Katrina/Rita and Risk Communication within FEMA

Christine M. RodrigueCalifornia State University

Long Beachhttp://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/

Disaster by Management

• My comparison of the Columbia shuttle accident and the FBI’s inability to head off the future 9/11 terrorists framed the bureaucratic mishandling of emergencies as “Disaster by Management”

• “Disaster by Management” includes:

– Public sector managerialism– Shifts from precautionary principle to de minimis ideas– Accumulation and legitimatization functions of government – The tensions between risk assessment and risk management

and the normalization of anomaly in risk perception and behavior– Normal accident theory vs. high reliability organizations– Geography as silent agent in communication and hierarchy

Disaster by Management

• NASA and Columbia– Parallel chains of command:

engineering, mission, NASA center line structures

– External constraints on NASA shifted resources and risk managers’ attention from precautionary principles to managerialist concerns

– Risk assessors have lower status than risk managers, increasing social distance for risk messages on the way up

• FBI and 9/11– Parallel, firewalled chains of

command: intelligence and criminal investigation

– Top level internal investigations into FISA abuses and racial profiling encouraged low level HQ analysts to tune out field office and translator risk communications

– Top level management did not communicate risk messages down at HQ, which prevented contextualization for risk messages coming up from geographically dispersed field offices

FEMA and Katrina/RitaExternal Constraints: Reorganization

• Managerialism and Bush 43: shift from government doing work, even if well, to government making sure work gets done

• Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces much of FEMA’s work is to be privatized, April 2001

• FEMA was demoted off the White House Cabinet and put under DHS in a November 2002 announcement

• FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh quits in December 2002, leaving Michael D. Brown in charge

• 2003 sees FEMA’s preparation/mitigation functions split into new Office of Preparedness and Response, leaving FEMA with response and recovery functions

• Prevention of terrorism rather than response to events would now dominate FEMA’s mission

• Frustration with the agency’s demotion, mission drift, and other external constraints led to resignations of key personnel in HQ and top regional centers, coring out the institutional memory within the FEMA hierarchy

DHS: Where FEMA fits

FEMA and Katrina/RitaExternal Constraints: Budget

• FEMA’s base budget cut 9.6% from FY 2003 to FY 2005 (White House budget requests would have cut it 22.5%)– Project Impact cancelled in 2001

– Hazards Mitigation Grants Program cut in half in 2003

• FEMA budget request to buy and pre-position communi-cations equipment in New Orleans after the Hurricane Pam exercise was deleted by DHS in the presentation of its overall FY 2005 budget request to Congress

• DHS, alone among Federal departments, has the right to reprogram money from one of its agencies’ base budgets to another without Congressional approval, and made such transfers:– 5 times in FY 2003 ($80 million)

– 5 times in FY 2004 ($90 million)

– 2 times in FY 2005 ($30 million)

FEMA and Katrina/RitaExternal Constraints: Cronyism

• FEMA has had 15 directors since 1979!

• Its history has been riddled with cronyism that set the stage for “normal accidents”– Reagan’s first FEMA director, Louis Giuffrida, resigned: FBI corruption

and cronyism investigations

– Bush 41’s choice, Wallace Stickney, presided over the Hurricane Andrew fiasco, which triggered a NAPA study and recommendations for redesigning FEMA

– Clinton’s choice, James Lee Witt, was the first director with actual disaster management experience, competent cronyism, and he implemented the NAPA recommendations and turned FEMA into a “model agency,” increasingly a high-reliability organization that learned from its mistakes

– Bush 43’s choice of Joe Allbaugh restored the tradition of incompetent cronyism, underscored by the ascension of his college crony, Mike Brown

FEMA and Katrina/RitaInternal Impacts of External Constraints

• Top levels staffed by cronies with no experience in disasters

• Demoralization of the professional staff: American Federation of Government Employees survey of 84 FEMA personnel in 2004 found 80% dissatisfied with its direction under DHS and 60% hoped to leave

• Resignations: Many now working for private sector contractors with FEMA

• Loss of institutional memory

• Loss of personal ties among disaster professionals in FEMA, State OES, county (parish) and municipal first response agencies, NGOs, disrupting the smooth assembly of incident command systems

• Confusing chains of command

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:Chain of Command Results

• Two broken chains of command– FEMA (response and recovery)– Directorate of Preparedness

• Diminished capacity to receive, transmit, and act on risk messages– Loss of institutional memory in the FEMA hierarchy – A dimming of FEMA’s authority to communicate with the

President– The potential for conflict in communications with DHS – Seeming apathy from the top of the stovepipe (AP videos

released last week)– Managerialism: precautionary principle less important than

opportunity costs of natural hazard mitigation, preparation, response on other administrative agendas

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:Risk Messages in Broken Hierarchies

• FEMA, with the National Hurricane Center, did inform DHS and the President of their assessment of the magnitude of the risk bearing down on the Gulf Coast from 25-31 August, but there were no questions, just bland assurances that the Federal government would help, somehow, and the President continued fund-raising trips and speeches

• Risk assessment science is lower in political hierarchies than risk manage-ment decision-making and the friction of that social distance is apparent in the AP videos released 1 March: no questions asked of the risk assessors

• FEMA did try to get the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana to evacuate but that request was unrealistic, given the failure to understand or care about the social geography of heightened vulnerability (income, race, mobility, age, health)

• The City, the various states, floodplain managers, and parish/county first responders did try to get FEMA resources, but FEMA was too decapitated to respond usefully: Incident Command never really launched as a framework for everyone’s coöperation

• 1,420 people are known dead, with 1,840 still unaccounted for: How many of those might have lived had the risk messages gotten through intact ties among local, state, and FEMA personnel and through long-established, direct, Cabinet-level ties with the White House?

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:Legitimitization vs. accumulation functions

• O’Connor holds that welfare-oriented agencies meet merely a legitimatization function, which tends to be a political football, with uncertain and variable funding

• Accumulation functions have to do with ensuring the conditions for profit accumulation and are better sheltered from funding and political vagaries

• Accumulation functions are clearly higher priority in the present administration than legitimatization functions: Opportunity costs are a greater concern than the precautionary principle

• FEMA predominantly meets a legitimatization function, compared with Homeland Security, DoD, the Fed, port authorities, the war in Iraq, energy policy, tax policy, and, so, was pushed down from the Cabinet and into DHS, which put more barriers to natural hazard risk messages emanating from it

• The natural hazards community, in and out of FEMA, feels marginalized, its responsibility for improving the welfare of communities at risk and those struck by disaster lost in homeland security priorities

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:Natural hazards and homeland security

cartoon: Ron Pudim, U CO Boulder Hazards Center

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:The normalization of anomaly

• “I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the levees being breached,” despite:– the Hurricane Pam exercise of 2004

– National Geographic article of October 2004, “Gone with the water.”

– Scientific American article of October 2001, “Drowning New Orleans.”

– Teleconferences of 25-31 August among FEMA, NHC, DHS, and Crawford

• Risk assessment science hurdles in affecting risk management policy:– Lack of lived experience, which promotes receptiveness to risk messages

– A tendency to normalize anomaly, to read extraordinary events in ordinary frameworks

– Risk assessment below risk management in government hierarchies

– The expense and opportunity costs of mitigation (wetlands restoration: $14 billion; $500 million levee upgrading budget underfunded by half from 2001-2005) at a time of Federal tax cuts and increasing war costs

– Managerialist imperatives trump precautionary principle

• FEMA: Normal accident theory poster child

FEMA and Katrina/Rita:Geography as silent agent

• Reorganization of FEMA under DHS increased the social, spatial, and temporal distances between FEMA and the White House

• Reorganization within FEMA broke ties between people doing mitigation and preparation work from those tasked with response and recovery

• Reorganization disrupted spatial and social ties among FEMA, state OES, local first responders, disrupting Incident Command establishment

• Apparently, telecommunications linkups among FEMA, NHC, DHS, and Crawford, Texas, were not enough to overcome the friction of spatial and social distance

• Perception of the spatiality of risk to the hurricanes may have been colored by the demographics of those most vulnerable, perhaps slowing down response

• Still emerging are conflicts over the space of the new New Orleans: which areas will be restored? Who will be able to move into restored space? Who benefits and who loses from the diaspora of the poor, Black, and Democratic residents? Is the safety of those returning a high priority?

Conclusions: Parallels among FEMA & Katrina/Rita, NASA & Columbia, FBI & 9/11

• Managerialist pressures shifted government attention from the precautionary principle to the opportunity costs of hazard identification, mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery

• Hierarchies developed with confusing and broken chains of command

• Risk assessment messages have high social and spatial filters to overcome on their way to risk management policy decision-makers

• Risk assessment is lower in the hierarchy than risk management

• Managerialism encourages the normalization of serious anomalies, amplified here by incompetent cronyism

• High reliability organizations can degenerate into normal accident organizations under managerialist pressures

• Clearing the path of risk messages up and down an institutional hierarchy is critical to human safety

• The balance between the precautionary principle (minimizing Type I errors) and easing the opportunity costs of regulation through de minimis formulations (minimizing Type II errors) is a policy choice best made explicitly and consciously

Selected Sources

• Michael D. Brown testimony before Congress 27 September 2005

• Joel K. Bourne, Gone with the water, National Geographic, October 2004 <http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/index.html>

• Mark Fischetti, Drowning New Orleans, Scientific American, October 2001

• Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences <http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/>