House Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina

9/27/05 Hearing

Witness:  Mike Brown, Former FEMA Director

Transcript of Questioning from Representative Sue Myrick (NC09)

Representative Myrick:  You said a little earlier that you did acknowledge that FEMA had some logistical problems in the supply chain, and I want to kind of go over some of that because I don’t believe everything I read in the press, but there were a lot of reports of problems that existed in getting supply trucks in and trucks that FEMA turned back that were loaded with water, other places where the Coast Guard had a ship that said local authorities could get 1000 gallons of decent fuel but FEMA ordered it to rescind the order.  Volunteers from Louisiana with 500 boats that wanted to help rescue people in New Orleans but were turned back.  Different instances where the Red Cross actually said they were turned away and couldn’t get in.  People who are normally contracted to FEMA who have large truck lines, others said they had you know 100 trucks would sit and wait and were not able to get in and couldn’t go to the staging areas in time.

Then medical things like there was supposed to be a FEMA medical tent someplace outside of New Orleans.  One of the hospitals was sending people there and there was no tent there for triage.  Other medical people who were asked to come in who were there were stopped and not allowed to get in, and this was in the Wednesday/Thursday time range, after the storm hit by the way to clarify.  Anyway it goes on and on.  I mean there are various, various stories about this.

My question to you is…Help me to understand, I know FEMA is not a first responder, I am fully aware of that, but I do know that you do coordinate these supplies getting in.  And you have all these staging areas around the area that are able to move.  Who, first of all, makes that decision to…is it FEMA, the headquarters?  Is it the regional offices that are involved in the decision?  Do regional offices have authority?  Do they have to go through a chain of command?  Help me to understand how the decision is made and what moves where.

Brown: That is a great question, because of my contention that one of the problems we had was the lack of a unified command structure.  It would have enabled us to meet those resource requirements.  So the way it works generally is this…A request comes in that says we need 5 trailers of meals ready to eat at “X” place and the way that should…

Representative Myrick: As request from a local or state?

Brown: A request from the local, a request from the local.

Representative Myrick: OK

Brown:  They make a request that says we need five trailers of MRE’s, meals ready to eat, and they feed that into the state EOC.  And the state EOC then says to FEMA our coordinating team that is there that we have had a request for this, we have validated that request, and by validation I mean they may come back and say “County ‘X’ requested 5 trailers”.  Based on the information we have they may only need three, or we have a greater need somewhere else, so we are only going to send them 3 instead of the 5 they requested.

Representative Myrick:  And the state then redirects the resources, your resources?

Brown:  Yes, that is right.  The state EOC in conjunction…if you have a unified command structure…the state and FEMA jointly make that decision because we don’t want to step on their priorities, we want to meet their priorities.  So once that request comes in, it may be modified, whatever.  And then that gets fed, after the initial stage of the disaster, then gets fed to FEMA headquarters so that we can dispatch those trucks out.  Where the breakdown sometimes occurs is we don’t have unified command at the state level where you get those resources requests in so you can push those resources into the region.

Representative Myrick:  Now you are saying at the state level with state officials, not with your FEMA people?

Brown:  Right, and that’s where the first breakdown can occur is that it comes into the state EOC and it’s not properly channeled, it’s not properly authorized.  Someone doesn’t say, “Yes that’s a priority”.  If that doesn’t occur to you, you don’t have a unified command.  We kind of go into an ad hoc mode.  And so if we hear that, for example, county “X” is requesting 5 truckloads of meals ready to eat.  So we will then go and figure out and say OK we’ve got four ready so we’ll just go and ship four into that county.

That’s when you don’t have a unified command structure.  If you have the unified command structure, it come into the state EOC, its validated, and in the initial stages of the disaster when things are still being coordinated at a global level out of FEMA headquarters then FEMA headquarters logistics sends that order out to send five trucks of whatever it is.  And that order will go to the closest staging area or sometimes it may not be the closest staging area, but where those things may be so that we can move them in.

Representative Myrick:  What kind of time frame are you talking about with this bureaucracy that we have to walk through?

Brown: Literally a couple of hours.  It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to work its way through.  The problem that FEMA has is that we don’t always have good visibility on those logistics.  And we are trying to…before I left FEMA, we were trying to rework those contracts to accomplish 2 things.  One is how to figure out better visibility to know literally you know when you have 500 trucks at Maxwell Air force Base you don’t always know exactly what those 500 trucks contain.  We need visibility of what’s on the ground.

Representative Myrick:  Now why do you not know?  If you’re the one that contracts with them at FEMA right?

Brown: Yes.

Representative Myrick:  Then why does FEMA not know what’s on the trucks?

Brown:  Because sometimes doing this ad hoc response.  Saying we needed 3 trucks of water.  So we found three trucks of water at Maxwell and just shipped them out.  And you don’t always…It doesn’t always catch up in the time before you do the next level of distribution, the next request that comes in.  So if there were only…let’s take the worst case scenario.

Representative Myrick: Alright.

Brown:  You have 5 trucks of water at Maxwell Air force Base and because you didn’t have unified command structure you dispatched three of those because you just knew you needed them in St. Bernard’s parish so you sent them to Saint Bernard’s parish.  Before that can be entered in…

Representative Myrick:  Entered into a computer or something, is that what you are talking about?

Brown:  Right, actually no.  A form gets fed to somebody and they log it into the logistics system.  Somebody else may send in a legitimate request for five trailer loads of water and you think they are there because no one has yet entered in the three that have gone out.  So you request in for five and there’s only two there.  So you only end up sending what you have knowing you still have to get more.  So we need better visibility in knowing through GPS and a better tracking system.

Representative Myrick:  Right.

Brown:  Of exactly what is there, when it left, and I would like to know if I were still the FEMA director, I’d like to know what route is that truck on?  Where is it going?  What time did it arrive?  Who signed off for it?

Representative Myrick:  Right now you don’t know any of that?

Brown:  We don’t always know that.  The other thing that happens is…with some of the contracts we have, these trucking companies they are independent contractors, and they may head out somewhere, and come across a road somewhere in Florida where they can’t traverse the road.  Well then they just turn around and go back.  We don’t know for hours or days that they didn’t make it where they were supposed to go.

Representative Myrick:  I know the major communications systems are a problem with all of this, but don’t trucks have radios that they call into where ever their head quarters is and they can tell that and can be communicated to you.

Brown:  In a perfect world they could do that.  But, in the middle of a disaster they can’t sometimes and other times they just don’t.  One of the things that happened in New Orleans was that, two things might happen.  One, they couldn’t get to where they were going because of flood waters.  Two…

Representative Myrick: Right, I know that in New Orleans…

Brown:  Or these independent truckers would hear news reports of widespread violence and they would say to themselves heck, I am not going to put myself in harm’s way.  So they wouldn’t go somewhere and we have got to get better control of that kind of logistical issue.

Representative Myrick:  Explain to me what does this regional office, these regional offices, with FEMA have to do with the supply chain then, if you say everything goes to heck when…

Brown:  Because my objective, our operational construct at FEMA is to eventually move all of that to the regional offices because we want to get that down to regions where they’re controlling the…That happens over, depending on the disaster, over a period of a few days, maybe a week, sometimes shorter.  When we can personally get back down to the region where they take control of it.

Representative Myrick:  I am going to yield to Mr. Taylor in a minute, but I have another question.  You said that you had MRE’s and water in the Superdome and basically reports finally came out and said that there were a lot of MRE’s and that was not that big a problem but the water was a problem and we couldn’t get more supplies. What about air lift?  I mean they air drop stuff in foreign countries all the time.  Why couldn’t they have air dropped something when we’ve got the military who could do it to temporarily ease the problem with the people in that building, the other building.

Brown:  That is exactly where the breakdown is that we need to analyze and figure out why that occurred.  Because I am sitting here looking at mission assignments where we specifically request airlift capabilities to do that very thing.

Representative Myrick:  Right, and it doesn’t happen?

Brown:  I don’t think it always happens like it was supposed to happen.  I think in some cases it did and some cases it didn’t.  And we have got to find out why.

Representative Myrick:  But that’s part of the process going back and re-looking at this.

Brown:  Yes, absolutely.  I can guarantee that the people at FEMA are going through the remedial action process right now and plugging those problems in to figure out why it worked in this area and didn’t work in that area, to see if there is any conclusive reasoning that we can solve contractionally or if in some cases it was an actual physical problem.

Representative Myrick:  Is this something that can be done fairly quickly?  Do you believe that we can feed that back to the committee?

Brown:  That’s a relative term because… (Technical difficulty with cameras and sound)

Representative Myrick:  (technical issue resolved)…what is the problem?

Brown:  I really want to address that question because you got to the heart of my frustration and that is that we never carve out the resources, either internally within our own budget process that we go through or with DHS to fix those things.  We never come to Congress to get the specific monies to do those specific things.

Representative Myrick: Why?

Brown:  And the time has come…Because there are always other priorities, there are always other priorities.

Representative Myrick yields to Representative Taylor

(later round of questions)

Representative Myrick:  Follow up for clarification because I maybe didn’t hear it right and I don’t really understand when you said, and I am paraphrasing obviously, when you said that you wish that you had told DOD to come in earlier.  You made the comment that the DOD secretary and the secretary of Homeland Security could agree to, in effect, take over.  How did you mean that in this structure?   This hierarchy structure we are talking about?

Brown:  Well as opposed to us as opposed to FEMA mission assigning the Department of Defense to do a specific task.  Distribute water in some county or parish.  We can instead just do a blanket mission assignment that says “We want you to take over this entire mission”.  Both the distribution of MRE’s, water, food, ice, that sort of thing, and the delivery of it to distribution points.  And then what I would call the wholesale, getting it to the mobilization center, then moving it out there out into the retail network, out into the county level, into the communities.

Representative Myrick: Right.

Brown:  And for that to occur, secretary to secretary has to agree to take on that overall mission and they indeed do that.  My point is that knowing in hindsight what I know.  Even though we were mission assigning DOD to do certain things early in the game, hindsight tells me on Saturday or Sunday I should have said right then this is going to be bad, let’s just have you do it all right bow because FEMA will not be able to handle this.

Representative Myrick:  Does FEMA have any kind of a formal planning process like DOD does?

Brown: No, and that’s what I testified to earlier.

Representative Myrick:  I’m sorry I missed that.

Brown:  We have a planning process, that’s not when you compare it to what DOD does in terms of their planning.  Ours is immature at best.  And so what we need to do is develop for all emergency management, not just for FEMA, but for state and local too, a robust planning center within FEMA that can put together these kinds of contingency plans and these kinds of play books that we can use that the DOD has.  We need to do that on the civilian side.

Representative Myrick:  Switching gears, what happened with the debit cards?

Brown:  I don’t know because one the debit cards were issued, I was gone.  And I have not kept up with that issue to find out what happened.

Representative Myrick:  So you, your job for FEMA was to arrange for them to be distributed?

Brown:  We arranged.  As I was leaving we were putting together a plan where by the banks would issue the debit cards and we would be able to get the numbers

Representative Myrick: That was under FEMA’s direction?

Brown: That was under FEMA’s direction.

Representative Myrick: Because, that’s part of what FEMA would normally do.

Brown: Well, getting financial assistance to people is part of what we would normally do.

Representative Myrick: Correct, I’m sorry.

Brown: But, we couldn’t do it in the traditional way this time.

Representative Myrick: I understand.

Brown:  People didn’t have access to checking accounts, that sort of thing.  So the concept was, put together a debit card so that they can get the cash into their hands.  Because, you don’t want to distribute, you know five hundred dollars of cash or one thousand dollars.  Put it on the debit cards instead.  We contact the debit card companies to begin that process.  When I left they were putting together the distribution plan for how they were going to do that.  And that obviously just did not work.

Representative Myrick:  Now you said that you were looking at some of the things that needed to be done and assessed.  I assume that is something that is going to be reassessed.

Brown: Actually, I still think the debit card is a very good idea.

Representative Myrick: I don’t have any trouble with the debit card idea but then it seems like…

Brown:  Because, it would allow us to track expenditures and see what they people are spending it on.  Where it goes, kind of see what happens to the disaster victims.  But the whole distribution in that kind of scale really needs to be looked at.

Representative Myrick: Right, that’s what I was talking about.  How it got out there, not the fact that they aren’t a good idea.

Brown: Right

Representative Myrick: You, well not you personally, but somebody at FEMA at one point had said you were going to get three hundred trailers put in there to house people.  And then I understand that is being re-looked at again.  I just wanted to say coming from a local background, a local government background, you know that kind of panics me.  That’s not just putting in trailers as you know, but you have sewage, you have roads, and you have all this other stuff.  And then you end up with a very big problem when they are no longer needed.

I wanted to ask if you… Has FEMA ever looked at as a next step?  We are talking about the monies you put into housing at manufactured housing.  I am not talking about trailers, I am talking modular homes, which are technically stronger than stick built and cheaper. Is that anything that has entered into any of the planning, any of the recommendations you have made?

Brown: We actually started planning for modular homes at the very beginning of Katrina because we knew the housing demand was going to be so high.  And so I appoint one of my FCO’s, Federal Coordinating Officers, to head up a housing task force, to look into that very issue.

Representative Myrick: Is there any way that we can get some information as on what the housing task force has determined or is determining?  Or what the result of that is?

Brown: I assume you can, because my assumption is that housing task force is still actively working in Louisiana and the other states.

Representative Myrick: Mr. Chairman would it be possible to request that information from the FEMA people?  I would like to see where it is.

Chairman: Absolutely.

Representative Myrick: Thank you, I yield back.