( Gerard Herbert / Associated Press )
Nowadays, we don't tend to think about FEMA until it's all we think about. And this week, between wildfires in the West and two historically powerful hurricanes, FEMA's responsibilities are center-stage. But FEMA hasn't always been responsible for the government's response to disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires.
Historian Garrett Graff wrote about "The Secret History of FEMA" for Wired this week. He talks to Bob about the agency's Cold War origins as civil defense in the event of a nuclear attack and how it transitioned to "natural" disaster response. Plus, they discuss the limitations to FEMA's capabilities and why it has such a spotty record. Graff is also author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While The Rest of Us Die.
Songs:
We Used To Vacation by Cold War Kids
[PROMOS]
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. We don't think about FEMA much, until that's all we think about. And consider the Emergency Management Agency's docket in just the past few weeks, Hurricane Irma's path through Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Florida, Hurricane Harvey's historic devastation in Texas, wildfires raging in the West, all while FEMA faces proposed cuts in President Trump’s budget, and major staffing positions remain unfilled.
But Historian Garrett Graff says the agency’s, quote, “under-the-radar nature” was originally a feature, not a bug. He wrote "The Secret History of FEMA" for Wired this week. Garrett, welcome back to OTM.
GARRETT GRAFF: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Nowadays, we think of FEMA as associated with the recovery in the wake of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, tornadoes, and so forth. But that wasn’t its original portfolio, was it?
GARRETT GRAFF: No, FEMA and FEMA’s predecessors -- it’s an agency that is regularly reshuffled and moved around -- dates back to 1950, when Harry Truman started the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Its main mission for the majority of the first half of its life was to plan for urban evacuations, to plan for the stockpiles, to run fallout shelters, preparing for nuclear war.
BOB GARFIELD: There was a pretty famous video that was produced and then reproduced and reproduced [LAUGHS] in the, the ‘60s, I guess, and the ‘70s. Can you tell me its history and what became of it?
GARRETT GRAFF: FEMA and its predecessors, you know, devoted an incredible amount of time and energy over the years to educating the population. I mean, remember, those Bert the Turtle, “Duck and Cover” drills in elementary school --
[CLIPS]
[BERT THE TURTLE (THE DUCK AND COVER SONG)]:
CHORUS: And you, and you and you.
Duck and cover.
NARRATOR: Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends, because every one of us must remember to do the same thing, Duck and Cover.
GARRETT GRAFF: -- with the idea that if you just crouched
low enough under your school desk, you would survive the atomic bomb.
[BOB LAUGHING]
NARRATOR: Paul and Patty know what to do! Paul covered the back of his head so that he wouldn’t be burned and Patty covered herself with the coat she was carrying.
[END CLIP]
GARRETT GRAFF: They got tired over the years though of redoing these animations every time that fashion changed, every time that cars changed. And so, as FEMA began officially in 1979, they created a stick figure video that they intended to use for the remainder of however long the Cold War lasted, to be aired in the event of a Soviet threat.
[CLIP]:
NARRATOR: Of course, attack could come by surprise but, more likely, there would be a time of growing international tension with all its signs and warnings, lasting days, perhaps even weeks, giving you time for some preparations.
GARRETT GRAFF: FEMA's big effort in the 1980s was this series of plans known as the Crisis Relocation Plans. It was part of a secret effort known at the time as Project 908, 9 naught 8, in military parlance, that would have planned for the evacuations of urban areas out into more rural parts of the country. So most of Connecticut would evacuate out to Vermont and New Hampshire. New York City would evacuate into upstate New York and into Pennsylvania, DC to northern Virginia.
BOB GARFIELD: Which makes sense on the face of it because both nuclear blasts and the fallout would be heavily concentrated in the urban areas. However, it’s an insane proposition.
GARRETT GRAFF: These plans, you know, looked great on paper. The New York City plan would have required precisely 3.3 days. They knew how many Staten Island ferries they needed to ferry X number of passengers up the Hudson to Saratoga. They knew how many airliners from LaGuardia they needed to ferry people into the middle of Pennsylvania, etc., etc., etc. And it would have, as you said, never borne anything close to what would have actually happened in reality. I mean, you could just sort of imagine the panic of, yeah, if there’s a looming nuclear war you're on the list to evacuate on the third day, so just keep hanging out in Park Slope, hit the Coop, go to your yoga class and we’ll come back for you on Saturday -- would not have gone very well.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, we’re speaking on a Wednesday. So far, America has not been in a nuclear war. Of course, our show doesn’t air ‘til Friday. But it's fair to say that as the Cold War wound down and as the Soviet empire disintegrated, FEMA's mission shifted away from civil defense and more towards civil preparedness and emergency response.
GARRETT GRAFF: Yeah.
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
BOB GARFIELD: How did that play out?
GARRETT GRAFF: So, the forerunners of FEMA began doing some natural disaster response in the 1960s. As the Cold War worn down, it became primarily a natural disaster response agency. But it was not something that the agency took to easily. Many of the very high-tech tools that they were deploying in the ‘80s early ‘90s to try to respond to natural disasters turned out to be too high tech. They had these souped-up command posts that were supposed to help guide the nation through nuclear war, known as the Response System MERS units, the Mobile Emergency. Response System. And they tried to put some of these facilities out to things like Hurricane Andrew, only to discover that while these command posts could talk on encrypted networks to military units around the rest of the globe, they lack the basic capability to actually be able to talk to first responders down the road.
BOB GARFIELD: And the 82nd Airborne and NORAD aren't much help when a city is underwater.
GARRETT GRAFF: Exactly. And so, they ended up spending a lot of the ‘90s trying to retool some of this technology for natural disasters.
BOB GARFIELD: FEMA's history, dealing with weather-related disasters, is -- it’s not just spotty, it's pretty much uniformly terrible, isn’t it?
GARRETT GRAFF: Uniformly terrible in the ‘80s and early ‘90s through the Reagan and George H.W. Bush era. Then President Clinton actually did a lot of work to clean it up under the administrator then, James Lee Witt, one of, if not the best, administrators in FEMA's history. And FEMA was a very high-functioning agency, up until the early 2000's.
BOB GARFIELD: This is after 9/11, when --
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
GARRETT GRAFF: Yes.
BOB GARFIELD: - FEMA was shuffled again into the Department of Homeland Security and lost its direct access to the Oval Office.
GARRETT GRAFF: And then, of course, we all remember, during Hurricane Katrina, Michael “Heck Of A Job” Brown.
[CLIPS]:
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN/CNN: FEMA’s been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no massive air drop of food and, and water? In, in Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got food drops two days after the tsunami struck.
FEMA DIRECTOR MICHAEL BROWN: We’re feeding those people in the Convention Center. We’re -- we have fed over 150,000 people as of last night.
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
I think what you’re witnessing is that --
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: But I guess the point is “as of last night.”
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
DIRECTOR MICHAEL BROWN: -- Soledad, Soledad --
SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: Sir, forgive me, I have to stop you.
[END CLIP]
GARRETT GRAFF: When a disaster strikes, FEMA is really reliant on local resources, state resources and federal resources, and it needs a lot of help in these situations, which is part of what didn't happen during Katrina. And so, it's been, you know, a decade-long rebuilding period for FEMA ever since. And, so far at least, with Hurricane Harvey, they have won pretty high marks. But, again, it’s an agency but today is still struggling to get the respect and the leadership that it deserves. The two deputy administrators have been sitting on the sidelines through Hurricane Harvey because the Senate hasn't yet scheduled confirmation hearings for them.
FEMA has a lot of supplies sitting around in stockpiles but it doesn't have high-water vehicles of its own to go into flooded areas. It doesn't have thousands of FEMA school buses to evacuate people. Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories online, there is no standing army for FEMA.
[CLIP]:
DAVE HODGES: Oh yes, the FEMA camps exist. We’ve covered that ad nauseum here on The Common Sense Show, as many other sites have, as well. We know about the super facility in Alaska, the one where they’re currently conducting behavior modification experiments.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: The right-wing conspiracy theories --
GARRETT GRAFF: Yeah.
BOB GARFIELD: -- the FEMA concentration camps for political opponents of the Obama administration.
GARRETT GRAFF: I think part of a challenge for FEMA is that they only make headlines in these very distinct moments. And so, you know, in March and April it's very easy, looking at a spreadsheet, to say, yeah, let's cut a couple of hundred million dollars out of FEMA grants. What good is that money doing? Then August rolls around and it’s hurricane season and they’re like, oh boy, I wish we'd spent that couple of hundred million dollars on preparedness back in March. By the time there is a problem with FEMA, it is far too late to do anything about it.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, some of the public outrage that the government did through FEMA and its predecessors throughout the Cold War seems quaint and silly now, but public information in a time of disaster, whether nuclear or weather disaster, is, obviously, of the essence. Is the public prepared for whatever might happen next?
GARRETT GRAFF: This is really, I think, a fundamental disconnect in what the public expects of FEMA and what is possible. FEMA is not there for the minutes and hours of an unfolding attack or a disaster. FEMA's job is to evacuate the leadership of the United States. FEMA runs the Central Locator System, the minute-by-minute tracking of the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession. And when an emergency happens, their job is to get those people to those mountain bunkers or up into airborne command posts. Really, FEMA's only job with the civilian population is in the days and weeks and months after an attack or a natural disaster, to begin to pick up the pieces.
What I think most Americans don't understand is that, to a very large extent, all of us are on our own, until a couple of days later when the federal government is supposed to show up.
BOB GARFIELD: Garrett, thank you very much.
GARRETT GRAFF: Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Garrett Graff is the author of "The Secret History of FEMA,” a piece he did for Wired, where he is a contributing editor. He’s also the author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
So just as Texas began
the secret history of FEMA bailing out from the diluvian destruction of Hurricane Harvey, the historically-furious Hurricane Irma tore through the Caribbean.
[CLIPS]:
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT The monster storm roared by Puerto Rico last night, knocking out power to more than a million people living there.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Authorities in Barbuda and St. Martin, they report more than 90 percent of those islands are damaged or destroyed.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Governor Rick Scott preemptively issuing a state of emergency in all of Florida's 67 counties.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: The worldwide media and their audiences have gaped in horror at the raw power of these storms. And why? Because [LAUGHS] of our transparent catastrophe bias!
[CLIPS]:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: There haven’t been more hurricanes and they’re no more dangerous than any others in previous years, but it doesn't matter because the bias is built in. There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it.
BOB GARFIELD: That was Rush Limbaugh who, along with much of the right-wing media, is constitutionally incapable of processing the news without seeing a liberal plot. So desperate was he to find a conspiracy, the world's loudest Republican managed to find fault with commerce.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: You have these various retail outlets who spend a lot of advertising dollars with the local media. The local media, in turn, reports in such a way as to create the panic way far out, which sends people into these stores to fill up with water and to fill up with batteries, and it becomes a never-ending repeated cycle.
[END CLIP][MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: Never mind the deaths, the ruined lives, the shattered economies and the hundreds of billions of dollars’ of storm damage. It’s all rigged and you are all naïve fools, just so’s you know.
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova—Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Jon Hanrahan and Monique Laborde. And our show was edited -- by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Terence Bernardo and Sam Bair.
Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Thank you also to Andy Lancet from WNYC Archives. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I’m Bob Garfield.
*** [FUNDING CREDITS] ***