Word: carafano
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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...change its name to shed the stigma following the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. As Michael Brown, the former chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emphasized during his occasionally churlish testimony on Capitol Hill last week, "FEMA does not own fire trucks, ambulances, search-and-rescue equipment." Says James Jay Carafano, an authority on homeland security at the conservative Heritage Foundation: "It's the National Disaster Coordinating Agency. You could probably come up with a sexier name, but that's what it does...
...terrorist threats and attacks." Outlining detailed lines of authority in the event of calamity, the plan "ensures the seamless integration of the Federal Government when an incident exceeds local and state capability." The plan failed miserably, as even Chertoff was admitting by late last week. The problem, says Jim Carafano, a homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, is that DHS's plans still assume that state and local authorities will be responsible in the first 72 hours after a catastrophe. "In this case," he says, "the state and local response was wiped out. There was no one to fill...
Already, there is talk of rewiring the country's emergency apparatus. "Washington handed out $750 million to small fire departments around the country, but if the fire department is wiped out, as it appears to have been in New Orleans, what's the plan?" says Carafano at the Heritage Foundation. The tiered response, whereby state and local officials are responsible for the first few days, doesn't work in a megadisaster...