Chapter Chapter 4
Section Federal Resource Challenges
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Federal Resource Challenges
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left the Gulf Coast in desperate need of resources and assistance. Nearly a quarter of a million people in shelters relied on shipments of ice, food, and water to meet their basic needs.175 Hospitals, shelters, and other critical facilities required diesel fuel to run their back-up generators. Many evacuees lacked access to medical providers and supplies. Emergency responders conducting life-saving operations demanded additional supplies and fuel. FEMA’s pre-positioned supplies proved inadequate to meet these demands throughout the region after landfall.176To fill this gap, the Federal government sent more resources to Louisiana in the first two weeks after Hurricane Katrina than it had sent to Florida for all of the previous year’s hurricanes combined.177
Lessons Learned:
The Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with State and local governments and the private sector, should develop a modern, flexible, and transparent logistics system. This system should be based on established contracts for stockpiling commodities at the local level for emergencies and the provision of goods and services during emergencies. The Federal government must develop the capacity to conduct large-scale logistical operations that supplement and, if necessary, replace State and local logistical systems by leveraging resources within both the public sector and the private sector.
As Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Director Brown provided public assurances that FEMA was prepared to act to meet the logistical challenge.178 FEMA personnel soon discovered, however, that the quantity of material requested post-landfall outstripped their logistical capabilities. FEMA simply could not procure enough resources to match the rate at which commodities were being consumed. The agency’s contracts with private companies, though sufficient for smaller disasters, were incapable of supplying the enormous quantities of resources needed.179 As a result, shortages plagued the affected area. In Mississippi, FEMA personnel were unable to meet requirements submitted by staging areas.180 William Carwile, the FCO for Mississippi, recalled that there was a huge gap “between what we required on the ground and what they were sending us.181 In some areas, local officials who requested high-demand resources, such as generators, received no shipments of those supplies from FEMA until weeks after landfall.182
Ineffective communications between FEMA and other Federal departments and agencies prevented available Federal resources from being effectively used for response operations. The USDA observed that its personnel “had difficulty in getting FEMA to take advantage of the resources available to them because of the unfamiliarity of some FEMA employees with USDA programs. Likewise, many USDA employees were unfamiliar with FEMA programs and procedures.” The Department of Interior also offered valuable assistance. In the aftermath of the hurricane, DOI delivered a comprehensive list of its deployable assets that were immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance, including such items as 300 dump trucks and other vehicles, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 boats, eleven aircraft, fifty to seventy-five maintenance crews. Although DOI repeatedly attempted to provide these assets through the process established by the NRP, there was no effective mechanism for efficiently integrating and deploying these resources. DOI offered 500 rooms and other sites for shelters or housing. The Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Agriculture (USDA) also offered thousands of housing units nationwide to FEMA for temporary assignment to evacuees. FEMA officials said that the need to negotiate conditional requirements in some cases prevented them from accepting some Federal agencies' offers of housing resources. Most of the thousands of housing units made available by other Federal agencies were not offered to evacuees and were never used.
The private sector too met roadblocks in its efforts to coordinate with the Federal government during the response. For example, the American Bus Association spent an entire day trying to find a point of contact at FEMA to coordinate bus deployment without success.183 Federal procurement officers also neglected to draw upon retailers’ supply lines to get the resources that victims needed. To this end, despite an acute shortage of blue tarps to cover damaged roofs, Federal officials were slow to draw upon the corporate supply chains that deliver tarps to the stores that sell them. For example, one private sector company had 600,000 tarps available.
Lessons Learned:
The Department of Homeland Security, working collaboratively with the private sector, should revise the National Response Plan and finalize the Interim National Infrastructure Protection Plan to be able to rapidly assess the impact of a disaster on critical infrastructure. We must use this knowledge to inform Federal response and prioritization decisions and to support infrastructure restoration in order to save lives and mitigate the impact of the disaster on the Nation.
Throughout the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Commerce worked to close the gap between the private and the public sector. The Department set up an informational website and hotline to provide businesses with a one-stop source of information on contracting opportunities.184 The Department also granted certain companies prioritized access to the raw materials needed to restore the region’s crippled infrastructure, even when the resources had previously been contracted to other parties.185
As logistics problems were now obvious to all, FEMA turned to DOD for major support in this area.186 On September 3, Secretary Rumsfeld directed USNORTHCOM to execute greater logistical support operations in both Louisiana and Mississippi.187
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