Local government and disaster response

Current View:

"FEMA should be restructured and preferably renamed to become a coordination office with federal resources to be applied in assistance to local Civil Defense organizations. In days to come I'll try to spell out what a Civil Defense organization ought to look like: volunteers, with training, with identification, with communications, with military or semi-military ranks and titles; people who know what they are supposed to do, where they are supposed to go in the event of a crisis whether that be invasion, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane; semi-autonomous even from the local government with its own chain of command so that much of it is self-actuating."

The quote above is from Jerry Pournelle's website. It reflects some fairly common misconceptions about what FEMA is and what it does, particularly in relation to local governments during emergencies. I have chosen to use it as a jumping off point for giving my perspective on this subject, although I could easily have quoted similar sentiments expressed in other places.

My experience in this business (detailed previously under the heading "Who am I ...") is limited to Pennsylvania, and our state, unlike those in the south, has functioning townships which somewhat complicates our local government situation. But I will offer a brief sketch of how we are organized here.

Pennsylvania state law places disaster response planning and operations as a local government responsibility. This means that not only every city, but each borough (what is often called a town or village in other places), and each township must have its own plan and operating structure for dealing with disasters. In other states, primary responsibility will often be at the county level because the county may be the lowest level of organized government and/or have direct responsibility for large "unincorporated" areas. Pennsylvania does permit groups of local governments to set up joint emergency management agencies (EMAs).

My own rural township (Windsor Twp. in Berks Co.) although it is rapidly developing a more suburban character, has a population of less than 3,000 persons. It adjoins several similar semi-rural townships as well as the local metropolis, the Borough of Hamburg, with a population of less than 5,000. We were ill-prepared to go it alone although for many years we struggled with mostly ad hoc responses which were never tested by anything more serious than the occasional blizzard or wind storm. We have no local police force (like most townships we rely on the state police), the volunteer fire company and emergency medical service (EMS) for the area are based in the borough which pays their workers' compensation taxes and makes them borough employees. Our supervisors maintain the township roads and plow snow, so we have some plow trucks and a large wheel-loader. The only other staff, at that time, was two men working part-time in zoning and code enforcement, a part-time secretary for the planning commission, a part-time secretary-treasurer, plus a couple of lawyers and some engineers handling sewage permits.

This is not to say that things didn't get done when needed. There is a cooperative spirit and impatience with red tape that characterizes rural and small town life. When a particularly nasty thunderstorm with lots of rain and high winds went through about ten years ago, our road crew cleared away a downed tree, even though the road it was blocking was state-maintained, because we could do it immediately and who knew how long it would take the state to get round to it. While working on that, we learned that a much larger tree had come down on a street in the borough and their loader (much smaller than ours) couldn't shift it, so our road crew went into the borough with our big loader and solved their problem. During a blizzard, a carload of workers leaving a mushroom house were trapped in their car and overcome by carbon monoxide. Our loader opened up the road from the state highway to the scene while the borough arranged a plow truck to clear a path for the ambulance to the scene; meanwhile, a call was made to the state highway department to arrange a relay of state plow trucks to clear a way for the ambulance all the way to Allentown (about 25 miles) to the nearest hospital with a hyperbaric chamber.

We never could recruit people for all the required boxes in the organization chart and would have had no authority to control the most important services (police, fire and EMS). Now, there is a joint agency which includes the borough and can control and coordinate vital services throughout the local area covered by the participating local governments.

Whether single or joint, the local EMA is required to make plans for handling emergencies within its jurisdiction and is responsible for putting those plans into effect when a local emergency is declared. The EMA coordinator is responsible to the local governing body and acts in their name when running the local emergency operations center. The EMA coordinator draws on both volunteers and local government employees to coordinate the actions of local police, firefighters, fire police (volunteers who direct traffic), EMS, streets and public works, etc. The EMA will also assist utility companies in gaining access to sites in need of repair. The county unit of the American Red Cross has the responsibility for opening and operating emergency shelters when requested by the the EMA. The county operates a hazardous materials (HazMat) team which will respond when needed. The county EMA can also assist in locating special skills or equipment needed by the local EMAs.

In the event of a more widespread emergency affecting many local governments (an evacuation called by the Limerick nuclear power station, for example), the county EMA can activate its emergency operations center and direct the response. But, even then, the bulk of the resources - both personnel and equipment - will likely be drawn from the local EMAs. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) can provide additional resources via such state assets as the National Guard and State Police.

FEMA has these basic roles. First, it works with state EMAs like PEMA to establish training programs for EMA participants including seminars, printed materials, table top exercises, and mass casualty simulations. Second, it sets standards for the content of disaster plans prepared by state and local EMAs. Third, it provides money for emergency shelter and disaster recovery. Fourth, in major disasters it serves as a clearinghouse to process state requests for federal assets.

Taking charge of a disaster from the responsible state and local officials is not FEMA's role and, as we see in the Katrina debacle, not something it does very well.