Project Katrina

After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) purchased more than $85M worth of basic supplies for storm victims. For more than two years, until last month FEMA let the supplies sit in warehouses at a cost of $1M/year.

During that two year period local government officials and non-profit relief organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi made repeated public pleas for donations of the exact sort of items FEMA had already purchased and were even stored locally.

That these supplies people have needed for years just sat in warehouses until mid-June of this year is bad enough, but FEMA was able to find a way to make this story even more sad and depressing the way only George Bush’s administration can.

The supplies (GSA now says it is only $18.5M—we can’t count) called Living Kits included towels, shirts, pants, shoes, coffee makers, pillowcases, dinnerware, blankets, pots and pans, buckets, and cleaning supplies. You know the stuff people need to live when they have lost everything and are living in trailers.

So FEMA kept all its stuff under lock and key because as a spokesperson told CNN:

We were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property.

Really, no great need! You have got to be fucking joking. I guess somebody needed to put together a Bush-style post-Katrina DVD for our national emergency agency so they were aware close to 250,000 folks are still living in FEMA provided trailers and housing.

So in June of this year with a single stroke of a pen, FEMA officials declared all the goods purchased for Katrina victims surplus and developed a plan to distribute them to other federal and state government agencies (including prisons).

But before they shipped off all the supplies (121 truckloads) they of course sent a representative out to state and local agencies, non-profit aid organizations, and churches just to double check that there wasn’t a need.

Well not really, I just made that up! That would be logical. Not only didn’t they sent anybody out for a face-to-face meeting, they didn’t even place one phone call or send a single e-mail on this topic.

When the Congressional delegations from Louisiana and Mississippi found out this shocking information from a CNN investigative story they went ballistic (video of the story here). Of course FEMA officials expressed, as you might expect, outrage, cause after nearly three years of rank incompetence and untold billions in waste and fraud how could something like this happen on their watch?

And since the Bush Administration officials have fake outrage down to an art form they of course promised a full investigation, meaning they will wait until the scandal disappears from the headlines before throwing some low-level bureaucrat under the bus.

But that was not enough for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. They requested FEMA:

Come and tell the committee how such a debacle could occur, and in the process, what are they going to do to assure Congress and the taxpaying public that it will never happen again.

Last Thursday in a pretty rare joint congressional hearing of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees officials from FEMA and the General Services Administration (GSA) got it from both sides of the aisle (some of the audio is here).

During the hearing Eric Smith, FEMA’s assistant administrator for logistics management kept to the same tired talking points when pressed on why the supplies were not distributed to folks that needed them:

They were returned to us after they were not used from different areas—Mississippi, Louisiana.

Landrieu said to Smith:

FEMA never told state officials or relief agencies involved in recovery efforts that the Living Kits meant to resettle hurricane survivors were still available. How can people ask for something they don’t know exists?

Smith’s response was mind-numbing:

They have to have a need. If they have bona fide need, it’s their responsibility to pass that need on.

Where have we heard this before? Maybe on Monday, August 29th 2005 when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called Bush, as more than 1,100 Americans were literally starting to drown and said:

Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got!

But days, weeks, and even months later she’d be blamed by the White House cause she didn’t say exactly what she wanted/needed. I guess in almost three years we still have not got this not so little problem figured out.

You see Mr. Smith when you have pictures like the above, and there are hundreds more like it, even one where a family wrote in duct tape on their roof:

We are Americans, please help, some can’t swim.

When you endure something like what happened as the lead agency that is supposed to ensure it doesn’t in fact happen, more fucking lame excuses almost three years after the fact just don’t cut it.

But thankfully Landrieu also would have none of his BS:

It’s like if a house was on fire. If the fire department operated the same way FEMA does, we would have to call the fire department and specifically request the hose, the pressurized water, the truck, the firefighters and the ladder, all before FEMA would acknowledge that they should send this equipment to help.

After the Congressional hearing a CNN reporter caught up with Smith and asked what mistakes were made? His response:

We did not really make any mistakes. Could things have been done better? Yes of course, but we followed our procedures.

To date only a couple truck loads of the supplies have been returned to Louisiana. None to Mississippi. But rest assured, FEMA told the committee they are still cataloguing what supplies it has left and they’ll report back to the committee. But they do admit at least 90,000 of the Living Kits have already been distributed (they don’t like to say, “given away”).

I’ve already used enough words and I just don’t really know what else to say other than I am ashamed as an America this has all happened as I was a taxpaying adult. What have we become?

I just want to end with a little quote from a BBC show I love called Top Gear. I’ve been watching it since 2005 and I can’t ever recall them ever making a single political statement. They just drive the fastest cars in the world really, really fast.

They’ve only been to the US for one show. A challenge to drive from Miami to New Orleans. They got off the road right before they hit New Orleans in 2006 and had this to say (extended video here):

Finally though we made it. And my word were we in for a shock. We’d seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done. But seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

Every house, I’ve been driving now for what 15 miles, and there isn’t a pavement there isn’t a building there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It is such a vast scale of destruction.

It had been a year since Katrina had blown through and we sort of assumed that the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it.

But we were wrong.

How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing this is here?

Some nights I don’t sleep well. I just wonder what they’d say today almost three years later!

You got to be joking. First you were late in responding to the “Federal Flooding” of New Orleans. You spent millions to deliver ice that never arrived. You kept hundreds of relief works in hotels in Atlanta while you briefed them on god knows what.

You let contractors sell you tarps for thousands of dollars each and generally wasted millions, and millions because of lack of oversight. And you gave freaking residents trailers contaimed with formaldehyde. Oh and you held fake press conferences in an attempt to bolster what little creditability you had left (that would be none actually).

And with all of that you are now asking for immunity from lawsuits related to the formaldehyde trailers, even though internal EPA documents show you were telling residents there were no problems while you were sending emails telling employees not to enter them cause they were toxic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is requesting immunity from lawsuits filed on behalf of Gulf Coast hurricane victims who claim they were exposed to dangerous fumes while living in government-issued trailers.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt is scheduled to hear FEMA’s bid to be dismissed from a series of consolidated cases filed against the federal government and the companies that supplied FEMA with tens of thousands of trailers after Katrina and then Rita in 2005.

Lawyers for Gulf Coast storm victims accuse FEMA of negligence for sheltering them in trailers with elevated levels of formaldehyde, a preservative used in construction materials that can induce breathing problems and is believed to cause cancer.

In court papers, FEMA’s lawyers told the judge the agency is entitled to immunity from such claims challenging its response to disasters such as Katrina.

There have been no shortages of stories about how KBR has been over charging the military on Iraq-related contracts and then, and this is just precious, threatening to cut off the services they are suspected of overcharging for if the bills weren’t paid.

Well it seems overcharging might be standard operating procedure at KBR. The Department of Defense Inspector General thinks the same thing occurred with KBR’s clean-up efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

The Pentagon Inspector General said he could find no documentation in Navy contracting files to back up KBR claims it paid fair and reasonable prices to subcontractors that served meals in New Orleans.

“The prices KBR agreed to pay were greatly inflated,” the 86-page audit said.

“The Navy paid approximately $4.1 million for meals and services we calculate should have cost $1.7 million, more than a $2.3 million difference,” said the audit, signed by Assistant Inspector General for Acquisition Management Richard Jolliffe.

[….] Altogether, the audit requested that the Navy seek refunds of at least $8.5 million for “inappropriate” payments to KBR.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director David Paulison has now placed blamed on Louisiana officials for turning down $85 million of emergency supplies that that agency recently gave away, after they had “lingered on storage shelves while hurricane victims suffered without the items they needed.” “We did ask Louisiana, ‘Do you want these?’ They said, ‘No, we don’t need them.’ So we offered them to the other states,” Paulison said.

Imagine this situation. You work for ICF International. After Katrina hits you secure a government contract to provide a service to taxpaying citizens. You do the work on the contract but you make mistakes. Thousands of mistakes actually, that could total millions and millions of dollars. So what do you do? Well, according to MSNBC you attempt to get the citizens to actually pay for your incompetence :

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

For thousands of Katrina victims, this may be a reality.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle “approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort.”

The bid invitation said: “The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000.”

It might be important to note that 2007 ICF International reported gross revenue of $727.1 million.

Update: Full disclosure, here is a detailed response from ICF. In a nutshell it isn’t their fault. I’ve read the response twice and was almost surprised not to see the comment of “How could have foreseen.”

Via TPMMuckraker:

According to The New York Times this morning, it all began to unravel when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), a CPA, asked to meet with the audit firm that was supposedly checking the NRCC’s books, an idea that apparently no one had had for several years. Christopher Ward, then the NRCC’s treasurer, finally relented, but then chickened out 30 minutes before and fessed up that there actually hadn’t been any audits.

It was ultimately discovered that Ward had been faking the audits since 2003. The Politico, which laid out this general outline of events early last month, reported that Ward had forged everything, including the letterhead. So when it came time to actually talk to the people who’d supposedly written those fake reports, it all unraveled.

See, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee, one of the most powerful arms of the Republican party. If they can’t even balance their own books how the hell do we think they can even begin to allocate and manage the billions to rebuild the Gulf coast. Oh wait that is right, we already know they can’t.

Reading my news feeds each day it is clear there isn’t a lot of good news coming out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And I can find none as it relates to FEMA, Katrina, and trailers. Now this from the Associated Press:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency misspent millions of dollars it received from selling used travel trailers, government investigators have found.

Instead of buying more trailers—as allowed under the law—FEMA used more than $13 million toward fully loaded sport utility vehicles, travel expenses and purchase card accounts, according to a draft report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general obtained by The Associated Press. The report is to be released Friday.

During its three-month review last summer, the inspector general found that FEMA used some of the proceeds from trailer sales for tree-removal services, agency decals and banners and global positioning systems. FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said the agency discovered these problems on its own and has taken steps to fix them.

After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA purchased 200,000 travel trailers and mobile homes. When displaced hurricane victims leave these housing units, FEMA may sell the units to the general public. The law states that FEMA must use proceeds from these sales to buy more trailers or return the money to the U.S. Treasury.

There is both good and bad news in the new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: Known Performance Issues with New Orleans Drainage Canal Pumps Have Been Addressed, but
Guidance on Future Contracts Is Needed. The the one hand the GAO found the the US Army Corp of Engineers rushed to award a contract in early 2006 to Moving Water Industries that “resulted in deficiencies in key contract provisions.” The report also takes the Army Corp and MWI to task:

The report said the agency performed “limited market research,” used specifications for the pumps very similar to MWI’s and drafted a contract “not written as precisely as it should have been.”

The pumps were plagued by numerous problems, including undersized gear oil circulation motors, vibrations and suspect pipe welds, resulting in a lower pumping capacity than expected, the GAO said.

The bad news was related to the findings about the procurement process:

The Army Corps of Engineers followed federal rules when it awarded a contract to a politically connected manufacturer to provide pumps to this city after Hurricane Katrina, Congress’ investigative arm said Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office reaffirmed findings it made in May after the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal whistleblower agency, said in October that there was a “substantial likelihood” the Corps acted improperly in handling the contract.

The report was the latest look at the contract awarded in early 2006 to Moving Water Industries Corp. Corps officials in New Orleans installed the company’s 34 pumps before the 2006 hurricane season despite allegations by Maria Garzino, the engineer who oversaw their installation, that the pumps would fail during a hurricane.

Yesterday I noted that Gil Jamieson will be leaving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This role in the aftermath of Katrina can not be overstated. And it was a role of abject failure. Here is the story.

A week after Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast a FEMA official in charge of streamlining the flow of disaster aid issued a directive that would have cut through the red tape and expedited a staggering 1,029 rebuilding projects and $5.3 billion in funding.

The official memo, written by Nancy Ward, outlined that once local and regional FEMA officials approved specific a project, Washington must then release the money within three business days.

But Gil Jamieson countermanded the order.

His decision meant the rebuilding of schools, roads, hospitals, firehouses, and other infrastructure was held up for months of interagency reviews that eventually ended at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Gil Jamieson, who at the time was FEMA’s head of Gulf Coast recovery said Ward’s directive would have given federal agencies too little time to review requests for funding. "There’s certainly a responsibility that we have, and I have, as a civil service official, to ensure those dollars are going to the purposes they were intended," Gil said.

However, despite Gil’s contention that added layers of review would save taxpayer millions in wasted spending, not a single rebuilding project was amended, declared ineligible, or kicked back for further scrutiny. Not a single one.

Ward, who was later promoted to FEMA’s West Coast director and led its response to the recent California wildfires, stands by the policy she issued on Sept. 6, 2005 when she was FEMA’s Louisiana-based director of recovery command.

"We knew given the enormity of Katrina that we needed to get the money out quickly," said Ward. Alas your boss didn’t see the same urgency.

U.S. Senators Mary Landrieu, Claire McCaskill and Barack Obama lauded Congress’ passage of their proposal to launch an investigation into reports that housing trailers contaminated with formaldehyde were provided to Hurricane Katrina victims.

This provision, which is contained in the Omnibus Appropriations package soon to be signed into law, will initiate a long overdue investigation into why the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) failed to prevent the contamination or investigate the allegations.

This exact provision was originally offered in July 2007 as an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill.

It is disconcerting that FEMA moved victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita into trailers with unacceptable amounts of formaldehyde, said Senator Landrieu. It is yet another example of the agency’s ineptitude. It is essential that we move forward with testing the trailers to determine how many are affected and what is necessary to move trailer residents into safe alternative housing. The language we secured in the omnibus spending bill takes this vital step to ensure that those affected by the hurricanes are being housed in a safe environment.

We pay taxes so that federal government protects us during national emergencies, not to put us further in danger, McCaskill said. Not only did FEMA fail Gulf Coast residents before Katrina hit, they knowingly continued to put their lives at risk nearly two years after the fact by allowing residents to live in trailers containing toxic fumes. I’m pleased that legislation will be signed into law that will help get to the bottom of this life-threatening decision so that we can prevent it from happening again.

The Bush Administration’s response after Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophic failure, said Senator Obama. Instead of deploying the resources required to save lives and rebuild communities, the Administration consistently cut corners and buried the truth. Lives were put at risk, and countless Americans were left homeless and without the help they needed to rebuild. We must get to the bottom of reports that this Administration may have knowingly provided contaminated trailers to those who lost their homes after this disaster. At the very least, we owe the victims of Katrina answers, and we will continue to fight to finally get them the help they have long deserved.

This provision requires the U.S. Inspector General to:

• Investigate FEMA’s policies and processes regarding formaldehyde in trailers purchased by the agency to house Katrina victims;
• Collect and respond to health and safety concerns of trailer occupants; and determine whether FEMA adequately notified occupants of potential health and safety concerns and whether FEMA has proper controls and processes in place to deal with health and safety concerns of those living in trailers following disasters; and
• Report to Congress on its findings.

This is a vital development. In 2005 FEMA supplied more than 120,000 trailers to Gulf Coast residents. Thousands and thousands are still living in them with formaldehyde levels that are dangerous to their health. But to this point we don’t know how dangerous. Maybe we will in the near future.