Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Washington --- Four years before Hurricane Katrina left Gulf Coast residents stranded on rooftops and in ill-equipped shelters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been ordered by Congress to develop a plan to protect the poor from such post-disaster traumas.

But FEMA never did, citing concerns that such a plan might be unconstitutional.

Every year since 2001, Rep. Sanford Bishop, an Albany Democrat and member of the House Appropriations Committee, has placed a provision in FEMA's budget requiring the agency to study how to effectively warn and rescue people who lack phones, cars, basic reading skills or an understanding of English.

Bishop said he first raised the issue of preparedness in poor and minority communities as a freshman lawmaker in 1994, after Tropical Storm Alberto flooded a number of towns in his district, including Macon and Albany.

It was not until May 2005, however, that FEMA awarded the $1.5 million contract to a North Carolina firm to begin that study, and it was July by the time the money arrived and the study began.

A month later, with the study barely under way, Katrina struck. Bishop says there were more casualties in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama because FEMA failed to heed Congress' order.

"FEMA repeatedly refused to implement it," Bishop said. "It certainly would have mitigated a lot of the results of Katrina."
Neither FEMA nor the company conducting the study, MDC Inc., denies that Katrina rescue efforts would have been enhanced if FEMA had in hand a plan to deal specifically with the poor.

"The timing couldn't have been more ironic," said Mirinda Kossoff, spokeswoman for MDC.

New Orleans' 9th Ward, the city's poorest neighborhood, was among the hardest hit areas, and images of its black residents clinging to rooftops awaiting rescue or packed inside the Superdome without adequate food and water were some of the most galvanizing produced bythe disaster.

But FEMA officials said they didn't ignore the congressional orders all those years and it wasn't the agency's fault that a plan to prepare and rescue the poor was not in place earlier.

Indeed, FEMA has been working since 2001 to get the study started, but was thwarted by Congress, said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews.

The way Congress worded its order to FEMA --- making explicit reference to a "Minority Emergency Preparedness Demonstration Program" and the need to focus on African-American and Hispanic households --- was determined to be unconstitutional by the Justice Department, Andrews said.

Federal laws that address racial matters must be narrowly drawn and using the term "minority" put a burden on Congress and FEMA to prove that minorities were being treated differently during natural disasters and terrorist attacks --- a time-consuming if not impossible premise to prove.

It wasn't until December 2003 that FEMA, the Justice Department and the staff of the House Appropriations Committee met to rectify the problem, changing the reference to minorities to the broader, more acceptable "disadvantaged communities," which focused on socio-economic need rather than race.

The next year, the new language was inserted into FEMA's budget bill and the contract awarded. The study is to be completed by May 2007.

"Mother Nature doesn't operate on any sort of clock as we would like," said Andrews. "Just because the clock ran out on us here [with Katrina], doesn't mean it won't be beneficial to have this in place in the future."

MDC, a nonprofit company working with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will study poor areas in six states and the District of Columbia that have previously been hit by hurricanes or flooding. None of the states are in the Gulf Coast or any farther south than North Carolina.

FEMA said it selected states that were declared disaster areas during or around the time of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, which came ashore in North Carolina and caused extensive damage and flooding in the middle Atlantic states.

Bishop tried to have $25 million added to FEMA's budget this year to expand and accelerate the study. But his proposal was killed during House-Senate negotiations over the budget in a party-line vote.

Though lawmakers have been trimming the federal budget to reduce federal debt and pay for Katrina recovery efforts, Bishop said he saw the vote as an attempt by Republicans to prevent further embarrassment to President Bush over the poorly executed Hurricane Katrina rescue effort. But both MDC and FEMA said the study could be completed without additional funding.

"It seems an acknowledgement that someone in the administration didn't do what they should have done. And [congressional Republicans] don't want to hold that up in the appropriate light," Bishop said.

"It has been an embarrassment --- and extremely disappointing --- that FEMA was not ready for what happened in the Gulf states," he said. "They certainly should be embarrassed and disappointed."


Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/news_348666a5961ef0400063.html