In what may represent a major change in policy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is now quietly drawing up plans for a handful of disasters: devastating earthquakes beneath San Francisco and St. Louis and catastrophic storms in South Florida and Hawaii.

FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that the agency is forming “base plans” for responding to specific calamities. This is a change in a Bush Administration policy that said states should develop such responses without the federal government getting involved.

Last year, lawmakers from California expressed dismay that the federal government did not have a plan to respond to a catastrophic earthquake in their state. In March 2006, Paulison’s boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, said their complaints were “unwarranted.” “You don’t want us to write a plan and say, ‘Here, San Francisco, this is what you’re going to do,’” Chertoff said. Rather, he said, officials from DHS had met with California emergency-management planners and asked to review the state plan. “They’ve got to write it,” Chertoff said at the time of the state’s primary role in a response plan.

The change is the result of a “culture change” at FEMA, according to Paulison. “We’re not going to wait for the state to ask for things before we start moving them, we’re going to anticipate what the needs are, and then when they ask for them, we’re going to be there,” he said. “The worst that can happen is they don’t need them.”

FEMA’s decision to plan for disasters is a reversal in philosophy for the Bush Administration, which believed that coping with natural disasters was mainly a state responsibility. Prior to 2001, FEMA was a cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the President, but starting in 2002 it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its authority was reduced. Following public outrage over the federal government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, pressure has built to reform FEMA and return it to its pre-2001 status.

Feds Now Drawing Up Plans for Major Disasters in 4 States (Insurance Journal 10/16/07)

October 23, 2007