Sunday, January 10, 2010

Crisis Management; FEMA's Role - Giles Hall

I think that the most effective way to distinguish the process by which F.E.M.A. made its decisions regarding hurricane Katrina will be to separate it into three major stages: pre-crisis affairs, mid-crisis action, and post-crisis planning. Where pre-crisis focuses on the issues of location, mobility, and resources; mid-crisis deals with response, and impermanence; and post-crisis plans for objectives, and permanence.

Before Katrina hit New Orleans’ poor lived in the sectors most susceptible to flooding. All but two of the city’s public housing projects were in areas below sea level1. Incidentally these were also the citizens unable to afford personal transportation, relying instead on buses and eventually FEMA airlifts to emergency shelters faraway. Mobility is essential to the resilient response of evacuees1; car-ownership was higher in the least-flooded areas, and so many of them have also returned to rebuild. Poverty and the subsequent immobility has been a leading contributor to the continued need for temporary housing.

Hurricane Katrina created an unprecedented need for sheltering and temporary housing across a four-state area along the Gulf Coast2. This became the primary task of FEMA mid-crisis in order to save lives and prevent an escalation of the crisis. New Orleans infrastructure had been destabilized and in some cases annihilated3. If aid took more than a few days, “the survivors [would have] no choice but to loot,” and to “live on the sidewalk under a tarp.3" Temporary housing provided by FEMA consisted of thousands of “travel trailers ready for occupancy with utilities included.4” The trouble remained however with where to locate them. “One in four FEMA trailer parks initially proposed for previously undeveloped sites were rejected by the potential host communities. Temporary trailers and trailer parks impose focused costs on local communities but provide only diffuse benefits to cities and regions as a whole. Trailers provide necessary housing for workers and families who will improve the economic conditions of the city and region, but focus potential externalities, whether actual or expected, on local host communities. States and developers around the world regularly struggle to site controversial facilities, including nuclear power plants, incinerators, and airports. Temporary housing after a disaster seems to be no exception.” After examination it was found that the final placement of trailers had an inverse relationship to voter turnout in the previous political election (Fig.1). It is apparent then that FEMA used records of voter turn out to avoid communities with an active civil society.


FEMA coordinated resources to resolve six areas of needs: disaster and recovery policy, community services, home design and construction, housing finance and insurance, community planning, and infrastructure. Although originally focused on temporary housing, its major mission is to "facilitate the coordination of re-housing.2” Long-term community redevelopment, not just short-term sheltering and temporary housing was always their focus. Katrina evacuees living in shelters, hotels and motels were told of their option to “move on” with a free one-way airplane, train or bus tickets to any destination in the continental United States. "Our goal is to get people out of the shelters and commercial housing and into a normal lifestyle,” Federal Coordinating Officer Sandy Coachman said5. In short the role of FEMA in this disaster was to offer victims a means of evacuation, shelter while in exile, the means to return.

Information Sources
1. Colten, Craig E. 2009. Vulnerability and place: Flat land and uneven risk in new orleans. American Anthropologist 4. January 6, 2008 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/cgi-bin/fulltext/120127630/PDFSTART. (Accessed January 10, 2010)
2.Nigg, Joanne M., John Barnshaw, and Manuel R. Torres. 2006. Hurricane katrina and the flooding of new orleans: Emergent issues in sheltering and temporary housing. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, (, Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane Katrina) (Mar.): 113-28.
3.Ethridge, Robbie. 2006. Bearing witness: Assumptions, realities, and the otherizing of katrina. American Anthropologist 108, (4): 799-813.
4. 2005. Disaster housing - Alabama's no. 1 priority. Press Release,September 26. Federal Emergency Management Agency. 1605-038. http://www.fema.gov.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/news/newsrelease.fema?id=19179 (accessed January 7, 2010).
5.2005. Katrina Evacuees Have Transportation Option. Press Release, October 19. Federal Emergency Management Agency. 1606-040. http://www.fema.gov.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/news/newsrelease.fema?id=19179 (accessed January 10, 2010).

No comments:

Post a Comment