Just How Incompetent Was Brownie?

Uh, very. And well before Katrina hit our shores.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown was warned weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit that his agency's backlogged computer systems could delay supplies and put personnel at risk during an emergency, according to an audit released Wednesday.

An internal review of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's information-sharing system shows it was overwhelmed during the 2004 hurricane season. The audit was released a day after Brown vehemently defended FEMA for the government's dismal response to Katrina, instead blaming state and local officials for poor planning and chaos during the Aug. 29 storm and subsequent flooding.

The review by Homeland Security Department acting Inspector General Richard L. Skinner examined FEMA's response to four major hurricanes and a tropical storm that hit Florida and the Gulf Coast in August and September 2004. It noted FEMA's mission during disasters as rapid response and coordinating efforts among federal, state and local authorities.

"However, FEMA's systems do not support effective or efficient coordination of deployment operations because there is no sharing of information," the audit found. "Consequently, this created operational inefficiencies and hindered the delivery of essential disaster response and recovery services," it said.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said parts of the report were misleading because FEMA's system was never designed to track supplies — although it is now testing a Global Positioning System program, used during Katrina, to do just that.

You’ve got to love that reasoning. The report is misleading because FEMA’s system was never designed to track supplies, even though FEMA’s mission during disasters is rapid response and coordinating efforts among federal, state, and local authorities. How do you coordinate efforts—efforts which by any stretch of the imagination would include getting much-needed supplies to the people who needed them—if you have no supply-tracking mechanism in place? The report isn’t misleading; not having such a mechanism is exactly what a phrase like “operational inefficiencies” means.

In an Aug. 3 response, Brown and one of his deputies rejected the audit, calling it unacceptable, erroneous and negative.

"The overall tone of the report is negative," wrote FEMA chief information officer Barry C. West in an Aug. 3 letter that Brown initialed.

"We believe this characterization is inaccurate and does not acknowledge the highly performing, well managed and staffed (informational technology) systems supporting FEMA incident response and recovery."

Among the problems the audit identified:

_FEMA's system could not track and coordinate delivery of ice and water to Florida, resulting in millions of dollars worth of ice left unused at response centers, and $1.6 million in leftover water returned to storage.

_An estimated 200,000 victims had to wait for temporary housing aid from disaster assistance employees because of backlogged computers.

_Emergency personnel were potentially put at risk because the system did not provide real-time disaster warnings and other information.

Re: ice, a report on NPR this morning included a statement from Brownie, in which he said he didn’t believe providing ice so that people’s “hamburger” wouldn’t spoil was the responsibility of the federal government. Whether he was being deliberately flippant or simply doesn’t know why ice is important, I don’t know—but providing (or coordinating provisions of) lots of ice very quickly has historically been a primary FEMA objective, because in any disaster it has been needed to keep medicines (like insulin) cool and to prevent dead bodies from rotting. It’s not generally regarded as an item offered to average civilians to keep their milk from going off.

Another tidbit about the disarray FEMA was in even before the disaster hit is that FEMA procurement was understaffed and many of people doing procurement hadn’t met the requirements for doing the job. Additionally, contracts that should have been in place for some things were simply nonexistent, causing FEMA employees to scramble to buy things like bodybags at full price in the aftermath of the disaster, because there wasn’t time to negotiate. From Brownie’s congressional testimony:

U.S. REPRESENTATIVE STEPHEN BUYER (R-IN): Because my next question is, if you had open staffs with regard to procurement, my next question is then: Did FEMA have in place contracts for disaster-related supplies such as tarps, ice, generators, temporary shelters, so that these items would be available without having to scramble for them and award them on contracts on the fly based on who you have on the ground at that moment?

BROWN: Yes and no. We have some of those contracts in place for provision of the meals ready to eat, of the water, of the ice. We do for some of the temporary housing, some of the trailers. But because of the scope of this disaster, we had to go out and start -- kind of like we did in Florida, too. We had to go out and literally start buying off the street to meet the demand.

Now, mind you, “yes” means they had contracts in place for some of the things that were needed, but not all, and “no” means that even the contracts they had in place were insufficient. If the same thing had already happened in Florida, the lesson should have been learned at that point to have secondary procurement contracts in place and ready to be activated in case of shortages. It’s called having a back-up plan, and I need to have that kind of forethought at my job to be considered competent, and people’s lives don’t even depend on it.

(Additional reading: Think Progress corrects the record on Brownie’s claim that Louisiana Gov. Blanco’s August 27th request to the President for a federal emergency declaration excluded Orleans, Jefferson, and Plaquerines parishes.)