The previous post revisited resilience to hazards and hazards recovery, LOTRW topics covered multiple times over past years. That reflection prompted a thoughtful comment from John Plodinec, who offered a range of reasons why FEMA needs a rethink, and a few suggestions for improvement.
Comments tend to get buried in blogs; to ensure that John’s thoughts see the light of day, I’m reprinting them here, verbatim (thank you, John!):
I don’t think anyone can argue with your conclusion – “An attack on one state is an attack on all.” But it doesn’t necessarily follow that FEMA, as she is now, best suits today’s needs.
The GAO has been justly critical of many aspects of FEMA’s operations. The national flood insurance program is … a mess. Sadly, parts of recent FEMA actions have been sullied by partisan games. And too often, there have been conflicts between the states’ and FEMA’s approach to recovery.
Three other aspects of the current situation are more subtle, but also indicate a need for rethinking FEMA:
• Even more problematic, the funding and responsibility for response and recovery funding is spread across several agencies. FEMA, SBA, HUD, HHS …
• Similarly, there are programs in several agencies (FEMA, Dept of Energy, HUD, EPA…) aimed at (or at least impacting) various aspects of mitigation.
• Emergency response and recovery funding is off-budget. In effect, a bad year (in terms of storms and other adverse events) adds to our already overwhelming federal debt.
I look at all of this and conclude that there may not be a better time than this to re-examine FEMA. For example, suppose we set up a disaster “bank” at the national level to manage flood insurance, and emergency response and recovery funding. Every year, it would receive say 60% of the maximum funding spent on response and recovery and flood insurance payouts. If one or more states declared a disaster, they could draw on those funds. In good years the “bank” would build up a cushion; in bad years, it would draw it down. There would be some requirements (as there are now), but the each state would be responsible for managing the funds. We might begin to see some significant innovation in the “laboratories of the states.” Further suppose that, instead of FEMA Regional Offices, we have regional compacts so that the state EMA’s provide support to each other (similar to what utilities do now).
I don’t claim that these ideas are either original or all that great – only that this is an ideal time to figure out how to fix current problems and actually get better bangs for our bucks. If we don’t make changes, we are saying we can’t do any better; to me, that’s an abdication of responsibility.
Well said! And a reminder to me that in these blogposts I’m never so articulate as I imagine or wish. I made mention of FEMA in the post, but that was in passing, while trying to address a bigger point: namely, that since we all find ourselves living on a planet that does much of its business through extreme events, the task of constructing a safety net – building resilience to hazards and recovering from hazards – is everybody’s business, every day. The fifty separate United States are in it together. As are 320 million Americans.
Call me defensive, but I wasn’t suggesting we absolve FEMA from a rethink. Rather I was suggesting that the current finger-pointing and focus on FEMA in isolation is misplaced. I was implying, apparently too timidly or vaguely, that to deal with hazards effectively will require substantive change by all institutions in all sectors, and at all levels. Emphasis needs to be less on fixing blame, and more (and more urgently) on fixing the problem. State and local governments need to place more emphasis on building codes and land use, and on the public education (both K-12 and adult-) needed to sustain political awareness of and support for hazard resilience. The private sector needs to focus more proactively on business continuity in the face of hazards (looking not just at facilities and supply chains but also the larger challenges of critical infrastructure and protecting workers and their families, homes and communities).
In light of the localized nature of most natural disasters and the technical and political complexities and expense of actually reducing disaster losses, insuring/spreading risk across larger regions and populations has appeal. The dollar risks alone are large and growing[1]. Hence the emergence over recent decades of property and casualty insurance, reinsurance, the much-maligned flood insurance, catastrophe bonds, and other financial instruments. Furthermore, disasters disrupt every aspect of daily life and work in different ways and through every societal interconnection. Risk management is rarely any government agency’s or company’s top concern; but it’s almost always in any sector’s Top Ten. It’s therefore unsurprising that efforts to build resiliency, recover, etc., can’t be confined to any single agency, such as a FEMA. They are spread throughout government and the private sector. The work can’t be compartmentalized.
That brings us to the individual level. We were all born on this planet of earthquakes, cycles of flood and drought, violent storms, disease outbreaks (and more). We can’t avoid risk; at best, we can only choose our risk preference through where and how we live and work. In particular, we can’t eliminate risk through some level of spending. No dollar level of effort will be enough. We must balance our respective family allocations of resources between risk management and life’s other aspirations.
As a practical matter, none of us enjoys universal options; we find our range of choice is constrained by where we were born, our birth circumstances, and the vagaries of life (geography, ethnicity, culture, poverty, wealth, etc.) But in the end, we must each shoulder personal responsibility and live with the consequences of our choices.
One special pain point in all this is the deep longing of most disaster survivors to return to the prior state-of-things. This applies especially to sense of place, but more broadly inclines us to rebuild-as-before. Perhaps we can aim no higher, but we should realize that natural hazards recur. Rebuilding-no-better therefore condemns some future generation to a repetition of the current grief and suffering.
A closing thought. That same longing follows other loss – the death of a loved-one, say. In that instance, however, there is no possibility of going back. As social scientists have explained, moving on, with its implication of somehow forgetting the past and the person, and the relationship, is an unsatisfying path. The path that beckons is moving forward – continuing to remember and honor the relationship and the person, acknowledging the loss and its reality for our present circumstances – but then going boldly into the future.
During this Passover/Easter season, with resurrection in the air, that future might reasonably look a little brighter.
[1] Two (of many) references. The estimated cost to the municipality of Los Angeles of the Altadena fire was $2B. The actual property loss was somewhere between $20-40B. A NYTimes Climate Forward article warns that climate costs could $40 trillion dollars annually by 2050. (The US has 3000 counties; that averages to more than $10B/year per county; assuming our population remains 320M or so, it comes to $100K/year per man, woman, and child). on the city of Los Angeles.