Project Katrina

Because of the Katrina debacle (FEMA’s response, not the actual hurricane itself), FEMA has been under close scrutiny this week as the agency scrambles to respond to numerous wildfires torching Southern California. One way to show you’re doing something, other then actually doing something, is to launch a PR campaign. And of course that is exactly what the White House and FEMA is doing,

But FEMA can’t even seem to get their PR campaign right. According to the Washington Post:

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters—in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter—and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

There were no tough questions, no skepticism, no follow-ups, and nothing that seemed to strayed from FEMA’s carefully constructed talking points. Just softball after softball. Have the reporters from our major media outlets lost the backbone to even question FEMA? 

Well not this time cause the people in the audience asking questions weren’t reporters. They were FEMA staffers pretending to be reporters. According to the Post FEMA only gave reporters 15 minutes notice, so FEMA employees stood in. I wonder if anybody in FEMA has heard of the concept of full-disclosure. Some of those that asked questions were Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, "Mike" Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs, and John "Pat" Philbin,  Director of External Affairs. Nothing like having the people that prepped you on the press conference ask the questions.

Update: FEMA just issued statement saying it is "reviewing" its "press procedures" to make sure that future communications are "straightforward and transparent." They go on to stress, "The real story—how well the response and recovery elements are working in this disaster—should not be lost because of how we tried to meet the needs of the media in distributing facts. We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment."

Note to FEMA. That is all fine and dandy, but how can we be expected to believe "the real story" when you can’t met the most basic journalist standards.

Yesterday President Bush made a “pit stop” in California for a photo-op and to showcase his administration’s ability to respond better to natural disasters than it did after Hurricane Katrina pounded Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. On Tuesday he pronounced the federal government’s actions “well-coordinated” after a Cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis. This would be the Cabinet meeting where Vice President Cheney fell asleep.

Bush and the Republicans are using this natural disaster to score political points by stressing to us they’ve improved on how they handled the last natural. The only problem is according to the Washington Post the comparison don’t make much sense.

Federal and state emergency managers say, however, that the two disasters can hardly be compared. Katrina’s floods and winds wreaked havoc on a far larger scale. California’s local responders lead the nation in training and coordination, while Louisiana’s rank near the bottom. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s responsibilities for battling wildfires are far more limited than its role in dealing with hurricane damage. “FEMA is not getting a real test in putting direct federal assets on the ground,” said George W. Foresman, undersecretary of preparedness for the Department of Homeland Security in 2005 and 2006.

[...]

While Katrina’s vast floods and winds covered an area the size of Britain at 90,000 square miles, fires in seven California counties blackened about 700 square miles as of yesterday —a footprint one-third smaller than wildfires burned there four years ago. The number of homes destroyed was about 1 percent of the 300,000 made uninhabitable by Katrina, and financial losses were less than 2 percent, based on initial estimates, comparable to the damage caused by wildfires in Oakland in 1991 and in Southern California in 2003.

It should be interesting to see how things progress over the coming weeks and months when we see if the promises made by the White House and FEMA are fulfilled. Or if this was just another in a long line of political grandstanding.