Here are just a few tidbits mentioned that put the accent on challenges for the future when you have “the big one” where you live and work.
The end-to-end cost for deploying a FEMA trailer is $250,000 each. It has to be purchased, transported, placed, hooked up, administered and disposed of. Is this really the best way to provide temporary housing? (Which can turn into “looong-term housing.”)
If you remember the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., 14,000 buildings burned — pretty much the entire city. The debris removal cost for that disaster was $4 billion. People couldn’t return to where they lived for many months.
Reference all those hundreds of communications vehicles that were purchased with Homeland Security grants, and the first place you should think about deploying them in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is to your commercial electrical power companies that must have telecommunications in order to restore electricity. Something you could be pre-coordinating now.
Brock Long, a former FEMA administrator, highlighted the fact that the current pace of disasters is not one that FEMA can keep up with. 2017 saw five major hurricanes in a row that “red lined” the organization. While at 20,000 people end strength today, it is not enough. More people is not the answer. We need to rethink how we mitigate, respond to and recover from disasters. He believes at some point the “agency will break” and not be able to keep up with the demand.
I don’t think it will be a Katrina-like failure in leadership (if they keep having competent leaders) but just a capacity issue.
As I say often when it comes to critical infrastructure and maintenance, we have a “Fix on Failure” attitude and strategy. What we do as a nation is throw money at an issue after there is a humongous failure. Money in itself or more people is not what Brock is calling for. Rethinking disasters in America is required.
