Brown ignored reports of FEMAs inadequate disaster plans – a year before Katrina

You would think that everything has already been said about FEMA’s sorry performance before, during, and after Katrina, but you would be wrong. The Congressional committee investigating the agency’s failure has received tens of thousands of documents from the agency, and each document shows an even more disturbing picture of dysfunction and atrophy under the deposed Michael Brown. The documents show that Brown was told more than a year before Hurricane Katrina that the agency’s emergency response teams were unprepared for a major disaster and were operating under outdated plans. An eleven-page memo to Brown from June 2004 described teams of national response managers which were not prepared and were getting “zero funding for training, exercise or team equipment.” Those responders “provide the only practical, expeditious option for the (FEMA) director to field a cohesive team of his best people to handle the next big one,” wrote William Carwile, one of FEMA’s federal coordinating officers. As for the plans that response teams use during an emergency, Carwile wrote: “Revision should be a priority since not one word of response doctrine…has been published in over two years.”

Carwile told Senate aides in a meeting this week that his memo was ignored by Brown and other high officials at FEMA’s headquarters, as were four budget requests over an eighteen-month period for money for the teams. He said each team needed about $1.2 million for training and equipment, according to an aide who attended the meeting.

-read more in this USA Today report