These questions have expanded to challenge the adequacy of the Departments of Interior and Bureau of Land Management to be prepared for megafires and performing appropriate fire prevention.

Even as the crisis in the Sunshine State was beginning to be fanned by the Santa Ana winds, the top-ranking members on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican Susan Collins, joined by colleague, Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, chairman of the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Response, were DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff that DHS’s draft National Response Framework (NRF) for national emergency response will institutionalize some of the very management errors that were identified in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

The trio raised questions about whether DHS is properly implementing the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Act of 2006. They also raised questions about the lack of a clear chain of command and the process by which the NRF was developed, and expressed concern that the NRF does not replace the need for proper operational plans.

“Even though FEMA by most accounts has made important progress since Hurricane Katrina, the draft NRF raises several important questions about whether the Act is being properly implemented,” Lieberman, Collins, and Landrieu told Chertoff, noting that the proposed “framework [is] no substitute for operational plans.”

“Effective planning for disasters – both large and small – is essential,” the Senators stressed. “Indeed, planning experts consider the process of making and updating such plans to be as important as (if not more than) the final product. Planning for a national response is particularly difficult, given the significant challenges in coordinating the responses of Federal, State, and local governments, the private sector, and nongovernmental entities. In the final analysis, an effective response requires well-exercised plans that clearly enumerate roles and responsibilities at all levels of government. Unfortunately, we are not convinced that the draft NRF meets this requirement.”

While Lieberman, Collins, and Landrieu’s letter was beginning to be mulled over at DHS, DHS and the administration of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger were in the midst of responding to the fires as best they could. On the 23, the day after receiving the letter, Chertoff seemed to be responding directly to Lieberman, Collins, and Landrieu when he told reporters the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina will be used in the federal government's response to the fires.

“I think there's no question that [there were] a couple of the lessons from Katrina which we have put into effect here," Chertoff said on the ground in California.

"First of all, [we’ve been involved in] planning and preparation in advance for these kinds of challenges, so that we have worked together and planned together with the Defense Department and with state authorities well in advance of the crisis,” Chertoff continued, noting “that's been a big help here. Second, we have really flooded the zone as quickly as possible by staging assets to deal both with the firefighting issue and with the response issue.”

On Friday, Chertoff again addressed criticism of the NRF in his address to the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Leadership Summit in Washington, DC.

“Some people have been critical about this framework,” Chertoff said. “… let me explain as clearly as I can what it is and what it’s designed to do. First of all, the framework is a framework. It is not a detailed set of plans. It is supported by more detailed sets of plans that look at 15 different kinds of emergencies and 15 different kinds of incidents, which are very different from one another. Some of them are natural disasters with which you are familiar, hurricanes and earthquakes. Others may involve terrorist types of things, multiple improvised explosive devices across the country, maybe devices that don’t cause a lot of damage, but that create a ripple psychological effect.”

“Another element of the plans that we have deals with the pandemic flu, not a fire incident, not an explosion, but a huge, very challenging public health emergency,” Chertoff explained. “Cyber attacks, again, would have no real necessarily explosive effect, although there could be some collateral explosions, but would be a huge impact on our infrastructure and our way of life.

"So, we have to develop a framework that embraces all of these, gives us the flexibility to adapt, depending on what the particular incident is, and then builds a set a specific plans down to the local and community level where the really specific process of identifying steps to be taken has to be put together.”

Concluding his comments on the NRF, Chertoff said “what we are doing in the National Response Framework, and I encourage you to read it, is to give public leaders across the country in plain English the broadest concept of what incident management is, to allow them to understand that there are times they need to be dealing with emergency management, there are times they need to be dealing with computer issues, times they need to be able to deal with law enforcement issues. But whatever the challenge, they need to deal with them using a unified command system and an incident management system, which I might say, was pioneered by the Fire Service, particularly the Fire Service in California.”

Chertoff praised FEMA’s responsiveness to the fires.

The praise was justifiable. FEMA clearly was way ahead in its response to the fires when compared to its response to Hurricane Katrina. FEMA and the federal government “got it right this time,” as one emergency response authority told HSToday.us. Authorities <a>href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1025/p01s02-usgn.html"></a> say the federal government did learn its lesson from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. California also is being praised for having learned valuable lessons from the terribly damaging fires there in 2003.

But an impromptu news conference at which FEMA employees egregiously poised as reporters and asked questions of Deputy Director Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson unfortunately diverted attention from FEMA’s heroic response, rekindling suspicions about the long beleaguered agency. Both Chertoff’s office and the White House issued scathing public reprimands for the gross lapse in judgment. 

As a consequence of the fallout, Pat Philbin, FEMA's external affairs director who was one of at least four FEMA spokesmen who pretended to be reporters, will not be taking over as head of public relations for the director of national intelligence, which authorities say is a good thing – “ODNI definitely is not a place where any similar misstep should be tolerated,” an Intelligence Community veteran told HSToday.us. 

But even without the fake FEMA press conference having tainted the agency’s hailed response to the crisis in California, disagreement – sometimes contentious – still boiled over regarding the adequacy of the state and federal government’s preparedness to fight megafires.

The AP reported that, “unable to slow, much less stop, many of the wildfires that have charred Southern California, some local officials lashed out … at what they described as state authorities who offered inadequate help and seemed unprepared for a foreseeable disaster.” 

“Most blistering in his critique was the head of Orange County's fire authority, who said a quick deployment of aircraft could have corralled the massive blaze his crews were fighting near heavily populated Irvine.” 

"It is an absolute fact, had we had more air resources we would have been able to control this fire," Chief Chip Prather told reporters. "If we had more air resources, we would have been able to control this fire. Instead we've been stuck in this initial attack mode on the ground where we hopscotch through neighborhoods as best we can trying to control things." 

State officials countered Prather’s assessment by noting that high winds had prohibited aircraft from flying over fire zones. 

State officials explained that the Santa Ana winds –known as “the Devil’s Breath” - were so strong at the outset of the calamitous fires that aircraft could not fly over fire zones. Additionally, a prolonged drought and the accumulation of fuel caused the more than dozen wildfires to burn hotter, move more rapidly, and spread more unpredictably than in the past.  In other words, the nature of the fire and weather combined to create a “perfect storm” that hindered firefighting techniques. 

But then the AP reported that “nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes sat idly by [at the outset of fires during optimal flying conditions], grounded by government rules and bureaucracy.” 

That drew fire from state Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who lashed out, "the weight of bureaucracy kept these planes from flying, not the heavy winds," Rohrabacher told AP. "When you look at what's happened, it's disgusting, inexcusable foot-dragging that's put tens of thousands of people in danger." 

In his speech last Friday to the International Association of Fire Chiefs, Chertoff was adamant that “from the very beginning, the Interagency Fire Center, which is a joint federal, state coordinating entity that helps to make sure we can get firefighting assets, including air assets, onto the scene of major fires, they were on top of this over the weekend. 

“I asked somebody to kind of pull some of the statistics, and it was fascinating, at least to me, that on Saturday, simply based upon the fact that people knew we were entering a dangerous period, the Fire Center had arranged to have eight large air tanker aircraft that were federal on site. There were then 16 CO415 scoopers, state and local, that were ready to go, and two medium air tanker aircraft. And then after Saturday, as the fires began to intensify, more and more aircraft got on scene. I think Governor Schwarzenegger said a couple of days ago that there were 90 total.”

Continuing, Chertoff said, “of course, there were challenges. As you know, you have to fly the aircraft when we had very, very high winds, and I think CNN reported that the winds on Sunday sometimes topped 100 miles an hour. Obviously, you have difficulty flying both from a safety standpoint and from the standpoint of making sure that the fire retardant actually gets where it’s supposed to go.

“And I confess that when I see people observing, criticizing that the controllers, the fire controllers, because more planes weren’t flying, I have to be honest with you and say I’m going to put my faith in the professional fire controllers who are sitting there in Riverside, responsible for managing the lives and the safety and the operations of the air crews and the ground crews that were fighting these fires. I think we have to support them, and I think we have to give them everything we can and trust their judgment about what the right thing is.” 

However, the issue of the bureaucratic snafu which kept aircraft on the ground went unaddressed.

There have been other criticisms. The Los Angeles Times reported that the panel appointed by Schwarzenegger after the 2003 fires recommended several years ago that California buy 150 more fire trucks for emergencies. So far, only 19 have been ordered. And the state hasn’t replaced its aging fleet of Vietnam-era helicopters, although the panel warned many were nearing the end of their operational lives and that replacement parts are "diminishing and will soon be exhausted." 

(Similarly, aging fleets of helicopters used to medivac trauma patients to appropriate medical facilities is a growing problem across the nation)

The Times reported that it hasn’t been because of the administration’s unwillingness to move on the panel’s conclusions  – Schwarzenegger has actually worked to increase firefighting funds, for example – but fiscal and other bureaucratic hindrances have gotten in the way of implementation of all the commission’s recommendations. 

Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reported that as FEMA set up its operations command post in California, "squabbles broke out among government officials over their preparedness and access to firefighting resources." 

"We are stretched very thin and we are in regular contact with fire authorities across the state, moving resources as necessary," Los Angeles County Fire Chief Michael Freeman said.

By late on Sunday the 21, 2,000 firefighters had been mobilized throughout Southern California, but the Governor's Office of Emergency Services was still forced to request assistance from throughout the state and surrounding states.

Even so, by the majority of accounts, California still had adequate manpower and resources to battle the blazes.

"Nobody does disasters better than California," FEMA director David Paulison, told reporters at a gathering at the Qualcomm stadium where thousands sought shelter. Paulison complimented state and local officials for their preparedness. 

Other concerns - whether they played a role in last week’s fires or not - have arisen over wildland management which critics say could allow for catastrophic fires on both state and federal lands bordering urban areas. These criticisms highlight a little reported debate over national preparedness for megafires.

In 2003, Richard Minnich, a University of California, Riverside, geography professor who has studied California forest ecology for decades, said the forest conditions in the mountains constitute an "ecological 9/11."  Numerous other authorities and officials have expressed concerns over the “chronic overstocking” in urbanized forests and outlying public lands, a problem that’s been compounded by opposition to thinning, authorities say, and which environmentalists forcefully argue.

Authorities’ say the frequency of super-heated fires on federal lands has been fueled by the Forest Service’s century-long policy to stop wildfires as quickly as possible rather than clearing out the tinderboxes of underbrush and trees that’s the accelerant for these megafires - a problem that was supposed to have been addressed by the bi-partisan Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 in so far as federal lands are concerned.

This law, which gained traction under the urging of President Bush following the severe 2002 fire season, was supposed to improve the capacity of the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior to conduct hazardous fuels reduction projects on National Forest System and Bureau of Land Management lands aimed at protecting communities, watersheds, and certain other at-risk lands from catastrophic wildfires.

The legislation also exempted specific areas from normal environmental studies and limits how the public could appeal projects and directs judges to expedite any appeals.

Some Democrats and environmental groups complain the legislation promotes more logging of fire-resistant trees under the pretext of reducing fire risk.

More than four years later and a month before the fires erupted, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)  told Congress that inadequate information and the lack of a systematic process to improve federal agencies’ approach to allocating funds and selecting lands for “fuel reduction” had nullified the intent of the Act.

This after lawmakers cited a 2002 Forest Service report’s findings to in part justify the need for the bill in the first place. In its report, “Process Predicament: How Statutory, Regulatory and Administrative Factors Affect National Forest Management,” the Forest Service report estimated that it was spending roughly $250 million per year on planning and assessment for all national forest projects, and that this consumed 40 percent of the total direct work at the national forest level and 20 percent of the total funding for managing the national forest system. Forest Service officials estimated they could improve administrative procedures and thereby shift up to $100 million a year from unnecessary planning to actual project work to restore ecosystems and to deliver services on the ground. 

GAO’s report found that that isn’t exactly what’s happened since the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 became law.

In June, GAO had also informed lawmakers that federal agencies have been unable to “effectively reduce fuels” nationwide for a variety of reasons that have been recognized for nearly a decade. But GAO had issued a number of reports, going as far back as 1999, “that found that the agencies lacked basic data needed to identify and prioritize lands needing fuel reduction treatment; a sound framework to ensure that funds appropriated to reduce fuels were spent in an effective, efficient, and timely manner; and a cohesive strategy for addressing accumulated fuels and wildland fire problems.”

The report, “Wildland Fire Management: Lack of Clear Goals or a Strategy Hinders Federal Agencies’ Efforts to Contain the Costs of Fighting Fires,” chastised the government’s shortcomings in planning to fight fires. 

Whether or not the shortcomings identified by GAO came into play in California, they nevertheless need to be scrutinized, because even if they didn’t, they still portend a potential catastrophe waiting to happen.

Among the problems GAO identified include failures to acquire and use firefighting assets and selecting firefighting strategies.

Robin Nazarro, Director of GAO's Natural Resources and Environment program and the lead author of the report, said that “in commenting on a draft of this report, the Forest Service and Interior generally disagreed with the characterization of many of our findings; they neither agreed nor disagreed with our recommendations. In particular, the Forest Service and Interior stated that they did not believe we had accurately portrayed some of the significant actions they had taken to contain wildland fire costs, and they identified several agency documents that they believe provide clearly defined goals and objectives that make up their strategy to contain costs.”

“We acknowledge that the agencies have established a broad goal of suppressing fires at minimum cost, considering firefighter and public safety and resources to be protected, but we also found that the agencies have established neither clear criteria by which to weigh the relative importance of these often-competing priorities nor measurable objectives by which to determine if they are meeting this goal,” Nazarro said.

Continuing, Nazarro concluded that “our review suggests that without measurable objectives, the importance of containing costs relative to the other program priorities is not clear and that managers in the field are therefore likely to select firefighting strategies without due consideration of suppression costs. Therefore, we continue to believe that our recommendations, if effectively implemented, would help the agencies better manage their cost-containment efforts and improve their ability to contain wildland fire costs.”

Asked earlier this week why the Forest Service's planning has been inadequate, Nazarro said, “if you don't have goals and strategies for carrying them out, you're in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode. They say they are using five to ten year averages, but each year the fires gets worse, so they're always underestimating what they need."

GAO’s report shows the administration was warned that the approximately $3 billion that’s spent each year on fire prevention and suppression has not been used appropriately.

"Agencies have not yet improved their systems for determining the appropriate type and quantity of firefighting assets needed for the fire season or for effectively and effiiently procuring them," GAO stated.

Continuing, Nazarro said the Forest Service doesn’t have enough skilled “managers trained in whetherto engage in fire use or to suppress. They need 300 managers, but they're short, with fewer than 100 now, and only another 100 being trained." 

Similarly, Roxanne Provaznik, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, was quoted as saying “our resources are low,” adding, “our firefighters are stretched out because of the number of fires around the state.”

Other officials agreed, with one saying "they were stretched thin and that a lack of resources was as much a burden as the temperatures and winds."

Following release of the GAO report four months ago, lawamkers scolded the administration over its firefighting planning. Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico said the White House had focused on cutting budgets instead of adequately preparing for wildfires. 

"The administration's budgets indicate that it believes that containing wildfire costs must come at the expense of preparedness," Bingaman said. "Its fiscal year 2008 budget proposes a nearly $90 million cut in the preparedness account. But starving the preparedness, wildfire suppression, and other Forest Service programs is not an effective or efficient strategy to contain those costs." 

GAO had warned three years earlier that during the previous five years the Forest Service and Interior Department had transferred more than $2.7 billion from other programs because they consistently underestimated how much money would be needed to pay for firefighting, a problem GAO found was recurring as of last June.

Consequently, officials were forced to delay projects to reduce accumulated fuels and to postpone wildfire training courses and the purchase of extra firefighting equipment. 

Bingaman said following the June, 2004 GAO report that “each year we are told that the administration's budget request will meet firefighting costs. Yet each year the administration's budget request proves inadequate to cover those needs, resulting in the chaos of having to transfer money from one account to another to make up for the shortfall."

“Year in and year out, we fight for adequate resources for fighting and preventing wildfires; year in and year out, those resources are cut out of the budget,” said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. “This report makes clear, in terms no one can misunderstand, that the cost of business as usual is far too high and that we must truly and fully fund both wildfire prevention and suppression efforts.” 

Wyden said the “report confirms and illustrates what we suspected - we are robbing Peter to pay Paul. The federal land management agencies sacrifice funding for land management in the name of wildfire suppression. In order to properly control fire, we need to treat our lands before a fire starts.”

Five years earlier, in April, 1999, GAO stated in its report, “Western National Forests: A Cohesive Strategy Is Needed to Address Catastrophic Wildfire Threats", “the window of opportunity for taking corrective action is estimated to be only about 10 to 25 years before widespread, unstoppable wildfires with severe immediate and long-term consequences occur on an unprecedented scale.” And not necessarily in California.

But it’s not just the federal government’s failure to cull “accumulated fuels” that’s causing problems. Officials say property owners in southern California also must share blame under state laws. Brian Savage, a division supervisor with the Culver City Fire Department, was quoted saying, “you tell people to do clearance and they think it's OK to leave the woodpiles and the sheds. That stuff starts burning and it's right up next to the house. They just don't get it."

Last year, California began to require residents in fire hazard areas to clear brush and flammable materials within 100 feet of their homes. The requirement was a recommendation of the blue-ribbon panel the Governor convened following the 2003 wildfires. Ruben Grijalva, director of the state forestry department, said roughly 50,000 inspections of homes have been made so far. 

 "The problem here is we're facing a situation where we have the worst fuel conditions in California history," Grijalva told the Los Angeles Times, "I personally don't believe any amount of resources could have done any better than what we're doing." 

In California, the culling of fuel for fires also has been hindered by the on-going battle between environmental concerns over preserving natural surroundings, and the need to remove as much underbrush and timber as is possible to starve fires once they ignite. This problem is especially prevalent in southern California.

Earlier this month, for example, an environmental group, the Hills Conservation Network, demanded that the University of California, Berkeley, cancel plans to log an estimated 23,000 eucalyptus trees in the hills above the campus by the UC Berkeley's Office of Emergency Preparedness, which said the trees are a fire hazard. The logging is supported by the East Bay Regional Parks District fire chief and Berkeley's own disaster and fire safety commission. 

 Louise Comfort, professor of public and urban affairs at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, pointed out inherent problems. She issued a statement Wednesday in which she said “California had a once-proud system of emergency response, with some of the best trained firefighters in the nation, but the Standardized Emergency Management System, adopted by the state after the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, requires continual training and updating of equipment and databases. Preparedness for managing natural hazards in California has been under-funded in recent years, as the focus of the Department of Homeland Security has shifted to terrorism.” 

 Comfort said “these fires are the kind of shared risk that requires local, state, and federal cooperation for immediate, informed response. The news reports indicate that intergovernmental cooperation has been significantly better for the fires in California than the failed response to Hurricane Katrina. This is partly because there is a larger and better trained local emergency response system, but also because the state and federal agencies recognized the need for action and did not want to fail again. Yet, we are far from achieving the kind of sustainable risk management that is essential in high-risk areas like California.”

 After the fires of 2003, which killed at least 15 people, there were expectations that the region would invest in preparing for a similar event in the future, but now many say it continues to lack the appropriate resources to battle the fast-moving flames.

 "The only lessons applied were those that don't cost any money … in terms of new fire prevention or fighting capabilities, we have barely made any progress," a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told the Wall Street Journal. But many officials have said that’s not the case at all, that there’s been implementation of as many of the Governor’s 2004 Commission’s recommendations as possible. 

 As the California fires raged, questions also not surprisingly rekindled regarding the degrading effect the deployment of the National Guard to Iraq has had on Guard forces’ missions on the homefront. While deployment of Guard forces across the country has had an impact on the Guard overall, as HSToday.us has, there’s not enough evidence to suggest that Guard deployment in Iraq impacted its responsiveness to the fires in California. 

 Acting Army Secretary Pete Green did tell California Demoratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in August that the state’s National Guard "has adequate capability to respond to small and medium domestic missions [and that] equipment shortages could potentially limit their capability to fully respond to large scale emergencies such as a catastrophic earthquake or major flood,” but the Guard seemed to have been able to perform the mission Governor Schwarzenegger asked of it. Nevertheless, politicos and war opponents continued to imply that the state’s Guard deployment in Iraq strained its capabilities to assist in fighting the fires. 

In conclusion, California and the federal government responded as quickly and as best they could. Does more need to be done to respond to mega-firestorms? Certainly. Does more need to be done to prepare for large-scale catastrophes and mass evacuations? Yes. Let’s trust that the lessons that are learned from the tragic fires in California, as well as from the Fed’s response to Hurricane Katrina, are implemented as swiftly as they possibly can be.

Let’s also trust that the complacency that has set in in some quarters regarding catastrophic terrorism doesn’t cloud the reality that homeland security encompasses preparations for all hazards, some of which, like wildfires, hurricanes and earthquakes, can be just as devastating as an act of terrorism. We need to recognize that we must be prepared for the wrath of Mother Nature, too!

With this apparently also on his mind, Chertoff noted in his address to the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Leadership Summit that “a couple of issues that we face going forward and how we’re trying to continue to improve our capabilities to deal with all hazards, whether they’re natural or man-made. And let me pause here to say, sometimes I see people who try to divide hazards into the two as if they’re obviously different. But look at the fires we’re fighting right now. Some of them are natural in origin. Some of them appear to be man-made in origin … So we have to look across the entire spectrum, and not be divided among ourselves, depending on whether something is a terrorist act or a criminal act or an act of God. We have to recognize it’s the same approach that we have to be able to deploy ...”