Politico.com

Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina

2015-08-27

Had I left the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the spring of 2005, my life would be very different today. And I really wish, in retrospect, that I had. But after the 2004 hurricane season, when FEMA’s excellent responses to hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne in Florida were widely praised, White House chief of staff Andy Card persuaded me to stay on as director through the 2005 hurricane season. I didn’t want to disappoint President George W. Bush. We’d developed a good relationship. Heck, he even gave me my own nickname: “Brownie.” By the end of the summer, it was a nickname the whole world would know. I, in turn, would have learned many lessons in how Washington fails—and how it assigns blame. People are still saying now, as they said then, that what went wrong in New Orleans a decade ago was all my fault. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. There were many dark moments in those three weeks on the Gulf Coast, and FEMA and the federal government certainly made some mistakes, but perhaps the worst part was being held responsible for the things that I didn’t control at all. I’m often asked, as the person who was running FEMA when Hurricane Katrina hit, why I didn’t evacuate New Orleans. My response is simple—FEMA had no authority to do that under the Constitution, which clearly establishes a system of federalism in which state and local governments are autonomous governmental entities. We call first responders “first” for a reason. When you dial 9-1-1 your call isn’t answered by an operator at 500 C Street SW, Washington, D.C., 20472. Your call is answered by a local government entity that has first and primary responsibility for a disaster. Could FEMA have ordered the evacuation of New Orleans? Yes, had it waived posse comitatus and invoked the Insurrection Act, which Congress ultimately amended in 2006 to permit deployment of troops in response to natural disasters. That unprecedented action was actually contemplated days after landfall aboard Air Force One—and I advocated for it. After I advised the president to federalize the response, he sat with Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Air Force One and outlined his plan. We immediately started drafting the federalization documents for the president’s signature, but Governor Blanco requested time to think it over and the president acquiesced. While the governor considered her options, the city became more and more dysfunctional. Blanco ultimately rejected the president’s plan, and political considerations eventually pushed the idea aside. By the time federalization was seriously considered, the biggest mistake had already been made: evacuation began too late. And even if FEMA had been given the power to order citizens out of New Orleans days earlier, it didn’t own the helicopters, military transport planes and amphibious armored personnel carriers necessary to carry out the evacuation of a major American city. As the storm neared New Orleans, all I could do—and did do even before the federalization debate got underway—was go on television, radio and any media outlet my press team could find—and encourage people to “literally get your butts out of New Orleans before the storm hits.” Prior to Katrina making landfall, I asked then-National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield to forcefully explain on a secure video conference call with Blanco and Nagin the catastrophe they were potentially facing if they failed to evacuate at least two or three days prior to landfall. When that didn’t work, I called President Bush at the ranch and implored him to call Mayor Nagin and encourage him to evacuate his city. The president called; the mayor dallied. Nagin finally asked people to evacuate on Sunday morning for a storm that hit his city sometime after midnight that night. By that point, Amtrak had left the city with rail cars sans passengers. Airlines had evacuated Louis Armstrong International Airport with planes sans travelers. And school buses sat in their lots, soon to be flooded and ruined. The mayor’s incompetence cost lives. While I was urging people to leave New Orleans, Mayor Nagin announced a “shelter of last resort,” the New Orleans Superdome. In other words, despite calls to evacuate, if you choose not to evacuate, or are now unable to evacuate because you lack transportation, run to the Superdome. I was livid. If you watch a video subsequently <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-01-video-katrina-warning_x.htm">leaked</a> to the media, you hear me exclaiming to the mayor and governor that the Superdome should not be a shelter of last resort. Our engineering reports had predicted the Superdome would not withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and at the time, Katrina was rated a Category 5. Those reports were proven correct when the roof was ripped out, the stadium was surrounded by 8 to 12 feet of water and the power went out. In that video, I also questioned whether there were enough medical teams in the Superdome to treat evacuees. FEMA had placed water, blankets and MREs (meals ready to eat) along with a medical team and support team inside the Superdome, but we were unable to fully stock the stadium with emergency supplies because you don’t put scarce resources in a facility where they are likely to be damaged or destroyed. As a consequence of the mayor’s actions, the people at the Superdome were scared, hot and tired. And the pictures of young, poor mothers with babies in cramped and unsanitary conditions gave the media what they needed. A focal point of fearful, confused citizens in a damaged building, surrounded by floodwaters. The blame game was primed. Had the mayor and governor fulfilled their responsibilities as elected leaders of their city and state, most if not all of the people crying for help in front of national television cameras would not have been there. They would have been in other locales, safe and secure. But the blame was not placed on those responsible. The blame was placed on me—the one person who had no authority to do anything at that point except get out the checkbook and start paying the Department of Defense to evacuate people from that hellhole to a place of safety. And that is exactly what I did. Soon the blame started coming at me from another direction—higher up. *** When the president flew to the Gulf Coast on Friday, Sept. 2, 2005 to inspect the damage and the response efforts, I asked the White House chief of staff for private time with Bush when he arrived in Alabama to give him a heads up about the problems in New Orleans and prepare him to deal with the media—especially for any questions he might get from the White House press corps. I’d kept the White House staff fully informed of the debacle unfolding in Louisiana, but I felt compelled to privately inform Bush of the difficulties with Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin. The president’s schedule included a brief meeting with me before the public briefing and photo op at the air national guard base. But that meeting was cut short and I wasn’t able to fully explain the situation to the president. Without warning about the problems we were having in Louisiana, he walked into the glare of the cameras. Governor Bob Riley of Alabama, pleased with FEMA’s response to problems in his state, said during the briefing he wanted to thank FEMA and me for our hard work. Though Louisiana was a mess, the Mississippi and Alabama response efforts were going relatively smoothly. The president picked up the cue from Riley and uttered those famous words, “And Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva a job…” I grimaced because that is exactly the sort of comment I had wanted to avoid. I wanted the president to convey how badly things were going in Louisiana. Now, he appeared to be out of touch with reality, and he used my nickname in front of the media, which instantly piqued their curiosity about the relationship between the president and me. The press was now on the hunt. Who is Michael Brown? Why does he have a nickname? Why is the president so uninformed about what’s really going on in Louisiana? As the media scrutiny increased, I faced another problem—chain of command. FEMA was part of the alphabet soup of agencies folded into the new Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Tom Ridge. But under the Stafford Act, which created FEMA and governed federal responses to disasters, FEMA’s director is to act “on behalf of the President of the United States.” To Ridge’s credit, he never interrupted that chain of command. But the same could not be said for his successor, Michael Chertoff. A few weeks into the recovery effort, I was stunned when the White House informed me in a call that I had to start following a new “chain of command” under Chertoff. That was one of the first signals to me that the bus was in first gear and about to run me over. The power struggle had started about a week earlier when I instructed Northcom to move a hospital ship to New Orleans. Upon learning of the ship’s deployment to New Orleans, then U.S. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi called in the middle of the night, screaming that the ship should instead be used in his state. I explained that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour had not requested use of the ship, and that we had a priority need for the ship in Louisiana. Lott impugned my character over the telephone, but I refused to budge. A U.S. senator interfering in ongoing operations for purely political reasons was unacceptable. But Lott went over my head and persuaded Chertoff to change the destination of the hospital ship to Mississippi. Northcom was so confused by this that I received an email making certain that that was the proper decision. Even though that was not the decision I’d made, I had been overruled by a secretary unfamiliar with ground operations and who was making a decision purely on the basis that a U.S. senator had requested the ship go to his state. Chertoff sealed my fate at that moment. Though I was ostensibly running our operations center in Baton Rouge, I was no longer in charge. Now, someone sitting at a desk in Washington was making operational decisions. The bus was moving full steam ahead right over me. Any expert in crisis management will tell you that if you can’t answer the question as to who is in charge of a crisis, then no one is in charge and the response to the crisis is doomed. *** But unfortunately for me, the media still thought I was solely in charge, unaware of the political machinations going on behind the scenes. This was hardly the only time that journalists failed to understand what was really happening in New Orleans. And that was partially my fault. My mishandling of the press during the disaster response was among my greatest mistakes. In the aftermath of Katrina, FEMA coordinated all of the helicopters, boats and amphibious craft being used to rescue thousands of victims from rooftops, buildings and highway overpasses. A detailed grid system was established to eliminate duplicative efforts, make the rescues as efficient and quick as possible and prioritize hardest hit areas. Triage was in full force. When CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked shortly after Katrina hit to accompany one of those teams so he could record the rescue of victims, my instinctive answer was to decline the request. The rescue boats carried the minimum crew members necessary to maximize space for victims. If I let a national news figure and a cameraman on a rescue boat, that boat would have two fewer spots on it for victims in need of rescuing. My answer—no, you can’t go. Big mistake in hindsight. Cooper and his cameraman rented a boat, and with total disregard or ignorance of the systematic, grid-driven rescue of victims, managed to find a house with victims yet to be rescued. As Cooper and his cameraman reported on “their” rescue, the inevitable question of where the rescuers are was asked, and the next stage of blame began. Based on that one, isolated, out-of-context rescue, the narrative was set that the rescue efforts were disjointed, in disarray and uncoordinated. Nothing could have been further from the truth—an organized plan existed to rescue each of those people. Within two or three days of the storm, we had gotten to safety the easiest victims to locate, those who had made it onto their rooftops. FEMA had so many rescue helicopters in the air it established a mini air traffic control system to coordinate its efforts. Getting evacuees out of the Superdome took longer, about a week. The hardest task, going door to door to rescue victims holed up inside their homes, was what went on for weeks. But those facts weren’t widely understood. Anderson’s rescue made for a compelling, albeit false, story with great visuals. I learned from that experience that the media are an inevitable part of every disaster, and you must learn to use them, and to reasonably accommodate them, in order to get the facts presented correctly. And that goes double anytime the press is out to get you. Then, after President Bush’s televised praise for me, Time and its bloodhounds went to work. Not long after the Bush news briefing, one of my press assistants approached me and asked if I had a copy of my résumé. Apparently Time was working on a story that I had “lied” on it. Knowing that I hadn’t, I blew off the request. Time ran with the story regardless. The magazine claimed in an article published on Sept. 8 that I had lied about previous work experience, that I had lied about job titles; It even claimed that I had not been an adjunct professor of law despite the law school’s rebuttal of that claim. Sources Time quoted later complained about their words being taken out of context. Former colleagues of mine and the dean of the law school provided affidavits during the congressional investigations, completely refuting the allegations. The article made no mention of the more than a hundred disasters I had successfully coordinated over a five-year period while serving as the deputy director, then director, of FEMA, and as undersecretary of Homeland Security. Nor did Time appreciate how my early experiences in municipal government working with first responders—both police and fire—proved invaluable in working with FEMA’s state and local partners. When I speak to various groups about crisis management, I always use the résumé story as an example of why you should never ignore a media request the way I did. Had I taken the time to understand what Time was attempting to do I could have called all of my previous coworkers and employers and perhaps staved off the outright lying of Time. But I was too busy coordinating the response to one of the largest natural disasters in our nation’s history. And I paid the price for that. Would it have been difficult to respond to Time? No. I could have simply referred it to the White House Office of Personnel. I could have referred it to the FBI, which had conducted full-field background investigations for my Senate confirmations. Or I could have referred it to the CIA, DOE, DOD or any other agency for which I held a top secret or other security clearances that would never had been issued had I lied on a résumé. The truth didn’t matter. News outlets around the country picked up the story, ran with the false narrative and lies, and suddenly the claim was that I not only lacked experience for the job, I had lied about that experience. The defamatory Time article accomplished its mission—a few hours after it was published, I was recalled to Washington, relieved of my responsibilities as the “principal federal official” in response to Katrina. Politics did what it does best—it found the target, the scapegoat. And in so doing, it gave the White House the opportunity to cut ties. Three days later I chose to resign. *** Resigning didn’t put an end to the blame game. In a staff report for the congressional hearings following Katrina, congressmen attempted to use emails in which I’d given no written response or a simple one- or two-word reply to disparage my leadership. How many of you have never answered an email, instead picking up the phone and calling the person? How many of you have replied to a lengthy email with a simple yes or no response? How many of you have ignored an email because you knew the issue had been resolved or was no longer even an issue? If you read through “Hurricane Katrina Document Analysis: The E-Mails of Michael Brown” you’ll see a desperate attempt by congressmen to selectively use such emails to attack me. In almost every public appearance at which there is a Q&A session following my presentation, I am asked if I regret any of my emails or if would I take any of them back. My unequivocal answer is no. In one infamous email, in response to a situation report from inside the Superdome, my reply was “is there anything I need to do or tweak?” Despite how it might appear, that is not an indecisive or unresponsive reply. Almost every hour those situation reports were received, discussed among the leadership team and decisions made—all without the need to respond by email. My email was a follow-up after the report had already been deliberated, assignments made, solutions put into action. But political actors ignored—willfully or ignorantly—how a crisis response team operates. I was accused of making light of the situation during Katrina. Yes, we joked. And we joked in the middle of a natural disaster. Much like a surgeon jokes while performing life-saving surgery, or the president jokes in the Oval Office, it is a natural, human instinct to use laughter and humor to remind people working for you that you appreciate their hard work. It gives those stressed out from work a reminder of their humanity. If members of Congress don’t understand that, then congressmen are dumber than I ever thought. Ask yourself—how many members of Congress would be willing to share any-and-all emails they have exchanged with staff, family or others while in office? I guarantee that we would find similar exchanges. But it wasn’t just my emails for which Congress was disconnected from reality. In the post-Katrina congressional hearings I was asked what, to this day, I considered to be either the dumbest question ever posed by a U.S. senator; or, a question designed to point the blame at me without realizing how ignorant it made the senator appear. After 9/11, I was concerned FEMA was not ready for genuinely catastrophic disasters so I asked Congress for funding to study several catastrophic scenarios, including the possibility of a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans. The tabletop exercise, which we dubbed “Hurricane Pam,” was held in July 2005, one month before Katrina hit. The results struck fear in everyone involved. Hurricane Pam taught us too late that Louisiana and New Orleans were ill prepared. The state’s emergency manager was under federal indictment, its emergency operations in disarray. The senator asked why, if we knew from the Hurricane Pam exercises in July, 2005, that New Orleans and Louisiana were ill prepared, why we didn’t make the necessary changes to policies, procedures, statutes and funding, so that the city and state would be prepared for Katrina in August 2005. Anyone who understands Washington recognizes the stupidity of the question. In less than 30 days I was expected to request and get approval for funding, adopt rules and regulations, disburse grants and have the state and locals hire, adopt, exercise, train and be ready for a disaster they hadn’t been ready for in years? Since Katrina caused several levees to breach, I also suppose that same U.S. senator expected me to have the levees re-engineered and brought up to standards in 30 days, too. To this day I relish telling that story to people who want to understand how Washington works. *** The post landfall response was the <a href="http://ehstoday.com/news/ehs_imp_12641">most massive movement</a> of resources, material, personnel and equipment since Sept. 11, 2001. More food, medicine, military personnel, FEMA personnel and volunteers, were dispatched from Pensacola, Florida to Houston, Texas than in any other disaster in U.S. history. Imagine the most stressful situation you can. In the midst of those circumstances, everything that is supposed to work a certain way fails to do so. No matter how often you push the button, bark an order or instruct staff, things don’t work the way they’re supposed to. I was experiencing that during Katrina, but didn’t recognize it. In those instances one needs to learn to step back, reassess the situation and restart the entire management process. The key to being able to do that is having a support system around you that can help you take a deep breath and objectively analyze the problem. But my trusted press secretary had been recalled to Washington. My staff had become disorganized, understandably fearful of the political repercussions, and had begun to distance themselves. I often pleaded with first responders and FEMA employees to get rest—to actually take time to sleep. While it is unnatural for them to do so—they’re driven by the desire to serve—if they fail to physically and mentally take care of themselves, they risk becoming victims themselves. In the end, I failed to heed my own advice. Every CEO, manager, business owner and politician, needs to learn from my experience. You must nurture your outside, independent network and train yourself to know when to call on them. But that isn’t the only lesson from my story. The American public needs to learn not to rely on the government to save them when a crisis hits. The larger the disaster, the less likely the government will be capable of helping any given individual. We simply do not have the manpower to help everyone. Firefighters and rescue workers would all agree the true first responders are individual citizens who take care of themselves. Government has a few lessons to learn, too. FEMA was once known for its great partnership with state and local governments. The agency saw its role as an augmenter of state and local response—helping to train, equip and organize first responders at the local level. It was what I always called an “honest broker.” Our role was to assist state and local governments to correct vulnerabilities they faced. When a presidentially-declared disaster struck, FEMA activated the Catastrophic Disaster Response Group, and, acting as that honest broker, brought federal, state and local agencies together to respond appropriately, efficiently and effectively. That same approach gave us the Urban Search & Rescue Teams, the Veterinarian Medical Assistance Teams, the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, the Nuclear Incident Response Teams, all of which were made up of local first responders who received training and equipment to use during presidentially-declared disasters. But after the creation of DHS in 2003, the focus shifted from an all-hazards approach to a focus on terrorism. Money for grants, training and equipment suddenly had to somehow help combat terrorism—and thus the partnership between federal and local agencies began to break down. Grant dollars were moved out of FEMA into the Department of Justice Office of Preparedness grants, thus moving the focus away from all hazards to one of law enforcement. Naturally, state and local governments followed the money, and the marriage between FEMA and state agencies was undermined by the pursuit of terrorism dollars. I wrote Secretary Ridge in 2003 and warned him that this shift of grant money out of FEMA would ultimately result in FEMA’s failure. And it did. Terrorism became the focus, as did law enforcement. Partnership faded away. You can’t blame state governments; they were simply chasing the money. Today government needs to affirmatively reassert its commitment to the all-hazards approach to disasters. Whether a disaster is man-made, natural or the result of terrorism, the response is the same. And the federal government must not become a first responder. The more state and local governments become dependent upon federal dollars, the weaker and more dependent upon the federal government they will become. Why is that important? Disasters happen every day. The federal government should be involved only in those disasters that are beyond the capacity of state and local governments to handle. Centralized disaster response at the national level would destroy the inherent close relationship between citizens and those who save their lives and protect their property in times of everyday disasters. We must not allow that to happen.