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Press Briefing by FEMA Director David Paulison

Coral Gables, Florida

Washington, D.C., June 8, 2006 -- The new Director of FEMA, R. David Paulison, addresses employees after having been sworn in by the Secretary of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. Bill Koplitz/FEMADIRECTOR PAULISON: Let me walk through how we got where we are and what we've been doing inside of FEMA ,and then just open up the questions. And you can't hurt my feelings, you can't embarrass me, I'm way beyond that. So you can ask whatever you think you need to ask.

When I was asked by the President to come in and step in and take over FEMA, first as an acting and then as a permanent position, I needed a couple things. Probably the most important thing I needed was the full support of the President, and I've gotten that. Not only have I gotten the support of the President, but also Fran Townsend, the Homeland Security Advisor to the President, and not just support, but their personal involvement. And that has helped me tremendously in getting things moving and getting things on the road. So I need to say that right up front.

First thing I did was to step back and look at what didn't work in Katrina, what things went wrong, what things worked okay but we could have done a lot better. And there were several significant things that I saw, based on my experience of handling disasters, what I saw simply didn't work.

The first and foremost was communications. There was a major breakdown in communications between the local government and the state government, a breakdown between the state government and the federal government, and then, quite frankly, a breakdown of communication inside the federal government itself between agencies. If you're going to run an operation, that type of communication system simply will not work.

So we went back and looked at how we're going to put this together. We based it primarily on the National Response Plan -- we're going to focus on having a unified command system. And that will go through our joint field office that you guys are familiar with. And everybody has bought into it. We've had exercises at the Assistant Secretary level, the Deputy Secretary, and even with the Secretaries in the White House. And everyone understands that we have to be on the same page. As we do our 12R planning blocks, we all have to be there together doing it, sharing information and making sure that we're all -- have the same information and are responding in the same way.

The second piece of that was not having the right equipment. Didn't have the enough satellite equipment, didn't have video capability, didn't have those communication things that, quite frankly, you have at your fingertips that we didn't have. So we purchased a lot of that equipment. But the most important piece of it is a process we're going to use to share information.

The second thing I looked at was logistics, and that's having the right things at the right place at the right time. We didn't do that. We didn't have enough equipment, didn't have the ability to get it where it needed to be. So what we've -- what we've gone out and done is purchased a tremendous amount of supplies that we normally carry -- the food, water, ice, blue tarps, medicine, all those types of things that we normally give out during a storm. And in some cases, we've quadrupled them. And I can give you all the exact figures, but just one example I would use, we had 160 tractor trailer loads of MREs prior to Hurricane Katrina, and now we have almost 800 tractor trailer loads.

And on top of that, we've signed a memorandum of understanding with the Defense Logistics Agency, which is the military's arm for logistics and support. They are going to be our backup. They'll be moving supplies into our warehouses as we are moving stuff out. Now, it's not a bottomless pit. But at the same time, we have enough stuff in stock already to feed a million people for a week. And with a back-up of that with the Defense Logistics Agency, that's going to give us support behind us we never had before.

The other thing is the ability to track our tractor trailers. Once they left the warehouse, we didn't really know where they were. We've had instances where truck drivers just went home and spent the weekend at home instead of going down to the disaster site. We had drivers who got lost. We had drivers who went to the wrong place, and we didn't know where they were.

I purchased 20,000 GPS units. We're putting one on every tractor trailer that comes out of our warehouses so we know exactly where it is at any given minute of the day. We get pinged every 15 minutes. And it's accurate right down to the very street corner where that trailer is going to sit. So we can give the states a very good heads-up of where their supplies are, how soon before they get there, and we can tell them exactly where it is at that time. And we can tell when it arrives. We had a couple instances during Rita, actually, where our supplies had arrived at a staging point, but the local mayor didn't know they were there, and he was on the television complaining he had no supplies, and they were around the corner behind the building. So now we know exactly where they are. That's going to help us. That's a tremendous business tool for us to use.

The other piece was the situation awareness. A lot of things were going on. We were dependent on the media to get a lot of our information, which is not bad, but we should be able to get a lot of information on our own. So we purchased satellite equipment where we can do video streaming, live video streaming back, so we'll have a better handle on what's happening if you have another Super Dome, or another Convention Center, or another levee issue where you can see real-time exactly what's happening. Those are some of the things that we're putting in place to make the system work a lot better.

The other was victim registration. We ended up with people pretty much -- not pretty much -- we ended up with people in every state in this country. All 50 states had people that came out of Katrina. We didn't know where they were, we didn't know who they were, and we didn't know what their needs were. What we are going to do for this coming year is we're going to preposition people in the congregate shelters -- we're working with the Red Cross and with states to identify those ahead of time -- put people in those shelters so we can register people as they come into those congregate shelters. So we know where they are, we know who they are, and we know what their needs are, based on how they register with us. That's going to help us significantly being able to track people and making sure they get the support that they need before they can get back in their homes.

We also saw that a lot of people could not come to where we were registering people, simply did not have the capability of getting from point A to point B. I've taken five of our command posts, mobile command posts, which are like big motor homes. We've staffed those and we put 20 laptop computers and 20 cell phones on those things to actually go where people are. And we can either give them a cell phone and say, here, call the 1-800 621-FEMA number and register, or we can sit down with them on the laptop and do it over the website to be able to do that.

We've also increased the capacity to be able to register people. I think during hurricane -- four hurricanes in Florida , we ended up registering, like, 25,000 people a day, which was a new record. During Katrina, we ended up registering 100,000 people a day, which was a new record. And we've put the capability, and we can register up to 200,000 people a day, so people won't get that busy signal every time they call. They'll be able to talk to somebody to get registered. And that's going to help them a lot.

So that's going to help us locating people, getting them registered, making sure we find out what needs are, have enough supplies in place and have the communications in place to be able to do what we need to do.

The other thing that I came across is the debris removal. In the debris removal piece, which is one of the biggest things we have to do -- we work with the local communities -- is we were reimbursing communities differently if they used the Corps as opposed to if they used their own private contractors, and that didn't make sense to me. So we've changed that. So regardless of who you use, whether you used the Corps or a private contractor, we will reimburse you at the same rate.

And also, we want to give them much more flexibility, want to give the local communities the opportunity to put those debris contracts in ahead of time, or encourage them to do that. We've put a debris registry in our website, and right now we have 250 debris contractors listed on there. We have the size of the contractor, how many trucks they have, what work they've done before, who they've worked for. So the communities can choose one of those 250, or they can do their own. And we're going to continually add more as we go through there. We want to give the local communities as much flexibility as possible as we go through the next storm.

I guess the last piece I want to talk about before we do questions is accountability, waste, abuse, and fraud. We had a lot of people abuse the system. When we did our expedited assistance program, we were giving out $2,000 to people, and for the most part, they were people who were plucked off the rooftops, simply didn't have a shirt on their back, had no identification, had no access to their bank records, and we passed those dollars out. But a lot of people took advantage of that, and now you've seen all the reports, like I have, where some people have applied dozens of times, some people did not live in the affected area. And so we want to stop that.

We've hired an identity verification company to check IDs so we can identify are you who you say you are, and did you live where you said you lived. That's going to stop a tremendous amount of the fraud. We've also cut back the amount of money we're going to give out initially. The expedited assistance program is something that FEMA very rarely uses. I think in the last 30 years we've probably only used it less than half-a-dozen times. But every time we've used it it's been a significant issue.

We're going to do the initial tranche of money, it will be $500 to families. And hopefully, they can get back in their homes within a couple days of getting over that hump, if we have to do that. And if we have to go back and do more, then we can go back and do more. But instead of putting $2,000 in somebody's hands, we found out a lot of the times the dollars were not spent where they needed to be spent, or where they should have been spent. So we're trying to put some controls on it.

We don't want to -- I think you need to hear this very carefully. This is still going to be a very, very compassionate organization, but we have to put some financial controls in to make sure we don't have the waste, fraud and abuse that we had last time.

Those are the things we're doing for this hurricane season. We have a lot of long-term things we have to work on. It took FEMA 30 years to get in this shape and it's not something you're going to fix in a few months. But what we can do, what we can very clearly do is put the things in place that we saw that did not work in Hurricane Katrina, and put those in place so we'll be in better shape this next hurricane season, to respond much more quickly. FEMA has got to be a more agile, a more flexible organization than it has been in the past, and that's what we want it to be.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, 11-Aug-2010 13:04:52 EDT