Lots of folks remember FEMA’s snafus with Katrina. But its history of screwups goes much further back. Here’s a recap on FEMA’s record with Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The conclusion might prove relevant this time around:
“Hurricanes and governments have developed an odd, symbiotic relationship.
When the former threaten to make their presence felt, the latter demand equal
billing. By the time the weather calms, it’s not clear which of them caused the
bigger mess.”
The American Spectator
November, 1999
HEADLINE: The Floyd Fiasco
Like TV weathermen, the Feds love the hurricane season.
BYLINE: by James Bovard.;
James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the
Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press).
BODY:
Hurricane Floyd–perhaps the most overhyped hurricane in Weather Channel
history–wound up killing at least 70 people and causing billions of dollars in
damages. But most of the deaths and damage occurred in New Jersey, parts of
Virginia, and North Carolina, where flooding kept thousands from their homes
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in the eastern third of the state for weeks. In Florida and South Carolina, by
contrast, which contrary to expectations escaped the brunt of the storm, federal
and state government reactions ended up disrupting far more lives than were
seriously threatened by the hurricane itself. No wonder Southerners labeled
Floyd “the King of Chaos.”
In an unusual act that may now become standard operating procedure, President
Clinton pre-emptively declared federal emergencies in several states even before
the hurricane touched the continental U.S.–and, according to a FEMA employee,
“before the governors asked for assistance. This isn’t permitted by the law, but
when was the last time Clinton obeyed the law?” With FEMA’s encouragement,
Southern states issued mandatory evacuation orders to nearly three million
residents of coastal areas.
Administration officials wasted no time spinning what was quickly called ”
the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the United States” as a major
triumph. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt praised
state officials for their rapid and thorough response, and Vice President Al
Gore quickly declared, “All things considered, it’s gone very smoothly.”
State officials were also pleased with their work. “Overall, we’ve never
moved so many people so far with so few problems,” said David Bruns, a
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spokesman for the Florida Emergency Operations Center. “It was astonishing it
went as well as it did, but of course, you probably didn’t feel that way if you
were sitting in a car for hours.”
And hundreds of thousands did sit in their cars for hours as the evacuation
orders produced some of the worst traffic jams in the history of the South.
Florida drivers were stuck in 30-mile-long backups. According to the Los Angeles
Times, some Floridians were caught in traffic jams with no movement for 12
hours. Some of the worst gridlock occurred exiting Charleston, South Carolina.
It took some people 16 hours to drive from Charleston to Columbia– normally
less than two hours away.
In 1989, when Hurricane Hugo whacked the Charleston area, Gov. Carroll
Campbell had quickly ordered that all lanes of Interstate 26 be reserved for
westbound traffic out of the city. But on the grounds that this exodus strategy
was too disruptive, state officials this time dragged their feet for eight hours
before allowing lanes to be reversed. By then the backups were already massive.
If Floyd had sped up and caught the jammed motorists, the result could have been
the biggest hurricane disaster since Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Charleston Mayor
Joseph Riley was outraged and denounced Gov. Jim Hughes, a fellow Democrat:
“What you’re doing is running the risk of killing my people.” The Charleston
Post and Courier editorialized: “The state was unconscionably inefficient in
The American Spectator, November, 1999 November, 1999
its evacuation effort.” What’s more, “because the state wasn’t ready to do its
job, the negative legacy of Floyd now extends to the potentially tragic
perception that staying at home during a hurricane beats trying to leave.” The
mayor of Isle of Palms, South Carolina, told the Associated Press that “one
woman vowed never to leave after she had to stop by the road to relieve herself
in front of a long line of traffic.” (It’s not known whether FEMA has made any
effort to offer her one of its ” crisis counseling” grants.)
Clinton was quick to defend the forced evacuations. “There may be some people
who question…whether we did the right thing to recommend all the evacuations,”
he said on September 19. “But now that we have this technology at the National
Weather Center, we have to act on it.” Will pre-landfall federal panic-mongering
become the rule in future hurricanes? In defending the evacuations, Clinton and
other officials sought to shift attention from whether state governments and
emergency planners were guilty of a stupendous misjudgment that exposed hundreds
of thousands of people to greater risks than they would have faced if they had
stayed home.
Clinton and Witt also painted the evacuation as a success because of the
limited number of fatalities caused by Floyd itself, ignoring that the
evacuation cost an estimated $2 billion, almost all of it borne by the evacuees.
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Predictably, news of Floyd sent politicians scrambling for a handout. Even
before the storm landed, Florida Governor Jeb Bush asked Clinton for 100 percent
reimbursement of state and local government disaster-related costs. In his
letter to Clinton, Bush claimed that computer models were predicting Florida
would suffer an astonishing $7 billion in damage. (Later he conceded this was
“purely a guess.”) Once Clinton issued his pre-emptive emergency declaration,
state and local officials were free to rev up spending and send the bill to
Washington. Florida, which would suffer little damage, was promised the feds
would cover 75 percent of overtime for police, firefighters, and other
government workers and other related costs in response to the proclaimed
emergency.
The more the federal government gives, the more demanding state and local
governments can become. Florida Insurance Commissioner Bill Nelson is now
pressuring FEMA to compensate state residents who had extra gas and lodging
costs because of the evacuation order. After FEMA did not jump at the
opportunity, Nelson–who is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate next
year–announced that he is considering ordering insurance companies to
compensate homeowners, even when their homes suffered no damage. The Tampa
Tribune noted that such an order “would earn political points along the Atlantic
seaboard…. But it would likely be unpopular in the rest of the state, where
homeowners would have to foot much of the bill.” Florida Insurance Department
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spokesman Don Pride observed: “If people aren’t reimbursed when they’re ordered
out, it may be a disincentive for them to obey.” Under this theory, the threat
of losing one’s life is not sufficient to leave the coast–unless the government
also promises to force other citizens to pay for your gas.
After the storm was over, President Clinton began urging North Carolina
residents to “take advantage” of the federal aid elixir. “The American people
know that no individual can handle this alone,” he said, announcing a special
distribution of federal food stamps to people who would not normally qualify for
such handouts.
In a speech in Tarboro, North Carolina, Clinton recited a long list of
federal benefits available to flood victims and urged the audience: “So you all
need to take advantage of these things.” A White House press release listed the
array of benefits–from disaster housing assistance (to cover the cost of a
hotel while people are forced out due to home damage), grants to low- and
moderate-income individuals, Small Business Administration loans for business
and personal property disaster, Agriculture Department emergency loans to
farmers who suffered crop or chicken losses, reimbursement for paying the cost
of clearing roads and carrying away downed trees, and more.
All of this post-disaster benevolence almost makes one forget that it was
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government policies that helped place many in harm’s way in the first place.
Floyd’s devastation in North Carolina is a reminder of how federal flood
insurance spurs development along “hurricane alley.” At a televised press
conference at FEMA headquarters Clinton was asked, “Mr. President, with federal
flood insurance, is the government encouraging coastal development at a time
when we may be in a new cycle of more dangerous and more frequent storms?” FEMA
Director Witt jumped in: “You know, without the Federal Flood Insurance Program,
without 19,000 communities across America being in that program, it not only has
saved probably close to $750 million a year in disaster dollars that taxpayers
pay. And the federal Flood Insurance Program is supported by flood premiums, not
taxpayers’ dollars.”
Witt has peddled this schlock ever since he arrived at FEMA in 1993. In
reality, the NFIP is more than $700 million in debt to the U.S. Treasury because
of heavy borrowings to cover its massive losses in recent years, even before the
surge of claims pending from Floyd. The Treasury Department has written off more
than a billion dollars in previous loans to the NFIP, thereby promoting the
fiction that the program is not an actuarial rathole. American taxpayers
currently face over $400 billion of exposure from NFIP policies.
“Forget-and-forgive” is FEMA’s attitude toward repeat flood claimants. A
National Wildlife Foundation study estimated that two percent of properties
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covered by federal flood insurance had “multiple losses accounting for 60
percent of the program’s total claims, and more than 5,600 properties had
collected claims exceeding the total value of the property.” Almost $3 billion
has been spent in the last two decades “repairing and rebuilding the same
structures two, three and four times.” One Houston home suffered 16 floods; its
owner collected more than $800,000 in compensation for repair costs.
FEMA’s repeated bailouts of flood victims and local governments are hell on
the environment. The Charlotte News & Observer noted in 1997 that FEMA’s ”
bailout (after earlier hurricanes) has reimbursed resort towns for just about
any piece of public property that blew away in the storm…. (It) has undermined
years of efforts to discourage unwise development.” Consider the experience of
Topsail Island, a 26-mile island off the North Carolina coast. At a time when
North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt sought to discourage rebuilding on the island,
FEMA came in and deluged the area with more than $100 million to rebuild private
and public facilities damaged by two hurricanes in 1996. In 1998, the island was
hit by another hurricane–and FEMA rushed in to spend another $10 million. The
1998 damage was greater than it otherwise would have been because FEMA had
extended the sewer system after the previous hurricane, thus opening the door to
new development. Federal relief spending over a three-year period amounted to
more than $10,000 for each permanent resident on the island, according to the
Associated Press. And once again, FEMA will come in and bail out Topsail
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Island, the lucky spot where Floyd finally made landfall.
Hurricanes and governments have developed an odd, symbiotic relationship.
When the former threaten to make their presence felt, the latter demand equal
billing. By the time the weather calms, it’s not clear which of them caused the
bigger mess.
LOAD-DATE: October 28, 1999
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