Replies to post #191031 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DesertDrifter]

I have kind of a worm's eye view of FEMA because i know a bit about it, but not at a political level.

Early in the FEMA game, there were only a few administrators and when a non-fire incident occurred, the bulk of the people called in to be part of the effort were basically Class 1 wildfire fire teams, who had lots of experience with big events and handling the logistics, direct action, and overall management, and were used to working as a group, supplemented by people like me who were accustomed to being placed in unfamiliar surroundings and getting crews to accomplish their tasks in a safe but aggressive manner.

It is during this era when i got called to go help with Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii. My grand participation ended up being handing out rolls of Visqueen and listening to everyone's hurricane stories. Which was about as far from my usual participation on large wildfires as a division boss with my nose in the dirt, making things happen as it could get. I wondered what the heck they were thinking... we were mostly there to be visible.

Then Bush decided that having preparedness was just a nuisance, and relied almost totally on the ICS system. (Incident Command System, which is a structure that can be expanded easily by bringing in personnel as needs dictate, everyone knows their role and can become a major force literally overnight) But confusion at the top meant no one knew how much decision power was delegated, as the ones at the top had basically no emergency response experience.

Then, just a few years ago, "they" decided that FEMA needed to be more effective, so they hired a couple standing teams of personnel to be full time disaster specialists instead of pulling from other agencies at the time of the crisis. This had the distinct advantage of having whole management groups that were used to working with each other so when they flopped into a flood or hurricane, the management could hit the ground running. They picked the best from wildfire teams, structural fire teams, electrical wizards, and they trained the supervisory people how they wanted them to direct the boots on the ground.

Let me say that i think FEMA is now an effective force. But this cockamamie idea to have to have 50 different groups from 50 different states learn the same lessons by trial and error, particularly since most true disasters are fairly rare events is just about guaranteeing growing pains and some degree of failure on each incident. And when people's lives are at risk who wants to put them in the hands of someone who got the public safety job in Kansas because their political party won last time?