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FEMA Plans To Show Lessons Learned From Katrina

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The New York Times

Published: September 1, 2008

WASHINGTON - Inside the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Sunday, no one needed to be told that after three years of cramming, test time had finally come.

Representatives of more than a dozen federal agencies tried to ensure that everyone knew what part they had to play as Hurricane Gustav churned toward the Gulf Coast.

"What I need from you is a sense of exactly what the Coast Guard can do," Paul Schwartz, the leader of the 24-hour command center that was activated for the storm, told a Coast Guard representative.

Nature has a way of upending disaster-response plans.

But there was a certain confidence Sunday that the federal government had learned its painful lessons and that there would be no repeat of the ineptitude that defined the response to Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

The evidence was visible both in the command center in Washington and on the ground across the Gulf Coast. The Coast Guard, Defense Department, National Guard and FEMA all have far more personnel, equipment and emergency supplies in the region than they did three years ago before the hurricane, officials said.

FEMA, for example, had 18 search-and-rescue teams ready to go, compared with seven before Katrina landed. It had 240 truckloads of water and packaged meals, and 400 truckloads of blankets, cots and tarps, far more than three years ago.

The Defense Department was coordinating the airlift of more than 1,000 patients from Gulf Coast hospitals and nursing homes.

The Coast Guard had about 500 extra personnel assigned to the effort.

Critical to the response was a decision by officials in New Orleans not to set up emergency shelters within the city limits, as they did at the Superdome in 2005.

Complications were still cropping up, including word from several hospitals and nursing homes that their own evacuation plans had fallen through. But federal officials said they found the planes and other equipment necessary to handle the load.

FEMA has decidedly more experienced officials at the top than it did three years ago. The agency's director, R. David Paulison, unlike his predecessor, Michael D. Brown, has several decades' experience in emergency response; he previously served as the chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Department, which routinely was tested by hurricanes.

Brown, the former FEMA director, had worked as the head of an Arabian horse society before he was appointed, and his former deputy had been an aide to the 2000 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

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