anybody, yet they felt they were ignored. They felt the government, 

i.e., FEMA, has been slow to respond. They further felt that a 

FEMA representative, if they told them they would be back with 

them tomorrow with an answer, that they may hear back in a week 

if at all. So they felt—they were told they would be back with 

them, but did not get back with them. 

So I asked them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest 

score, where would you rate FEMA? And it came out slightly below 

2 on the average, slightly below 2. 

However, now, as far as the city’s relationship with FEMA—let 

me say this: The evacuees are terribly disappointed in the response 

that they received. 

We had a public assistance meeting 10 days after the hurricane. 

We were told what to expect as far as public assistance was concerned. We talked with FEMA representatives several times about 

the cleanup, the debris cleanup. Finally the Corps came in. And 

then 3 weeks after—I think after it was known that I was going 

to be testifying last Friday and it got delayed—last Thursday I had 

a representative from the Intergovernmental Affairs Office of 

FEMA stop by to make a—as he put it, courtesy call. We are still 

waiting on an individual assistance office to be set up in our community. We did make available to the citizens of our community—

we had the library available to them so that they could go online 

and sign up for an IA number. 

We also had a computer lab set up in a mobile home so that we 

had 11 computers available to them with help, so that people could 

go on and sign up for their individual assistance number, which we 

understand by hearsay, that they have to have before they can go 

in and talk with FEMA. I now understand that an individual office 

is to be set up because I know the gentleman that is renting them 

the building, but we do not know when it is going to be set up. 

So we have not been overly satisfied. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

42

Judge Eckels, my final question—although I could go on forever 

actually asking all of you questions—but my final question is for 

you. When FEMA announced its ill conceived and short-lived debit 

card, I read press reports that it created a real problem in Houston 

in terms of crowd control. I am curious whether FEMA officials 

called you and told you of their plan to distribute the debit cards 

prior to doing so? 

Judge ECKELS. No. 

Chairman COLLINS. No. 

Judge ECKELS. Briefly, the local FEMA officials were very cooperative working with us. They did talk to us about the debit card program, and actually I think it was a very compassionate program 

and one that made sense. In retrospect it is one that was a classic 

Federal system where they came in and were going to do it their 

way with a bunch of Federal personnel to issue the cards. I think 

it probably should have been done through the banks, which would 

have created both the cash in the people’s hands, but given them 

a bank account that they perhaps never would have had otherwise. 

That said, when it came up, our local FEMA officials were in a 

meeting with me talking logistics about how we were going to do 

this. They had the capacity to issue about 50 per hour. They received orders from Washington to begin issuing them, which was 

ill conceived. While we were meeting, there was a strike force that 

came in from Washington and began moving our housing officials 

out of some of the shelter areas that they were using to set up their 

debit card operation. 

We did get that solved. Our local FEMA representatives were unaware of what was happening. It was the same problem the mayor 

mentioned down here, with different FEMA teams not being aware 

of each other’s activities. 

We were able to the next day set up that card operation, and we 

processed 500 per hour, that’s families not individuals, and we 

were able to handle the entire population in the Astrodome complex in 1 day by about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. 

The problem we faced was that the national office, through their 

press releases, announced this program and caused an expectation 

within the community that was not there. I had to go out in the 

middle of a crowd of 2,000 angry folks and say, ‘‘I am in charge. 

It is not happening. Let me explain to you why. You are going to 

get your money, you will get your benefits.’’ It was not that they 

were mad or afraid they were not getting their benefits, they just 

were mad because it was not happening as they were told because 

that was done out of a press release out of Washington, DC, not 

in coordination with the local officials. 

The next day, on instructions from Washington, we announced 

that it would be open to the public and they should come at 10 

o’clock in the morning. That night they changed their mind and 

canceled the program once again that was working smoothly in 

Houston. 

So through that process I had to once again go outside. We put 

every highway sign available in the city out on the street saying 

‘‘No FEMA cards.’’ We put them up in the freeway system, our information signs through our TranStar system to let people know 

there were no debit cards, and we were able to get the message out 

43

and avoid that confusion. It was not so much that the cards were 

a problem. It was the unmet expectations, and if there is anything 

you get from all of us here today, communications is the key. 

Whether it is our evacuation plan of people having to sit for 20 

hours, where it’s clear we had a failure there, or the debit cards 

coming out of Washington. It is people’s expectations being met and 

knowing when to expect help. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks again, Madam Chairman. 

I want to tell you all, your stories will stick with us because you 

have been out there on the front lines. Some of them are encouraging. Your work sounds like it was exemplary. But the stories of 

the way in which FEMA was not ready to give you help, was not 

ready—not for prime time, but for crisis time really will stick with 

us. We have got to convey them back to Mr. Paulson, Acting Director, next week, so that we can improve their performance. 

One of the shining stars here was the Coast Guard, and the 

Coast Guard actually does not—as you know they prepare for rescue over water. They were suddenly drawn in in Katrina to do a 

lot of the stuff they normally do in New Orleans particularly, but 

throughout the Gulf Coast. And they were ready. It just appears 

in so many ways that one would hope an emergency management 

agency would anticipate that FEMA was not ready. 

So we have a lot of work to do with them. Again, this is not 

pointing fingers of blame. It is just getting our act together so we 

can be there for you as local officials. 

Judge Eckels, you had a better experience, which is encouraging, 

but——

Judge ECKELS. I would mention the image of the Coast Guard. 

Lieutenant General Leonard was appointed by the mayor and me—

he is a Coast Guard Lieutenant out of Galveston—but from Houston to head our joint unified command structure. We started it 

from Harris County’s Emergency Management Office. As it grew 

and we needed our folks doing other things, the Coast Guard lieutenant came in and did an excellent job. I would hope he would get 

some kind of recognition at some point. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, they just got it. 

Judge, I am interested in terms of lessons learned. Did the plan 

for evacuation, plans for emergency response include the prospect 

of what you had to implement in response to Rita, which was a 

mass evacuation? 

Judge ECKELS. It included a mass evacuation of the coastal surge 

zones of that 1.2 million people. What we had not anticipated was 

the number of folks who would flee outside of those zones. It is understanding that they would in the sight on television of what we 

have described as the giant Pac Man coming up, these big red blobs 

getting ready to overwhelm the city. People were scared and they 

left. I do not blame them. If they had stayed, they would have 

faced the same things that you are and seeing in these other areas, 

where there was no power, no water, uncomfortable conditions. 

But we anticipated about 1.2 million coming out of the coastal 

zones. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And ended up with——

44

Judge ECKELS. We wound up with probably over 2.5 million, and 

that overwhelmed our plans. We will be better prepared next time. 

We have learned from that. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. What will you do differently? In other 

words—because this is a problem that most any American city 

would face. We know that road systems—I can tell you in Connecticut, we do not have large cities. We have cities. The roads are 

congested at the commuter hours every day. If you suddenly said, 

‘‘Evacuate Hartford,’’ it would be——

Judge ECKELS. Well, in Connecticut you do have a strong rail 

system to move people out of those cities——

Senator LIEBERMAN. We do, right. 

Judge ECKELS. And you do not have as far to go to reach a major 

population center. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Judge ECKELS. With that kind of a number you have to go to 

Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, maybe even up to Oklahoma or Little 

Rock to get out of harm’s way—you would want to go far enough 

to find hotels and other services for folks. 

So first thing we would do is probably use contra-flow lanes earlier to keep from blocking the limited access highways. It is not 

available on all roadways, but Interstate 45 and Interstate 10 

would be opened as contra-flow lanes much earlier. We will use a 

much stronger effort on our communication and education campaign on the staging of the evacuation. By the time the mandatory 

order was called, when we would have otherwise closed those 

routes down for the people in the surge areas, they were locked 

down with traffic from everyone else trying to leave. 

We are going through that now, but the mayor, the governor, and 

I are appointing a blue ribbon commission to work with our transportation planners on an evacuation plan. They will be folks who 

are not the elected officials in charge but community folks who 

have some business sense and a background in these areas, to review our entire planning operation. Governor Perry did a great job 

of building a better plan than was on the ground before. This year 

was the first time anybody had looked at an evacuation plan. He 

had a great plan, but we have learned a lot from Rita, both in 

terms of logistical support along the route, and choke points along 

the route, such as bottlenecks at small towns from evacuation route 

mergers. 

Another problem we had in this case was that not only was 

Houston evacuated, but the entire upper Texas coast from Corpus 

Christi, and some of those plans conflicted with each other and created more problems. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Let me give you a chance to respond to 

some stories in the media nationally that I have seen, that in the 

evacuation of Houston, there were not announcements made of 

shelters of last resort. Are you familiar with those? Just give us a 

quick response. Obviously, the concern is that you were worried 

about the chaos that occurred at some of the unprepared centers 

in New Orleans. 

Judge ECKELS. Well, the Astrodome was the staging area for the 

recovery efforts in New Orleans and East Texas, so it was filled at 

this time before the storm with ambulances and fire trucks, and 

45

the Coast Guard was in there with the boats in the Reliant Center. 

All of our staging for the relief was done from the Astrodome. 

The people in the low-lying coastal areas that the local governments brought their facilities—their cars and their police cars and 

their school buses—to the Astrodome to get them out of the flood 

zones. So it was filled. 

The City of Houston is typically not a shelter city. We try to 

move people through the city and on out. The city, through the 

mayor’s office, set up through the various high schools some shelter 

areas. The key for that was it was for special needs folks. It was 

for people who were in buildings, mobile homes, and other buildings that might not have held up to the storm and who had not 

left earlier. They were not designed to be a shelter for the other 

2 million folks who lived in the Greater Houston area. 

What was needed was an education campaign. I went door to 

door in some of the neighborhoods talking, like you, to get the 

sense of what people were thinking. They were afraid that they 

were going to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave in areas well outside 

the coastal surge zone, from the Gulf of Mexico. They did not need 

a shelter. Yet they were seeking a shelter. 

After the storm, had there been a need such as in New Orleans, 

a post-event shelter need, there were many locations that we could 

have done, including the Reliant Convention Center and the 

George R. Brown, which ultimately served as a shelter. Those were 

not widely circulated publicly because we did not want—I think in 

the mayor’s mind he did not want thousands of people showing up 

at a shelter who really did not need the shelter just because they 

were afraid of the storm. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I have a few seconds left and a big question. 

Since you are all here, maybe give me a quick response. I think one 

of the things a lot of us here are struggling with, as we watch their 

recovery, is what is the best way to try to rehouse the evacuees? 

Of course, as I said in my opening statement, a lot of skepticism 

about FEMA spending all the money on trailers or RVs. I read a 

story in the paper again today about the cruise ships bobbing——

Judge ECKELS. I have that sign in my office as a reminder of the 

following——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Which one? 

Judge ECKELS. Senator, the housing in Houston, we are going to 

be different than the other areas. We have apartments. We have 

capacity. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. In other words there are available apartments? 

Judge ECKELS. We have a large housing stock. We have run 

short of the housing stock that falls in the HUD Section 8 housing 

with FEMA reimbursement, at $600 a month, which is reasonable 

for a basic apartment in Houston for some of these folks in the 

shelter. 

Our experience in Tropical Storm Allison—which is the closest 

thing that we had—with 70,000 homes flooded, people wanted to 

be in a trailer, a mobile home by their house so they could work 

on repairing their house. That was not offensive to them. It is not 

comfortable if FEMA’s role is to provide shelter, a place to live, just 

a roof over your head and a place that is safe from the elements, 

46

it works fine for a limited period. Some of them were there up to 

a year living in mobile homes in their driveways while their own 

home was being rebuilt. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Did you say that, mayor, earlier in your 

opening statement? 

Mr. MASSENGILL. Right. That is what the people that I talked to 

in our shelters want. If they could go back to Slidell, for instance—

and I just use that as an example; there are other areas as well—

most of the evacuees could go back home. They could work on their 

homes. They could try to get their lives back together. They realize, 

matter of fact, several of them have said, ‘‘We would even pay rent 

for those. We just do not have access to those.’’ They just want to 

be able to get back home. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is an important distinction because I 

think the vision on the other side is the worry about a trailer park 

set up of evacuees away from where they normally lived, away 

from job opportunities. We know some of those set up after earlier 

hurricanes in Florida still exist, so that is not what we want. 

Judge ECKELS. Except that would be closer. If many of those people want to be closer than Houston, and we have, again, tens of 

thousands living in apartments in Houston today. It is a great 

place. They have schools. They may decide to stay there. But for 

those who want to go home, they are still a long way from home. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I hear you. When conditions are such back 

home that they cannot move a trailer onto the lot where they used 

to have a house. 

Judge ECKELS. The question is whether they stay in Houston or 

they stay in a large FEMA-ville somewhere out there closer to their 

home. But then they have to ensure jobs and schools and everything else that you have to set up, so it is probably easier to absorb 

them in our system. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you very much. You have been extremely helpful witnesses. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you all for your testimony. It has 

been excellent and once again confirmed my belief that local government is often far better in touch with the needs of the individuals than those that are in Washington. 

I think one of the most interesting impressions that I take from 

this hearing is the importance of communication, not only among 

the various levels of government, but within FEMA itself. It is extraordinary that there were decisions made in Washington that 

were not communicated to FEMA officials who were on the ground, 

to local and regional FEMA officials, and that is a very important 

insight that you have given us today. 

I also want to conclude this hearing by again asking you to 

thank the citizens of your communities for taking in people who 

have been displaced, whose lives have been devastated by the hurricane. I think it is an extraordinary example of generosity, resilience, and caring that defines the American people. So thank you 

for the good work that you are doing and for sharing your experiences and insight with the Committee today. 

The hearing record will remain open for 15 additional days for 

the submission of any additional questions for the record. 

47

And I want to thank our staff also for working very hard to put 

this excellent hearing together. 

Thank you. This hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:02 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.] 

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