Coordination and communication problems between levels of government

From: Governing Magazine, December 2005

FEATURE: DISASTER

THE KATRINA BREAKDOWN

Coordination and communication problems between levels of government
must be addressed before the next disaster strikes.

By Jonathan Walters & Donald Kettl

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, only one thing disintegrated
as fast as the earthen levees that were supposed to protect the city,
and that was the intergovernmental relationship that is supposed to
connect local, state and federal officials before, during and after
such a catastrophe.
 In sifting through the debris of the disaster response, the first
question is why intergovernmental cooperation broke down so
completely. While it's hard even at this point to get an official
accounting of exactly what happened, clearly there were significant
communication and coordination problems at all levels of government.
At the moment, much time and effort is being spent assigning
culpability--for a lack of preparation, delayed decision making,
bureaucratic tie-ups and political infighting--to individuals and
agencies. But in the end, such investigations may produce little that
is of widespread practical use.
 What is more critical, and has significant implications for the
future of emergency management in the United States, is the need to
explicitly and thoroughly define governments' roles and
responsibilities so that officials in other jurisdictions don't suffer
the same sort of meltdown in the next natural or man-made disaster.
The lurching tactical responses to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and
this year's rash of major hurricanes only underline the truly
fundamental issue: how to sort out who should do what--and how to make
sure the public sector is ready to act when the unexpected but
inevitable happens.
 It won't be easy. Some in the federal government clearly feel that if
they're going to be blamed for failures--failures that they ascribe at
least in part to state and local officials--then they'd prefer a
system where the federal government has the option of being much more
preemptive in handling large-scale domestic disasters. States as a
whole, though, are not going to go along with any emergency management
plan that involves the feds declaring something like martial law. They
would much prefer that existing protocols be continued and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency regain its independence from the
Department of Homeland Security and be led by experienced
professionals rather than political appointees.

A GROWING FEDERAL ROLE
 In fact, the history of disaster response and recovery in the United
States has witnessed an ever-increasing federal role. On April 22,
1927, President Calvin Coolidge named a special cabinet-level
committee headed by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to deal with the
massive flooding that was ravaging communities up and down the
Mississippi River Valley that year. The scene, described in John M.
Barry's highly topical chronicle, 'Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi
Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America," arguably represents the
beginning of the modern era of intergovernmental disaster response.
(It also represents the first clear attempt to politicize federal
disaster response, with Hoover consciously riding his performance
during the disaster all the way to the White House.)
 In 1950, the federal government began trying to formalize
intergovernmental roles and responsibilities through the Federal Civil
Defense Act, which defined the scope and type of assistance that the
federal government would extend to states and localities after certain
kinds of disasters or emergencies (although Congress had been offering
financial aid to states and localities in a piecemeal fashion since
the early 1800s). In 1979, President Jimmy Carter created the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, largely in response to governors'
complaints about the fragmented nature of federal disaster planning
and assistance. And in 1988, Congress, passed the Robert T. Stafford
Disaster Relief Act, which outlined the protocols for disaster
declaration and what sort of intergovernmental response would follow.
 From 1989 to 1992, a succession of disasters, including the Loma
Prieta earthquake in California and hurricanes Hugo in South Carolina
and Andrew in Florida put the whole issue of intergovernmental
emergency response in the public hot seat, notes Tom Birkland,
director of the Center for Policy Research at the Rockefeller College
of Public Affairs and Policy. In particular, the disasters highlighted
the federal government's slow-footed and bureaucratic response in the
wake of such catastrophic events. (To be sure, such events were also
teaching state and local governments plenty about THEIR emergency
response capabilities). That, in turn, led to a major turnaround at
FEMA, with the appointment of James Lee Witt, the first FEMA director
to arrive on the job with actual state emergency management
experience.
 In general, two things were going on around the increasing federal
role in emergency readiness and response, Birkland says. States and
localities were getting hooked on federal money--especially for
recovery. But American presidents were also discovering the political
benefits of declaring disasters, which allowed them to liberally
sprinkle significant amounts of cash around various states and
localities in distress. "That spending grew considerably under the
Clinton administration," says Birkland. "And it created the
expectation of federal government largesse. Federal spending, however,
was always meant to supplement and not supplant state and local
spending."

LOCAL RESPONSE
 But if the federal role in disaster response and recovery has
increased--along with expectations of federal help--emergency
management experts at all levels still agree on the basics of existing
emergency response protocol: All emergencies are, initially at least,
local--or local and state--events. "For the first 48 to 72 hours, it's
understood that local and state first responders are principally
responsible," says Bill Jenkins, director of the Homeland Security and
Justice Issues Group, which is currently looking into the
intergovernmental response to Katrina. "The feds come in as requested
after that."
 The extent to which the local-state-federal response ramps up depends
on a host of factors, including the size of the incident and what
plans and agreements are in place prior to any event. It also very
much depends on the capacity of the governments involved. Some local
and state governments have the ability to deal with disasters on their
own and seem less inclined to ask for outside help. Others seem to hit
the intergovernmental panic button more quickly. But whichever it is,
say those on the front line of emergency response, how various
governmental partners in emergency response and recovery are going to
respond shouldn't be a surprise-filled adventure. Key players at every
level of government should have a very good idea of what each will be
expected to do or provide when a particular disaster hits.
 Most important to the strength of the intergovernmental chain are
solid relationships among those who might be called upon to work
closely together in times of high stress. "You don't want to meet
someone for the first time while you're standing around in the
rubble," says Jarrod Bernstein, spokesman for the New York City Office
of Emergency Management. "You want to meet them during drills and
exercises." In New York, says Bernstein, the city has very tight
relationships with state and federal officials in a variety of
agencies. "They're involved in all our planning and all our drills.
They have a seat at all the tabletop exercises we do."
 During those exercises, says Bernstein, federal, state and local
officials establish and agree on what their respective jobs will be
when a "big one" hits. Last summer, for example, the city worked with
FEMA, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and New York State health and emergency
response officials on an exercise aimed at collecting 8 million doses
of medicine and distributing them throughout the city in a 48-hour
window. "What we were looking at is how we'd receive medical
stockpiles from the federal government, break them down and push them
out citywide. There is a built-in federal component to that plan,"
Bernstein says.

NO PLAN B
 While pre-plans and dry runs are all well and good, they're not much
use if not taken seriously, however. In 2004, FEMA and Louisiana's
Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, conducted a
tabletop exercise, called Hurricane Pam, that simulated a Category 3
storm hitting and flooding New Orleans. It identified a huge gap in
disaster planning: An estimated 100,000 people wouldn't be able to get
out of the city without assistance. As is standard in emergency
management practice, it is the locality's responsibility--at least
initially--to evacuate residents, unless other partners are identified
beforehand.
 Critics of Mayor Ray Nagin say he failed to follow up aggressively on
the finding. Last spring, the city floated the notion that it would
rely primarily on the faith-based community to organize and mobilize
caravans for those without cars or who needed special assistance
getting out of the city. The faith-based community balked, however,
citing liability issues. The city never came up with a Plan B.
 Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security had great confidence
in its 426-page "all-hazards" National Response Plan. Unveiled last
January, it "establishes standardized training, organization and
communications procedures for multi-jurisdictional interaction;
clearly identifies authority and leadership responsibilities; enables
incident response to be handled at the lowest possible organizational
and jurisdictional level; ensures the seamless integration of the
federal government when an incident exceeds state or local
capabilities; and provides the means to swiftly deliver federal
support in response to catastrophic incidents."
 Katrina was its first test. And in the wake of the Category 4 storm
and subsequent flooding, the city's vital resources--communications,
transportation, supplies and manpower--were quickly overwhelmed. But
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff waited until 24 hours after the levees
were breached to designate the hurricane as an "incident of national
significance--requiring an extensive and well-coordinated response by
federal, state, local tribal and nongovernmental authorities to save
lives, minimize damage and provide the basis for long-term community
and economic recovery."
 The nation--indeed the world--bore painful witness to its failure.
"There are mechanisms and protocols set up as part of the National
Response Plan, and those were not followed," says John R. Harrald,
director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at
George Washington University. Harrald notes that under the response
plan, one of the first things that's supposed to happen is the rapid
activation of a joint operations center to coordinate the
intergovernmental response. In Louisiana, that didn't happen quickly
enough, he says.

CALLING IN THE TROOPS
 As a result of Katrina, and to a lesser extent hurricanes Rita and
Wilma, the general citizenry and elected leaders at all levels of
government, as well as emergency responders up and down the chain of
command, are demanding a comprehensive review of how local, state and
federal governments work (or don't work) together.
 Part of that discussion has to include what to do when a state or
local government's ability to prepare, respond or to ask for help is
either impaired or wiped out altogether. "The question is what do you
do when state and local capacity fails for one reason or another,
either because they're overwhelmed or they're incompetent," says GWU's
Harrald. "Do we have a system that allows us to scale up adequately or
do we need a system where we can bring the military in sooner but that
doesn't give away state and local control?"
 Bill Leighty, Virginia Governor Mark Warner's chief of staff, who
volunteered to spend two weeks in Louisiana helping manage the state
response to Katrina, says he thinks there needs to be a serious
intergovernmental discussion about when, for example, it might be
appropriate to involve the military more directly in a domestic
crisis. It is a position born of watching FEMA in action, versus what
he saw of the military while he was in New Orleans. FEMA's
bureaucratic approach to every item it provided or action it took was,
at times, brutally exasperating, says Leighty. "But when you tell the
82nd Airborne, 'Secure New Orleans,' they come in and they know
exactly what to do and it gets done."
 Even some long-time New Orleans residents, who watched helplessly as
looters rampaged through parts of the city, say they wouldn't have
minded at all if the military had stepped in to restore order. "There
are times when people are overwhelmed," says Frank Cilluffo, director
of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington
University, "and they don't care what color uniform is involved in
coming to the rescue--red, blue or green."
 However, both Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the Democratic governor of
Louisiana, and Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi,
strenuously objected to requests from the White House to give the
Pentagon command over their states' National Guard troops. And
President George W. Bush's suggestion of a quick resort to the
military in future disasters stunned many observers, including those
in his own party. In a television address from New Orleans, he argued
that only the armed forces were "capable of massive logistical
operations on a moment's notice."
 But governors were aghast at the idea that the military would become
America's first responders. In a USA Today poll, 36 of 38 governors
(including brother Jeb Bush) opposed the plan. Michigan Governor
Jennifer Granholm put it bluntly: "Whether a governor is a Republican
or Democrat, I would expect the response would be, 'Hell no.'" For one
blogger, the worry was "How long before a creek flooding in a small
town in Idaho will activate the 82d Airborne Division?"
 Bush grabbed the military option in part because of the poor
performance of state and local governments. Indeed, everyone breathed
a sigh of relief when Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen arrived to assume
command.
 Part of the explanation also lies in public opinion polls. A Pew
Research Center survey just after the storm revealed that nearly half
of those surveyed believed state and local governments had done a fair
or poor job--and there was no partisan difference on that conclusion.
That meant the smart political play for Bush, although he didn't fare
much better in the poll, was to suggest that the military might have
to do what state and local governments could not.
 That idea, of course, could scarcely be further from the strategy the
Republicans had spent a generation building. The Richard Nixon-Ronald
Reagan model of new federalism revolved around giving the states more
autonomy and less money. But faced with the need to do something--and
lacking any alternative--Bush reached back to Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society philosophy of an expanded role for the federal government.
 But Bush's plan to push the military into a first-response role was
clearly less a broad policy strategy than a tactic to find a safe
haven in the post-Katrina blame game. That became clear in November,
when he announced his avian flu initiative. In that plan, he penciled
in a heavy role for state and local public health officials.

CONTROL AND CONTENTION
 Some believe there is a middle ground when it comes to issues of
authority and autonomy. James A. Stever, director of the Center for
Integrated Homeland Security and Crisis Management at the University
of Cincinnati, says he and colleagues had forwarded a paper to the
former head of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, outlining the concept of
"homeland restoration districts." The idea is to have established
criteria for when a more robust federal disaster response might be
appropriate. Recovery districts would allow for ad hoc federal
takeovers of specific geographic areas when appropriate, says Stever,
rather than creating some new, overriding national response protocol
that calls for broad federal preemption of local and state authority.
 But sifting through such ideas--and the others that are sure to
surface--is going to mean rekindling the sort of conversation about
intergovernmental coordination and cooperation that Washington hasn't
seen in a long time. Whether the current Congress and administration
will be willing to conduct that conversation isn't clear. State and
local officials, for their part, have been called in by Congress to
testify on how the intergovernmental response to disasters ought to
go. But such sessions have frequently had the familiar ring of both
state and local tensions over who controls federal funding, as well as
a little tin-cup rattling.
 For example, in testimony before the House Homeland Security
Committee, David Wallace, mayor of Sugar Land, Texas, argued that the
first lesson learned in the wake of Katrina is that local governments
should have more control over how federal homeland security first-
responder money should be spent. "There was a real concern from the
beginning that an over-reliance by the federal government on a state-
based distribution system for first responder resources and training
would be slow and result in serious delays in funding reaching high-
threat, high-risk population areas." Wallace concluded his testimony
with a request for federal funding for what he describes as Regional
Logistics Centers, designed to bring local regional resources to bear
in the immediate aftermath of disasters.
 Nor is it only touchy issues of funding and control related to
readiness and response that need discussing, points out Paul Posner,
who spent years as a GAO intergovernmental affairs analyst. "There's
other knotty issues that cause a lot of intergovernmental friction,
like federal insurance policies, local building codes and state land
use policies." These are key issues that Posner points out all
influence how vulnerable certain places are to disasters in the first
place.
 From hurricanes and pandemics and to earthquakes and terrorism, the
United States is grappling with the prospect of a host of cataclysmic
events. Taken individually, most communities face a small chance of
being hit, but experts agree that its not a matter of "if" but "when"
another large-scale disaster will occur somewhere in the United
States. As Katrina so powerfully illustrated, a fragmented
intergovernmental response can be disastrous.