R. David Paulison has served as the face of emergency management in the second term of the Bush administration, rehabilitating the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the point where it earned praise from both sides of the aisle in Congress and where it acted decisively in the face of disaster—a far cry from the debacle in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and less than two weeks after Hurricane Gustav clipped that same city, officials at FEMA were largely prepared to hit the ground running as Hurricane Ike came ashore in Texas, avoiding many of the same mistakes that cost lives and caused significant turmoil in the agency’s response to Katrina. The public face of FEMA came in the form of Paulison, a plainspoken former fire chief from Miami who had loads of hurricane experience.

“We were on the ground before landfall. We’re on the ground now. And we’re going to be there as long as necessary for a full recovery,” Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, told reporters during a press conference in Washington, DC, on Sept. 15.

Ike’s power was impressive, destroying buildings and infrastructure in 10 states as the third costliest hurricane in US history, according to the National Hurricane Center. But Paulison’s FEMA got out in front of the hurricane and talked to state and local officials and citizens on the ground long before it struck. The agency moved supplies into the affected areas quickly and set in motion plans to assist displaced residents. FEMA came to Texas and Louisiana as a wiser partner, learning from hurricanes Katrina and Rita but also from its actions during Hurricane Gustav and from tornadoes and flooding in Iowa over the summer.

Supply chain

According to Paulison, in preparation for Ike, FEMA prepositioned supplies near areas anticipated to need them the most. FEMA personnel sent food and water, generators, tents and tarps to assist anticipated hurricane evacuees and victims. An estimated 2.2 million people evacuated in Texas and about 130,000 in Louisiana, according to state officials, with more than 37,000 Texas residents staying in 284 state shelters as of press time.

Supplies initially shipped by FEMA after Ike hit included roughly 10 million meals, more than 23 million liters of water, more than 20 million pounds of ice and 80,000 tarpulins. The state of Texas was operating most of the 60 points of distribution (POD) sites for sending out supplies, while FEMA had control of 12 of them in the Houston area—largely because it volunteered to assist with them. FEMA worked directly with local officials through the night after the storm was clearing out to see where they could store supplies and ship them out.

Once suitable locations were identified, FEMA moved its pre-positioned trucks into place to support POD sites. FEMA opened PODs as state and local officials requested additional supplies. The distribution of the supplies did not go entirely without complications. FEMA encountered some basic logistical issues in taking over distribution centers in and around Houston immediately after the storm.

“And we look towards the state, the county, and the city to tell us where they want the PODs and what type of product they have there. And it should not be a problem delivering those supplies. We have a lot of it in-theater,” Paulison remarked.

Rapid distribution of supplies from the PODs took a few days to really hit its stride as FEMA rushed to get items moving through the supply chain but FEMA made certain to maintain two days worth of food, water and ice on the ground to cover any gaps in delivery of future supplies, which were arriving continuously.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) indicated that he was pleased with the FEMA response effort during a tour of storm damage on Sept. 15, defending any perceived delays in delivery of basic goods.

“Here’s the fact: You’re never going to get the ice, food and water back into an area that’s been impacted like this hurricane fast enough. It’s just not going to happen fast enough,” Perry told reporters.

In fact, residents of a disaster area must be ready to support themselves for three days in the wake of any catastrophe, Gavin Smith, executive director of the Homeland Security Center of Excellence for the Study of Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure and Emergency Management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told HSToday. Endowed by the Department of Homeland Security, the center researches disaster-related topics like evacuation planning, supply distribution, public communications and models potential hazards.

“Emergency managers will tell you that it is really incumbent upon people, if they don’t evacuate, to be entirely self-sufficient for 72 hours,” Smith remarked. “So when people are complaining that there might not have been food in the first 24 or 48 hours, the reality is that it takes up to 72 hours, especially in a larger disaster, to clear the roads and to bring the materials—even if the materials are just five miles away. It’s not as simple as just throwing the meals and water and ice at people’s feet. That’s an unfortunate misconception.”

Smith’s own mother was forced to evacuate Galveston before Hurricane Ike struck. But several days later, she was back in town checking out the progress of restoration and determining if she could move back into her home. FEMA officials, local officials and utility workers were out in force, assuring her that Galveston was not being neglected, Smith reported.

At press time, FEMA’s trucks were moving freely through the streets of Houston with the assistance of police escorts, clear of debris and other obstacles that may have impeded them.

Housing strategy

The 2005 response to Hurricane Katrina was not only universally panned for the suffering of the residents of New Orleans immediately after the storm but also for their continued ordeals in temporary housing in mobile trailers that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined were actually hazardous due to high levels of formaldehyde.

In response to congressional pressure, Paulison’s FEMA developed a draft National Disaster Housing Strategy to address shelter issues. Although FEMA missed the congressional deadline for the strategy, which was immediately criticized by several legislators, the agency defended the strategy as one that worked for residents of Iowa over the summer and one that would work for Texas.

Flying into the region with President Bush to survey the hurricane damage on Sept. 16, Paulison described the Ike response efforts as entering into a sustainment phase, where FEMA provides support to people on the ground.

Following that, FEMA planned a long-term housing phase, where it works with state and local officials on plans for housing the evacuees. Modeled after housing efforts in the aftermath of floods and tornadoes in Iowa last June, FEMA planned to set up a joint housing task force with the states and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and others.

Paulison warned that residents of hurricane-stricken areas could be waiting for up to 18 months before they could return to their homes, so the housing task force would utilize apartments, extended-stay hotels, and other options to keep people comfortable. Under this model, the affected state leads the task force with the input of the local communities suffering from a disaster. Federal agencies lend their expertise and resources to assist in making certain that every displaced resident is safely at a temporary home somewhere.

“It’ll involve putting people into apartments, finding rental housing available. It’ll be the state decision where they want to use a mobile home program or not. We have contracts for mobile homes. We have Mississippi cottages. We have Katrina cottages. And Texas has also developed some type of modular housing like that,” Paulison explained during his ride on Air Force One.

The model worked well in Iowa, Paulison said, where a combination of housing options kept people in the state and enabled them to move back into their homes once they were cleared or rebuilt. The Iowa plan followed prescriptions in the draft National Disaster Housing Strategy, which was released on July 21.

Paulison’s leadership during natural disasters after Hurricane Katrina made a profound difference in how FEMA handled those emergencies, said Kemble Bennett, vice chancellor for engineering at Texas A&M University. Bennett also serves as the chair of the FEMA National Advisory Council, created by Congress in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to advise on issues of preparedness and emergency management in an effort to maintain a high degree of coordination with state, local and private sector partners nationwide.

While Bennett cautioned that it was too soon to say how housing for displaced residents of the Gulf Coast of Texas would shake out in the months after Hurricane Ike, he was confident that FEMA would not repeat the mistakes it made after Hurricane Katrina.

“The long-term strategy is to avoid the trailer situation as much as possible and look at other forms of shelters and homes and other kinds of solutions. I cannot tell you now whether FEMA is prepared and has those ready to go [for victims of Hurricane Ike],” Bennett told HSToday in an interview scant days after the storm. “I do know they do not want and will avoid the same situations they had with Katrina as much as they can.”

The National Advisory Council pored over the draft National Disaster Housing Strategy soon after its release and submitted significant comments in response. FEMA officials told Bennett that the vast majority of those comments would be incorporated into the final rule, scheduled for publication sometime in the last quarter of 2008.

Still, personnel at FEMA were able to think fast on their feet because they had just been through a similar experience with Hurricane Gustav, which struck New Orleans on Sept. 1.

“We had just gone through Gustav,” Bennett stated. “Although it did not impact Texas, the pre-deployment and the cooperation between the federal, state and local governments in that particular hurricane were tremendous, according to reports that I received from the field. We have our own Urban Search and Rescue Team—Texas Task Force 1—and I stay in constant communication with those guys in the field. They say there was a remarkable difference in terms of gearing up and getting ready.

“Then along comes Ike. We had the same timeframe for cooperation from what I heard from the field. The pre-deployment of assets from the state and the federal government was handled very well. It went extremely well in that regard,” he said.