Katrina/Rita and Risk Communication
within FEMA
Christine M. Rodrigue
California State University
Long Beach
http://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:
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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/Rita
External 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/Rita
External 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 communications 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/Rita
External 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/Rita
Internal 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
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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 management 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
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O’Connor holds that welfare-oriented agencies meet merely a
legitimatization function, which tends to be a political football, with uncertain
and variable funding
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Accumulation functions have to do with ensuring the conditions for profit
accumulation and are better sheltered from funding and political vagaries
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Accumulation functions are clearly higher priority in the present
administration than legitimatization functions: Opportunity costs are a
greater concern than the precautionary principle
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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
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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:
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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 20012005) 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
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Reorganization of FEMA under DHS increased the social, spatial, and
temporal distances between FEMA and the White House
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Reorganization within FEMA broke ties between people doing mitigation
and preparation work from those tasked with response and recovery
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Reorganization disrupted spatial and social ties among FEMA, state OES,
local first responders, disrupting Incident Command establishment
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Apparently, telecommunications linkups among FEMA, NHC, DHS, and
Crawford, Texas, were not enough to overcome the friction of spatial and
social distance
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Perception of the spatiality of risk to the hurricanes may have been colored
by the demographics of those most vulnerable, perhaps slowing down
response
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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
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Managerialist pressures shifted government attention from the precautionary principle
to the opportunity costs of hazard identification, mitigation, preparation, response,
and recovery
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Hierarchies developed with confusing and broken chains of command
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Risk assessment messages have high social and spatial filters to overcome on their
way to risk management policy decision-makers
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Risk assessment is lower in the hierarchy than risk management
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Managerialism encourages the normalization of serious anomalies, amplified here by
incompetent cronyism
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High reliability organizations can degenerate into normal accident organizations
under managerialist pressures
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Clearing the path of risk messages up and down an institutional hierarchy is critical to
human safety
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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/featur
e5/index.html>
• Mark Fischetti, Drowning New Orleans, Scientific
American, October 2001
• Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social
Sciences <http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/>