Accentuate the Positive, 3.0

Within a week after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, and while I was still deep in “Red Cross mode,” I got a lot of questions about FEMA.

Actually, the questions were more along the line of “Whose fault was this,” and more often than not, they were pitched my way from our shelter guests.

The best answer I could give them was that it really wasn’t anyone’s fault. When pressed about FEMA’s role, my answer today is the same as the answer I had then — “FEMA probably would have messed some things up, but it was already botched before it got to that level.”

Now, a congressional inquiry is examining thousands of documents related to that time frame.

The Louisiana documents released late Friday revealed delays and state claims that requests for federal help weren’t received, and reflected partisan battling between the Republican Bush administration and Blanco, a Democrat.

The Mississippi documents, though only a handful were released, showed no political tensions between local officials and Washington. But FEMA officials in the state were among the first to admit that needs weren’t being met.

The most serious external issue here is the total political breakdown between levels. I call that an external issue because there’s only so much an organization can do if another can’t or won’t cooperate.

The most serious internal issue for FEMA — the one they did have the power to handle — was their poor management of public expectations.

There’s a big public perception of FEMA as this superhuman agency, with tens of thousands of relief workers, and helicopters that drop gold dubloons. “Here comes the cavalry, to shower us with money and freshly built replacement homes.” In reality, FEMA is a ragtag band of anti-bureaucrats, who collectively have a better track record than most red-tape-jockeys when it comes to actually getting things done. There just aren’t enough of them (nor is there a need for enough of them) to meet the impossibly high standards we’ve imagined.

FEMA did a poor job of communicating what it does, plain and simple. Residents in hurricane zones wouldn’t be shaking their fists in anger if they understood that a lot of the lack of movement was someone else’s bailiwick. They’d be more understanding if they understood the process — and here is where FEMA failed horribly.

Actually, that’s just one place FEMA failed. But I’ll have something to say about Mike Brown later…

One of the reasons I moved to WordPress was the flexibility to divvy up my categories. And one of the catergories I wanted to highlight on the return of the blog was stories from my Red Cross experience.

I probably should have been logging and blogging a lot of those experiences as I was in the moment. But had I done so at the time, I would have been failing at my job. There are very few times when communications are that critical — and during the first few days of Hurrcane Katrina I was running through 18-hour days of critical decisions on the fly. There were some good lessons there — and this is the place where I will share them.