Kelly Caldwell2013-05-24T10:58:16-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=kelly-caldwellCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kelly CaldwellGood old fashioned elbow grease.Don't Forget to Do Thistag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9380862011-08-26T17:08:56-04:002011-10-26T05:12:01-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
That is how long it took a husband and wife to locate each other in the aftermath of September 11th.
I've mentioned this couple here before but as Hurricane Irene bears down on New York City, their story bears repeating.
The couple lived in one of the luxury high-rise apartment buildings near Ground Zero. When they heard the explosions of the planes hitting the Twin Towers, instead of turning on the television, they went outside. He grabbed his wallet and keys. She grabbed her cellphone.
When the towers fell, the pandemonium forcibly separated them. The NYPD evacuated them on different boats, to different cities in New Jersey. He found his way to a friend's house; she spent that first night in an elementary school gym.
He called her repeatedly on her cell, but her service was out, and the battery eventually died. She borrowed a working phone from a fellow evacuee and called a friend, but they didn't know where he was.
On September 12th, he learned she was at the elementary school shelter and he rushed to find her. By the time he arrived, she'd left to look for him. And so it went.
For four days.
Today, as you stock up on clean water, put fresh batteries in your flashlights, and put your passports, cash and a change of clothes in a go bag by the front door, please also take a few minutes to confer with your family and agree that if you all are separated or evacuated separately, you will all call the same person to let them know where you are.
This person should live outside of your home city or area. They should know how to get in touch with the people you care about, including in-laws and best friends. They should be someone who can be counted on to coordinate messages between evacuated family members.
You know, messages like, "Honey, stay in the elementary school gym; I'm on my way."
This morning, my sister, my husband and I agreed that if we're evacuated from New York City separately, we will all call my mother-in-law. She lives in Missouri, so Hurricane Irene is unlikely to knock out her phone service. She is the keeper of addresses and birthdates, anniversaries and phone numbers. We know we can count on her to notify my dad and sister, to call my best friend in Maryland if necessary, to handle a five-way message relay if it comes to that.
FEMA has several really great suggestions for keeping your family safe in a disaster. You can check them out here.
And they've added some cool digital tools for disaster preparedness, as well.
Here's hoping you never need to use them. ]]>Nine Years Later: Still Thinking About Rubbertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7130002010-09-11T01:13:17-04:002011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
In the long months of the post-September 11 recovery, amid the blue police barricades everywhere, and the bus stops plastered with "Missing!" posters, and the fires spewing out toxic dust, New Yorkers debated what the attacks meant for life in our city, and the future of our country.
There were those who said we all should just get used to the military policing our streets (in spite of Posse Comitatus), and to our buses and subways blowing up once in awhile.
Others reminded us that we'd been attacked before. We triumphed in the past because every American responded to the call for action; if we banded together now against Al Qaeda in the same concerted way we did then, we could preserve not only our safety but our democracy.
In a city where volunteers drove 1,000 miles to help us out, but we all went home to wipe a fresh layer of ash off our windowsills, it was hard to know which vision to believe in.
But one bit of history gave me hope. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning bookNo Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the moment Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins revealed to the President and his Cabinet that we were at risk of losing World War II because of one critical shortage -- rubber. We had a five-month supply, maybe six.
"The shortage of rubber was particularly worrisome, since rubber was indispensable ... if armies were to march, ships sail, and planes fly," Goodwin writes. "From stethoscopes and blood-plasma tubing to gas masks and adhesive tape, the demand for rubber was endless." And we didn't have enough.
Did President Franklin Roosevelt order the invasion of a small rubber-rich nation? Mint money to buy up all of Canada's rubber reserves? Pass tax cuts for rubber producers? No. He turned to the American people.
In June 1942, he laid out the problem in one of his fireside chats, and announced a national rubber drive, asking everyone to clear out all the rubber they could find in their attics and tool sheds and garages, and to cart it down to their local filling stations.
The response, Goodwin writes, surpassed the Administration's most extravagant hopes -- Americans increased the national rubber stockpile by 400 tons -- seven pounds for every man, woman and child.
Meanwhile, the nation's chemists and manufacturers were devising a way to use farm alcohol and petroleum to create synthetic rubber. And they, too, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. One year later, our production of synthetic rubber jumped from 12,000 tons to 308,000 tons -- an increase of more than 2,000 percent.
And that's not all -- we conserved, too. President Roosevelt formed a blue-ribbon commission to "recommend such civilian actions as necessary to ensure an adequate supply of rubber for the armed forces," Goodwin writes. Their solution? Gas rationing. It was the best way -- no, the only way -- to save enough rubber to make a difference. Though it was unpopular, Roosevelt instituted the ration. And Americans respected it. They formed car pools, rode buses, cut milk delivery to every other day. They walked.
More than anything else, it was the American response to the WWII rubber shortage that buoyed me in the fall of 2001. I read Goodwin's book over and over again, imagining kids cutting down tire swings, and chemists working overtime in labs, and people walking to work, all to make sure that the nation had the rubber it needed to win.
Surely, I thought, we could confront the thorny and frightening problem of Al Qaeda and terrorism on our soil with the same concerted response, the same resourcefulness, ingenuity and sacrifice.
Americans were eager to be called. They flocked to Ground Zero, offering to help clean up, search for survivors, whatever we needed. They jammed the Red Cross switchboard for weeks, calling to volunteer. They donated $2.8 billion to disaster relief. Two point eight billion dollars.
But the national call to action never came. Downtown, the NYPD started allowing only ironworkers and rescue workers through the barricades. President George W. Bush visited Ground Zero, talked about war and called up 50,000 reservists. To the rest of us he said, "Go shopping." Mayor Rudy Giuliani echoed him. "Go back to normal," he said. To work. To school. To the theater. Shopping.
While there was some consolation in seeing Macy's reopen and school kids schlepping their backpacks up and down Broadway, it felt wrong somehow to not be reaching out, trying to pull our city back to its feet. It felt like lifting your legs while your mother vacuumed around you and calling it "helping." Only instead of your mother cleaning up your toast crumbs, it was firefighters looking for bodies, workers looking for jobs, residents trying to get the grit out of their apartments. And the specter of international terrorism looming over us all.
Most of us, we just couldn't buy a shirt we didn't need and call it "helping."
Nine years later, that grand mobilization has yet to materialize. Even the simplest, most straightforward actions became debacles. Congressional Republicans keep sabotaging the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which would provide medical care to first responders and innocent bystanders who were sickened by the toxic smoke that spewed all over downtown. New York's repeated requests for help replacing the radio system that failed police and firefighters on September 11th keep getting rejected.
And Friday, two of the people who wrote the 9/11 Report released a study that says we're not doing what needs to be done to fight Al Qaeda and terrorism abroad.
What do we have instead? A 9-year-old war in Afghanistan; a vitriolic protest over an Islamic community center; a proposed Koran burning in Florida; and a case of national amnesia about the difference between Al Qaeda, (who actually attacked us) and Islam, (a religion with about a billion adherents).
Is it too late? Is it crazy to think there's still time for the 21st Century rubber drive, a national effort that would starve Al Qaeda (and other fundamentalist groups like it) of its money, wreck its brand, and drain away its membership?
Maybe. Then again...
As I've been thinking of FDR and the rubber drive, I've been thinking, too, about a card table on the corner of 96th Street and Broadway.
One woman, (whose name I've forgotten but who owned a very playful 100-pound Great Pyrenees) needed to help, and like 7 million other New Yorkers, she couldn't get through to the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army, or St. Vincent's Hospital, (which was the primary emergency room treating the injured.)
So she printed from the Red Cross website a list of supplies needed at Ground Zero, took a folding table down to the street, and hung the list on a pole. And she waited.
Like FDR and the rubber drive, my neighbor with the playful Pyrenees wasn't prepared for the onslaught of donations her request unleashed. When rain was forecast, and the Red Cross said the workers needed ponchos, she collected thousands of ponchos. When the Salvation Army said it needed energy drinks, people emptied the shelves of every grocery store in the neighborhood. They emptied every Gap of its t-shirts, every Duane Reade of its bandages, every bodega of its granola bars.
When, after three days, donation stations like the one on 96th Street filled the parking lot of the Jacob Javits Convention Center with supplies, the city asked us all to please, please stop. Reluctantly, we did.
Since then, I think, we've all been waiting for the next Harry Hopkins or FDR to stand up and post the next list of What's Needed Now. We've heard mostly silence. And now that silence is being filled by anti-Muslim sloganeering and Koran burnings.
But the lady with the Playful Pyrenees didn't wait for someone to tell her to take her card table to the sidewalk. She just did it.
Nor did Susan Retik wait to be invited to help Afghan widows start their own businesses. Or Greg Mortenson wait to be invited to build schools in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Nine years later, maybe it's time for us all to be our own Harry Hopkins, to organize our own version of the 1942 rubber drive, for each of us to deploy our resourcefulness, ingenuity, sacrifice. (Don't know where to start? See below.)
It is now, as Eleanor Roosevelt said in 1940, "...no ordinary time, no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole. ... This responsibility is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it ... to the fullest of their ability."
The fullest of our ability. Yes, maybe it's not too late, after all.
I've got some old rubber for you. ]]>Say Yes to a Mosque at Ground Zerotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6536522010-07-21T11:04:17-04:002011-05-25T17:05:23-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/tweet: "Peace-seeking Muslims," Palin wrote, "pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing."
She was writing about a plan to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero, and she waded into the fray just behind Rick Lazio, Republican candidate for New York governor.
"New Yorkers have a right to feel safe and be safe," the New York Daily Newsquotes Lazio as saying. "There are serious security questions about the appropriateness of this mosque."
The sorrows and grief, the toxic clouds of benzene and asbestos, and the years-long financial hardships of September 11th fell on Christian and Jew, atheist and Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist -- and Muslim -- alike.
Can we have forgotten this? Have people really forgotten that Muslims were among the dead, injured, missing on September 11th? Can it be that, a mere nine years later, people need to be reminded that Muslims were also among that day's heroes?
The answer, I guess, is yes.
So let me now remind them: The 2001 terrorist attacks were carried out by a group of Islamic fundamentalist zealots, mostly from Saudi Arabia, against Americans, of all races, politics, and religions, including Islam.
It is not a "provocation" or "security question" for Islamic New Yorkers to build a community center a few blocks from Ground Zero. As Islamic New Yorkers shared in the struggles inflicted on our city by those attacks, so too must they share in our recovery. To that end, building the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan is a vital step in the right direction.
An Oasis
So what is this scary plan that has Palin and Lazio so upset? A not-for-profit group wants to build a mosque and 13-story community center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. If approved it will be called Park51 and will host not only host religious services, but also educational classes, exercise programs, and a swimming pool.
Park51 will be like the Vanderbilt YMCA on east 47th Street, which offers a teen ethics program along with Polliwog swimming classes in a building just a stone's throw from the United Nations. And it will be similar to the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side, (where, full-disclosure, I take NIA classes), a 10-story building on Columbus Avenue which offers family movie nights, Jewish singles parties, and, also, swimming lessons.
It seems unlikely that Palin, Lazio and other opponents of the project are enraged at the specter of polliwog swim classes and family movie nights a few blocks from Ground Zero. Could their real concern be that the polliwogs and moviegoers will be Muslim, that by its presence, the community center will invite Muslims to Ground Zero?
If that's so, they fail to grasp that Muslims have been a part of Ground Zero since the beginning, even in the ashes.
Never Forget
Will Sarah Palin call it a "provocation" to see Abdoul Karim Traor's name etched into the National September 11 Memorial? For Abdoul Karim Traor's name must surely be there. He emigrated to New York from the Ivory Coast, and died at work on the morning of September 11. A cook for Windows on the World, his coworkers remember him as hard-working, funny, kind. He left behind a widow and three children, who were aged 8, 3 and 1 when he died. Abdoul Karim Traor was also a Muslim.
One day, Mr. Traor's children could lay a bouquet of flowers next to the plaque bearing his name, then head to karate class at Park51. The only thing wrong with that picture is that they are growing up without their father.
Touri Bolourchi was a 69-year-old mother of two, a grandmother, and a nurse when she boarded United Flight 175 in Boston. The fact that she was also a Muslim did not deter the five hijackers on that flight from killing her with 60 others when they flew that plane into Tower 2 at 9:01 a.m. Would Rick Lazio call it a security risk for Ms. Bolourchi's grandchildren to visit the memorial, then walk to Park51 to pray for their grandmother?
Equal Opportunity Disaster
No one called it a "provocation" or "security risk" when the doors of the Disaster Assistance Center on 141 Worth Street opened and welcomed anyone who made it out of the World Trade Center, or its vicinity, alive. When I worked there for the Salvation Army, my fellow caseworkers included Muslims, Hispanics, blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, Asians and Middle Easterners. We looked like New York City.
We saw immediately that the financial fallout rained down on every race, religion and class. In a single day at Worth Street, five months after the attacks, I approved financial aid for:
A Queens man laid off from his job in customer service for United Airlines;
A middle-aged woman who spoke only Mandarin and lost her job as a seamstress when her Chinatown garment factory shut down;
A laid-off stockbroker from Greenwich, Connecticut;
A 50-something man who barely made it out of Tower 1 before its collapse and who struggled to find work because he was caring for a sister who suffered a stroke;
A single mother who had been director of diversity for a large accounting firm in the Twin Towers and whose unemployment was about to run out; and
Mohammed, (not his real name), who once paid 30,000 dinars to bribe his way out of the Sudan. He scraped together 10,000 more Sudanese dinars than he'd made the previous year so that he could avoid being drafted into the army and forced to participate in a genocide against Christians and animists in Sudan's south. He emigrated to the United States and found work as a translator and clerk for an attorney in lower Manhattan, only to have terrorists try to drop a building on him.
In the months that 141 Worth Street was open to the victims of September 11, the people running it thought to set up security screening with a metal detector, to forbid people to bring scissors into the building, to evacuate quickly when a crank called in a bomb threat. It never occurred to anyone to screen out Muslims, to keep Mohammed out while admitting everyone else.
A Burden Borne By Muslims
But there was one burden post-September 11 New York that Muslims shouldered more heavily than everyone else -- that of being arrested for practically no reason in the middle of the night.
A year after the attacks, several nonprofits set up a group called the Unmet Needs Roundtable. Disaster aid caseworkers like myself could go there and ask for financial aid for our clients, people still struggling to piece their lives together again.
Every time I met with the Roundtable, another woman was there, too. She was a caseworker for something called the Coney Island Avenue Project, a nonprofit that helped locate Muslim men from Brooklyn who disappeared after September 11th. She presented case after case of men who'd emigrated -- legally -- from places like Pakistan and Bangladesh and Yemen, who worked as taxi drivers and bodega owners and Halal streetcart vendors, who had been arrested and held for months at a time on specious charges of overstaying their visas. I say "specious" because they had renewed their visas on time; it was the federal government that took nine months to a year to process the paperwork, then arrested them for having an expired visa.
Imagine filling out and sending in the paperwork to renew your driver's license on time, and the state taking nine months to process it, then arresting you for driving without a license.
The Coney Island Avenue Project searched the jails for these men on behalf of their families, found lawyers to represent them, helped their families with rent and food, and tried to find the men work again once they were released.
The Unmet Needs Roundtable didn't bar the Coney Island Avenue Project from its services because it reached out primarily to Muslims. Instead, it acknowledged that this was a pain inflicted almost exclusively on Muslims post-September 11, and with money donated by Christian churches and secular private donors, it tried to alleviate it.
Say Yes
Sarah Palin also tweeted, "Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real."
To that, New Yorkers must say no.
As long as the Park51 Islamic center meets the same zoning and building permit obligations that were also met by the Vanderbilt YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, by the American Buddhist Study Center on Riverside Drive and by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in the West Village, then New York City should say yes to this much-needed sanctuary for Muslims in Manhattan.
I, too, say yes. I say yes to a mosque next door to Ground Zero. And I say yes to inviting imams to participate in the ceremony that will, one day, mark the unveiling of the National September 11 Memorial. And yes to leasing office space to Muslim-owned companies in the re-built 1 World Trade Center. And yes, yes to Sarah Palin and Rick Lazio remembering that there is a difference -- a huge, huge, difference -- between Abdoul Traor and Touri Bolourchi and the fundamentalists who murdered them, between my client Mohammed and the clients of the Coney Island Avenue Project, and the Saudi terrorists who killed our neighbors and ripped a gaping hole in our skyline.
And I say yes, yes, oh yes, to, one day, standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow New Yorkers -- Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jew, agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist and atheist alike -- in the shade of the trees on the plaza of 1 World Trade Center, finished and bustling at last, or before the names engraved into the memorial, or in line at the inevitable Starbucks on the lower concourse, all of us recalling that once, some zealots knocked us down, but together we rose up again.
]]>Haiti Needs Your Help. But First...tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4241402010-01-14T21:34:27-05:002011-05-25T15:10:21-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/text message donations alone.
And that's not even what Americans gave via checks sent snail mail, cash tossed in at pass-the-hat collections and corporate donations.
The generosity of this country never ceases to amaze and humble me. As Haiti begins its recovery, American giving to it, too, is in its infancy. So as we all look around and ask ourselves, "What else can I do?" here are a few things to keep in mind.
If Your Mother Forwards You An Email, Check It Out
Most people I know consider themselves skeptical and sophisticated when it comes to appeals for money. And yet, many of those same smart people have sent me that "Bill Gates Will Donate a Penny to Charity Every Time You Forward This" email. If someone asks you to donate to a charity you don't already know, take 30 seconds and check it out.
At Charity Navigator, you can see how much nonprofits spend on actually helping people. HOPE Worldwide, for example, set up a Haiti response donation page on Wednesday. A quick check at Charity Navigator will show you that this is indeed a legitimate charity, but because it's been spending less and less on its programs in recent years, it only gets two stars, for "Needs Improvement."
In the comments, you'll learn that HOPE Worldwide was founded by the controversial International Churches of Christ (not the same as the United Church of Christ). The ICoC has come under fire for many of its practices, such as assigning new members a "discipler" -- basically the human equivalent of an ankle monitor. It's also been banned from 39 college campuses for recruiting methods that border on harassment. The ICoC's former leader Kip McKean appointed HOPE Worldwide's first directors, Robert and Patricia Gempel, who are still on HOPE's board.
Now compare that to the International Rescue Committee - It gets a four-star rating, for "Excellent," and in the news section, you'll learn that the Forbes Investment Guide once named it one of its Ten Gold Star Charities.
Which one will you donate to now?
You can also check out fundraising emails and pleas at About.com's Urban Legends page, which has already debunked a couple of Haiti earthquake-related rumors and potential frauds.
Sometimes, Writing A Check Is Not Enough
Believe me, I get that. After September 11th, my sister and I stood under scaffolding on 96th Street and Broadway with a bunch of our neighbors, collecting whatever the rescue workers needed - clean t-shirts, rain gear, shovels, granola bars. After three days, the parking lot of the Javits Convention Center was full of stuff collected by well-meaning volunteers like us. Right now, Haiti doesn't need stuff, (though it may call for t-shirts and shovels later). Right now, what Haiti needs, is cash.
If you feel the urge to do more than write a check, think for a minute. Instead of collecting supplies at your church or a local grocery story parking lot, try organizing a pancake breakfast or spaghetti dinner to raise money instead. Put a jar on your desk to collect change. Have your kids' scout troop brainstorm a fundraiser of their own.
And if you're eager to get down there and chip in, call your local chapters of one of the charities responding to the disaster (The American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity are three possibilities) and sign up. Right now, the country can only accept help from the most highly trained first responders. But your turn will come. The Salvation Army still had a response program running in Oklahoma City six years after the bombing of the Murrah Building. Several New York City charities maintained their post-September 11 programs for five years after the disaster. And four years after Hurricane Katrina, you can still help rebuild homes in New Orleans.
Reach Out and Touch Someone
Catastrophe makes us want to reach out to those we love, but if the person you're longing to speak to in Haiti isn't a member of your innermost circle, resist the urge to call every 15 minutes until you get through. Rescuers need the limited communications capacity to coordinate their efforts.
Every New Yorker (myself included) has a story about getting a call on September 11th from an ex they hadn't spoken to in years, a distant relative they met once when they were 7, a former coworker they were pretty sure didn't even like them. With limited phone service and the police and fire radio systems down, these calls weren't merely irritating, they hampered the rescue.
If you've got family in Haiti, of course you've got to find them. But if several people here in the states are all looking for the same family members, maybe you can coordinate your calling efforts, so six, or ten, or a dozen, people aren't all trying to call the same number at once. And setting up a phone tree here will help spread news, when there is some, among loved ones here in the U.S.
The U.S. State Department has a hotline for tracking down family members in Haiti: 1-888-407-4747.
The New York Times has set up a message board for people looking for loved ones in Haiti, and for people in Haiti wanting to let people know where they are.
And if you don't have a loved one in Haiti, but you know someone who does, don't be shy about reaching out to them. The waiting and dread are a terrible burden no one should have to shoulder alone.
Get Yourself Prepared
Let's say, God forbid, that it's your city or town that is abruptly, violently, reduced to rubble. Your cellphone is splintered into 100 pieces under something heavy, and it wouldn't work anyway because most of the cell towers are lying on their sides. Utility poles are listing like twigs in a swamp. Your car is in a tree, and the roads are clogged with debris. Your loved ones are scattered at five or ten different points throughout the area. How will you find each other? How will you tell the people who love you that you are safe?
Ever since taking office last May, FEMA chief Craig Fugate has been urging Americans to sit down and answer those questions. In many of his speeches, whether to professional emergency responders or the general public, Fugate has repeatedly said that while FEMA must respond to disaster effectively, the public has a responsibility, too. And that is: Be prepared.
Fugate's such an evangelist about this that on Twitter, 29 of his 136 tweets have been variants of "Does your family have a plan?" or "Are you prepared?" He urges people to check out FEMA's website and its simple checklist for making a plan with your family. It recommends common sense things like choosing one person out of town who everyone will call if you find yourselves spread out and disconnected after a disaster. (Sometimes, after disasters, it's easier to get a call out of the area than within it.)
Fugate's giving us all good advice. One of my clients at the Salvation Army's World Trade Center Disaster Relief program was a woman who got separated from her husband on the morning of September 11th. She evacuated to New Jersey; he walked to Brooklyn. He heard from a friend that she was in a shelter in Jersey and he hitched a ride there to find her; meanwhile, she heard he might be at a different shelter in Jersey. They circled around the state looking for but not finding each other for three days.
As we watch people both in Haiti and around the world scramble to locate and contact their loved ones, maybe now is a good time to heed Fugate's suggestion. Download the checklist, get your family together, and make a plan.
Here's hoping you never need to use it.
]]>The Other Essential Reform Joe Lieberman Is Blockingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3555762009-11-13T13:30:32-05:002011-05-25T14:40:23-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
Not only has Sen. Joe Lieberman been working overtime to smother health reform, he's parked himself squarely in the path of another badly-needed, long-awaited change.
The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure last Friday passed the FEMA Independence Act, which would break FEMA free of the Department of Homeland Security and restore it to its Clinton-era status as a stand-alone, Cabinet-level agency. The FEMA chief would once again report directly to the President.
When Congress created DHS after September 11th, it rolled together 22 federal agencies, including FEMA. If cramming 22 bureaucracies under one roof sounds like a good idea, here are two words: Hurricane Katrina.
But before the reform bill could even reach the full House floor, Senator Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and his colleague, Sen. Susan Collins, (R-Maine) were already trashing it.
"FEMA is exactly where it belongs," Lieberman proclaimed in a press release.
"Removing FEMA from DHS makes no sense," Collins said in the same statement. "It would ignore the input of first-responders."
Actually, it is Lieberman and Collins who are ignoring first responders.
Last year, the senators invited several emergency managers
to testify at a hearing before their Senate Homeland Security Committee, (which Lieberman chairs and Collins is the ranking member). They asked the experts, what else can Congress do to improve FEMA?
Said Jane Bullock, the FEMA chief of staff during the Clinton Administration:
"Move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security and reestablish it as an Independent Executive Branch agency whose Director reports directly to the President. Reinstate the Director of FEMA as a member of the President's Cabinet."
Nancy Dragani, a veteran of the Army National Guard and now director of Ohio's Emergency Management agency, said:
"The FEMA Administrator must continue to serve as the primary advisor to the President on all issues related to disasters and emergencies, and have the full authority granted to the position through the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act."
Larry Gispert, former President of the International Association of Emergency Managers, compared submerging FEMA in DHS to "requiring the Department of Defense to do both war-fighting and diplomacy."
"The missions of the Department of Defense and the Department of State could never be combined - and neither should consequence and crisis management," Gispert said.
Somehow, after that hearing, the message didn't sink in with Lieberman and Collins. Maybe it would if they listened to former FEMA Deputy Director Mike Walker. Speaking last year to a group of fellow emergency managers, Walker called the status quo "a morally corrupt policy."
"Emergency management is an enduring mission" Walker said. "That mission should not compete for resources with what should be a temporary mission - reducing the threat of violent, radical extremism.
The same official dealing with that large task should not have the time to also deal with a hurricane building in the Atlantic. Nor does the Administrator of FEMA need a cabinet secretary looking over his shoulder or another operations center second-guessing every decision."
Small wonder that the experts are nearly unanimous in deriding the decision to fold FEMA into DHS. What was once an independent agency of 3,000 emergency response professionals is now a smallish cog in a federal super-department, one that employs 180,000 people.
As a result, the disaster professionals must seek permissions and signatures and paperwork from Homeland Security officials before they can take action. Even when rivers are rising or hurricanes are hammering the shorelines.
So when Alabama asked FEMA to send ice after Hurricane Dennis, the request disappeared into the bureaucracy, and the ice never arrived.
As Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast a few weeks later, FEMA officials tried again, and sent ice to staging areas throughout the south, so that it would be ready to go wherever it was needed. After the hurricane made landfall, the emergency managers issued directives for the ice to be distributed. Again their instructions melted into the ether.
Instead, the ice made circuitous journeys around the country, never arriving in New Orleans or Waveland, Mississippi, or any of the other communities asking for it. NBC News tracked one truck on a two-week trek from Wisconsin to Louisiana to Georgia to South Carolina to Maryland. It never did deliver its cargo.
Even more appalling, similar bureaucratic bungling kept thousands of hurricane evacuees out of post-disaster housing.
In New Orleans, Katrina destroyed more than 200,000 homes and displaced 750,000 people. Shortly after the storm, the Department of Veterans' Affairs realized it owned 7,000 vacant houses thereso it offered them to FEMA for hurricane evacuees. FEMA quickly accepted, and the VA dispatched workers to get the homes ready- until DHS officials stepped in and ordered them to stop. No one moves in, DHS said, until it draws up a legal agreement.
The houses then sat empty for more than three months.
With the ice and the VA houses, the DHS' second-guessing hampered FEMA's ability to respond to disaster. But FEMA also loses when it has to compete with DHS for resources. To borrow Larry Gispert's analogy, imagine the State Department having to ask the Pentagon for money.
Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates battling it out for a $40 billion payday would make a great episode of "Celebrity Death Match," but it would be terrible federal policy.
After the 2004 hurricane season, when four hurricanes and a tropical storm pummeled Florida, then-FEMA director Michael Brown realized he'd need a bigger budget for 2005. Brown could not take his request to Congress or the President; instead, he had to ask the DHS. DHS said no.
A year later, when Dennis and Katrina and Rita nearly bled FEMA dry, Congress had to rush to pass emergency appropriations bills to keep up with the response, which was, of course, famously inadequate.
The FEMA Independence Act acknowledges what first responders have been saying for years: that it's poor strategy to let anti-terrorism officials interfere with disaster response; that you probably don't want to give one federal agency the right to veto another agency's budget; that allowing DHS to absorb FEMA was a mistake.
And that, in and of itself, is probably why Lieberman is so bent on killing it.
Lieberman was the principal author and lead co-sponsor of the Department of National Homeland Security Act of 2001. He drafted the legislation in less than four weeks, proposed it on the one-month anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and made FEMA a centerpiece of the new department he envisioned.
When Hurricane Katrina revealed the folly of this choice, Lieberman doubled down. With Collins as his co-sponsor, they proposed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006, which added some resources and rearranged some staffing and implemented "strategies." And it emphasized that the FEMA Administrator should report to the President, and not the Homeland Security Secretary, during a catastrophe.
Collins and Lieberman seem to think that fixed everything. "We cannot argue with success," Collins said.
Maybe by "success," she means not really changing anything.
Meanwhile, most of the time, FEMA stays under the DHS big tent with all its bureaucratic red tape, and maneuvering, and competition for resources.
The status quo continues to hamstring FEMA's ability to move quickly when disaster strikes. Right now something needs to move quickly -- and it's Joe Lieberman. ]]>Lingering Disgracetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2836242009-09-12T14:04:11-04:002011-05-25T14:00:22-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
As we pause once more to grieve the senseless deaths of 2,998 people, we must also acknowledge that the losses of September 11th have not stopped.
The rescue workers who rushed to the wreckage, the people who stayed to clean up the pile, residents of the apartments and co-ops ringing the World Trade Center, and people who simply went back to work downtown - thousands of them have been sick since 2001, many continue to get sicker, and many are dying. And much of this pain and illness could have been prevented, if the Environmental Protection Agency and its then-director Christie Todd Whitman had not lied about the air we were breathing.
In August, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that first responders and New Yorkers who lived or worked near the World Trade Center suffer asthma at a rate of twice that of the general population.
The Mount Sinai Medical Center study has shown that a third of first responders have diminished lung capacity, 70 percent of them have serious respiratory illnesses - and 40 percent of them are uninsured.
And then there are the truly harrowing reports of large numbers of rescue workers diagnosed with myeloma, a rare blood cancer.
When the Twin Towers collapsed, everyone remembers the huge dust clouds. What many don't know is how long that dust lingered. For months, it was everywhere - it clung to walls and windows; it lay thick on sidewalks and floors, constantly churned by the moving people and machinery of the recovery; it hid in ventilation systems and cracks and crevices.
And beneath the World Trade Center, fires raged for three months and flared up again and again through the winter and spring of 2002, spewing out smoke you could see and smell as far north as 96th Street, seven miles away.
What we were breathing was oil, asbestos, mercury and benzene, (which kills bone marrow and causes leukemia and other cancers), with a chaser of pulverized glass.
You could smell it. You could taste it. So many people who spent time south of 14th Street developed a dry, hacking cough that we nicknamed it the "Downtown Cough."
Yet Whitman and the EPA denied anything was amiss.
The levels of lead, asbestos and volatile organic compounds in air samples taken on Tuesday in Brooklyn, downwind from the World Trade Center, were not detectable or not of concern.
-- EPA press release, September 13, 2001.
EPA is greatly relieved to have learned that there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air of New York City.
-- Statement by Christie Todd Whitman, September 13, 2001
Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district.
-- OSHA spokesman, September 16, 2001
The good news continues to be that the air samples we have taken have all been at levels that cause us no concern.
-- Christie Todd Whitman, September 16, 2001
EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced today that results from the Agency's air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe.
-- EPA press release, September 18, 2001
Really? Now let's hear from New York Daily News writer Juan Gonzalez:
Toxic chemicals and metals are being released into the environment around lower Manhattan by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and by the fires still burning at Ground Zero, according to internal government reports obtained by the Daily News.
Dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead and chromium are among the toxic substances detected in the air and soil around the WTC site by Environmental Protection Agency equipment - sometimes at levels far exceeding federal standards, the documents show.
EPA monitoring devices also have found considerable contaminants in the Hudson River - in the water and in the sediment - especially after it rains.
-- Toxic Nightmare at Disaster Site, Juan Gonzalez, October 26, 2001
As much as 180,000 gallons of flammable oil - roughly equivalent to 10 times the amount of jet fuel in the two airliners that crashed into the twin towers - may be feeding the fires that have been burning for more than two months at the Trade Center site.
... officials say they don't know whether the contaminants seeped into the soil, burned or drained off into the Hudson River.
-- Major Oil Spills at Ground Zero, Juan Gonzalez, November 29, 2001
Asbestos contamination inside buildings near the World Trade Center site may be far worse than government officials have reported, according to a new study by a top private toxicology firm.
Even as they were reassuring the public, EPA officials distributed respirators late last week to their employees in the Federal Building. The handouts came in response to complaints from the employees of terrible air quality in the building, a few blocks from the Trade Center site.
-- Asbestos Higher In Newer Test, Juan Gonzalez, October 9, 2001
Despite Gonzalez's dogged reporting, and the almost immediate spike in respiratory ailments from people living and working around Ground Zero, the EPA continued to deny the threat.
And the Giuliani administration joined in. The mayor criticized Gonzalez and disputed his articles. Giuliani's administration set a dangerously low bar for declaring the buildings around the World Trade Center safe to re-enter, and even joined with the state in offering cash incentives to people who moved into apartments near the burning pile.
Despite being able to taste and smell the truth, New Yorkers could not stop the lie from claiming casualties. Almost immediately, people began streaming into the Disaster Assistance Center where I worked, asking for help with a variety of toxic-air related problems - problems FEMA could not deal with, because according to the EPA, the air was safe.
Like the M. family, who lived between Ground Zero and one of the piers where barges were loaded with World Trade Center wreckage. Smoke from the fires underneath the pile blew through their windows on the south, while dust clouds from the garbage barge drifted in from the west. The family's two children, previously healthy, developed asthma, and they sought to relocate temporarily, until the fires were extinguished and the debris hauled away.
But as long as the EPA said the air was fine, federal regulations prevented FEMA from calling the family's building unsafe, so it denied their application for housing assistance. They stayed for months, until the children began having daily asthma attacks. The Red Cross, the United Way, and the Salvation Army helped the family pay its medical bills and move to another neighborhood.
Then there was "Emma," a paralegal who worked at 1 Liberty Plaza and who repeatedly collapsed in respiratory distress every time she tried to go to work. When the EPA declared that the smoke and fumes weren't hazardous, it cleared the way for people to live and work near Ground Zero. This meant that, despite what their own lungs might have told them, the owners of 1 Liberty Plaza could not receive disaster compensation for lost rent if they kept the building closed. So of course, it reopened - on October 24, 2001 - and thousands of people returned to work, including Emma.
Well, she tried anyway. She fought for air every day, and went into respiratory distress too many times to count. She was rushed to several different emergency rooms, and each time she was misdiagnosed. Because of the EPA's declarations, the doctors who treated Emma after each collapse did not screen her for respiratory illnesses caused by toxins.
After several hospitalizations, and one particularly close call when she stopped breathing on the C train, a doctor studied her lungs more closely and diagnosed Emma with chemical bronchitis, a condition more often seen in people who work in industrial plants, handling poisons.
By then, Emma's law firm had fired her. The September 11th Victims Compensation Fund at that time refused to include people with respiratory injuries, as did the American Red Cross and the United Way. The Salvation Army and another church-based group helped Emma and her two sons move out of state.
And we saw "Lynn," who developed a migraine every time she tried to enter her apartment blocks from the site, even after she paid to have it thoroughly cleaned. She did not have a previous history of migraines.
Whitman's false declarations also prevented triggering federal rules that would have required building owners to painstakingly remove the dust from crevices, ventilation systems, water tanks. Instead, all that landlords had to do was hire a run-of-the-mill housecleaning service to vacuum the hallways, wipe down the surfaces, and call Ollie Ollie Oxen Free. Lynn's doctor suspected her migraines were caused by toxins left in the air ducts, recycled through the vents, and refreshed by the fires. The EPA's lie also prevented FEMA from considering Lynn's building unsafe, so it denied her application for housing assistance.
Four years before Hurricane Katrina, the Bush and Giuliani Administrations looked at a disaster, and the hazardous ripple effects following in its wake, and chose to protect commerce, sacrificing public health and safety.
We cannot go back and erase the lies. But we can do better by the people battered by the enduring fallout.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, (both D-New York), have sponsored the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which would screen and treat the cops and firefighters, medics and nurses, demolitions experts and ironworkers, civil engineers and volunteers, everyone who rushed to Ground Zero to rescue the injured, who stayed throughout the recovery, and who are now sick. The federal government's reticence to care for these heroes has been a lingering disgrace, and passage of the Maloney-Nadler bill would finally put a stop to that.
The bill would also provide treatment to people like Lynn and the M. family, and the cleaning crews hired to vacuum their buildings, who continue to struggle with serious medical problems caused by the disaster and the subsequent lies about air quality.
And it would re-open the Victims Compensation Fund and direct it to consider the claims of people like Emma, whose primary injury is a chronic respiratory disease and who were exposed to the toxic fumes and dust anytime in the first year after the terrorist attacks.
Malone and Nadler's bill made it out of committee just before the August break, but it's got a long way to go. And with the health care reform frenzy, it's at risk of languishing for three months and dying a quiet death. Today, in the time it takes to light a candle and set it in your window, you can help keep it alive by looking up your local Congressman's phone number, picking up your phone, and asking them to vote for it.
It's right and good that eight years later, we still stop to mourn our unbearable losses. But let us also step up and stop them from accumulating, too.
]]>Giving FEMA the Green Lighttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1918022009-04-29T11:12:00-04:002011-05-25T13:15:26-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
Actually, I'm about to sit by uselessly and watch someone else fill them. Six weeks after September 11th, my first day as a disaster-aid caseworker, and I've learned only one thing: The Guidelines -- who's eligible for help, and who's not. But that's enough to know this poor woman will be leaving the disaster-aid center with nothing. Neither the apartment that filled up with thick, gray dust nor the sweatshop that laid her off are close enough to Ground Zero. She doesn't qualify.
She's already been rejected by the Red Cross and another private agency. Our table, for the Salvation Army, is her last stop, her last chance.
I'm not a heartless bureaucrat. I am not cut out for this, I think, bracing myself for the rejection I'm sure will come. Delivering the news will fall to Bob, the man next to me. He's got that telltale, impossibly perfect posture of someone who's been in the military, and he wears a navy blue polo with "FEMA" emblazoned above the heart. (In the early days of the disaster, workers from FEMA sometimes pitched in at charities such as the Salvation Army and Red Cross.) Unlike the FDNY baseball caps mushrooming all over the country, Bob's FEMA shirt isn't disaster swag. He's one of those people who travels the country, hopping from wreckage caused by tornadoes to wreckage caused by hurricanes to wreckage caused by floods. He's the one here who knows what he's doing. We look at him and wait.
He starts to explain The Guidelines to a translator seated at the table with us. Our client speaks only Mandarin, but when he says "Canal Street," the tears form. You have to live or work south of Canal to qualify for disaster aid, and this woman's home and former factory are both on the wrong side of the Canal. But Bob doesn't lower the hammer. He smiles at the old woman, scoops up all of her documents and says we have to check a few things.
In a far corner of the room, Bob scours every scrap of paper the woman brought with her -- and she brought everything, and I do mean everything: old phone bills, last year's W-2, her grown children's birth certificates. Bob studies each one, while I wonder silently what good it will do. Staring at the paperwork won't move her apartment five blocks south.
Bob snaps his head up and looks at me. "You don't enforce the rules just for the sake of enforcing the rules," he says. "You use them to keep out the people who really don't qualify and the frauds. And sometimes, you bend."
He holds up the woman's old W-2, his eyes lighting up. "This is it," he says, softly. His green light.
The old woman's sweatshop might have been on the wrong side of Canal, but the company that fired her was on the right one. Bob took that tissue-thin piece of paper and used it to wedge open an impossibly heavy door, the one entitling her to disaster aid. He authorized paying her rent for a couple of months, her electric bill, her phone bill. He sent her on her way with a gift certificate for $100 in groceries. And after she left, he gave me another meaningful look. "Sometimes," he said, "you just have to find a way."
Seven and a half years later, I've been thinking about Bob a lot lately. Is he in Valley City, North Dakota, where the overflowing Sheyenne River knocked out the city's sewer system, filling streets and buildings with raw sewage?
Is he in Mississippi or Louisiana, finding homes for the still-suffering victims of Hurricane Katrina who, later this week, will be kicked out of their FEMA trailers , with nowhere to go?
Maybe he's in the Florida panhandle, battling mosquitoes and using a boat to travel where roads used to be, assessing flood damage while heavy rains continued to fall.
Where I'm pretty sure he's not, is guarding a secret concentration camp run by FEMA.
Recently, the editor of Popular Mechanics appeared on The Glenn Beck Program on Fox News to debunk Internet videos purporting to show concentration camps on U.S. soil being run by FEMA. The videos show footage of barbed-wire fences and ominous-looking towers, and claim American citizens are being imprisoned there in secret. "Outside this building is fencing and a cattle run section of fence," the narrator intones while panning over a desolate, concrete yard littered with train cars and propane tanks, " all topped by barbed wire pointing inward, not to keep people out but to keep people in." Later, she zooms in on more fencing and says, "Inside the facility we found large fenced in areas next to the railroad tracks marked green zone and blue zone, suitable for holding a lot of people."
Editor-in-Chief James Meigs and the staff of Popular Mechanics did a little digging and discovered the footage is actually of an Indiana repair yard for Amtrak. Another image being circulated, one taken from a satellite and branded with the seal of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, turns out to be a photo of an actual concentration camp -- in North Korea.
The initial coverage of this story focused mostly on Beck, who seemed like one of the less likely TV personalities to give air time to Meigs and the good reporting by Popular Mechanics. (Indeed, listen to Beck's introduction of the story. He seems inclined to believe the myths.)
But those stories miss the larger issue. What's unsettling about this urban legend isn't that it exists, but that people, including possibly Beck, want to believe it.
Urban legends germinate and thrive because they tap into people's most cherished beliefs -- and our most nagging suspicions. Take that resilient chain letter claiming Bill Gates will pay you every time you forward a bogus e-mail. I cannot tell you how many otherwise intelligent people have sent me that one, saying, "Hey it sounds too good to be true, but just in case...". We click the forward button, often in spite of our better judgment, partly because of a perception that Bill Gates' wealth is nearly infinite. But we also do so out of a deeper sense that Microsoft just might be advanced enough, powerful enough, and ubiquitous enough to track the e-mail activities of 87 million people.
The myth of the FEMA concentration camps exploits a belief more disturbing -- that FEMA is not just incompetent, it's malevolent.
And it seems to have hit a nerve for an awful lot of people -- the most popular FEMA camp video on YouTube has racked up nearly 1.1 million views. That's just one of several videos, on one website alone.
FEMA's been unpopular before, and often rightly so. For decades, it was a bureaucratic morass. It devoted most of its resources to planning for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and it responded to floods and hurricanes and massive earthquakes with the speed of the U.S. Patent Office and the compassion of the Internal Revenue Service.
FEMA's reputation was so bad that in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew shredded southern Florida and left 250,000 people homeless, Gov. Lawton Chiles actually turned down federal assistance. Think about that: A quarter of a million people homeless, and the governor balks at money. (Chiles changed his mind after the Administration of then-President George H.W. Bush assured him aid would be delivered not by FEMA, but by the military.)
It was worse in 1989. That year, FEMA responded to both Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake -- the one that struck at the start of Game 3 of the World Series -- like a sloth on Quaaludes.
Halfway through President Bill Clinton's first year in office, FEMA turned itself around so dramatically, it was downright shocking. Under the leadership of James Lee Witt, the agency began planning its response to natural disasters before they struck. It made a speedy response to calamity its highest priority.
During the Midwestern floods of 1993, FEMA actually arranged for clean water to be delivered to the people of Des Moines before the city's water plant failed. It picked up and moved entire towns, permanently, getting people off flood-prone riverbanks and relocating them to higher, safer, ground. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, it paid for temporary housing for more than 115,000 people for two years, ensuring that people did not get rushed back into unstable buildings.
And in New York City in 2001, a FEMA worker who was as compassionate as he was efficient showed me how to take a list of rules and wield them against misery.
Even after the ineffectual response to the Loma Preita Earthquake, and Hurricane Hugo, after being supplanted by the military after Hurricane Andrew, even then, nobody accused FEMA of locking thousands of American citizens behind barbed wire and gassing them. So why is the FEMA camp urban legend catching on now?
During the Clinton Administration, Americans finally began to trust FEMA. Since Hurricane Katrina, they feel that trust has been betrayed: Toxic trailers. Diverting $1.5 billion away from affordable housing to programs that benefit casinos. More than 20,000 New Orleanians stranded in a Houston slum. And a succession of leaders who, in the memorable words of Maureen Dowd, couldn't tell "the difference between a tropical depression and a panic attack."
People see the suffering FEMA's mistakes and negligence have caused, and they suspect some deeper corrosion must be at the heart of it. But in perpetuating the FEMA's-running-concentration-camps myth, they're looking for the culprits in the wrong place.
The failures of FEMA in the last eight years were directly related to the flawed policies of the previous Administration. President George W. Bush replaced experienced FEMA workers with political cronies, and Michael Brown was just one example. His predecessor Joseph Allbaugh - who made some spectacular fumbles in handling the response to September 11th - had previously been President Bush's campaign director, and before that, his chief of staff when he was Texas' governor. And the cronyism penetrated far below the first layer. In 2005, FEMA's No. 3 official came to that job from a career as a publicist. Many other midlevel and regional FEMA directors had political credentials, not disaster-response ones.
But cronyism was just the start. Equally catastrophic was an early Bush Administration decision to shift FEMA's focus away from planning how to respond to disasters and to turn that job over to state and local officials. It was supposedly a way to put emergency planning in the hands of people who understand the terrain. But in reality it meant siphoning money away from disaster response and using it to give grants to politically friendly companies and regions.
For example, after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA spent $3 billion on trailers that turned out to be contaminated, buying them from four GOP-friendly companies, Bechtel, CH2MHill, Fluor and the Shaw Group. And Zanesville, Ohio, population 25,000, landed generous federal grants to buy thermal imaging sensors to locate people through thick smoke, and to buy kits that test for nerve gas. (Meanwhile, New York City repeatedly asked for money to replace the police and fire radio system that failed on September 11th. It got snubbed.)
Those grants came with a hidden cost -- slashing the FEMA budget for putting experienced disaster workers in a room and asking them, "What should we do if a Category 5 hurricane hits New Orleans and the levees break?" or "Hey, what happens if the Sheyenne takes out the Valley City sewage plant?" And then taking actual steps to prepare for those threats.
President Barack Obama promised to restore competence to FEMA, and judging by Craig Fugate, his nominee to be the next Administrator, it looks like he's keeping his word. Fugate is a former paramedic and firefighter, who's been leading Florida's emergency management office since 2001.
But it is not enough to either sit by and hope that each president makes disaster-recovery a priority, or to spread urban legends designed to make FEMA as popular as Guantanamo Bay.
We must expect more, but we must also do more. We can begin by changing the tone of our national conversation about disaster response. At his first confirmation hearing last Wednesday, Fugate got us off to a good start.
"Judging FEMA's future success on the basis of whether it is 'better than Katrina' is not viable," Fugate said. Better than Katrina "...does not, in my opinion, meet our sworn commitment to the American people. Therefore, if confirmed, I commit to meeting the demonstrated recovery needs of the Gulf Coast, and at the same time, I will hold FEMA's future response and recovery missions to a much higher standard of success."
When Bob took the time to search for his green light, he did more than keep one seventy-something seamstress from going hungry. He kept rent flowing to her landlord, which kept mortgage payments flowing to the bank. The bank made loans to small businesses fighting to survive in lower Manhattan. And as scores of caseworkers looked for thousands of little green lights, New York clung to life.
It might seem nearly useless to e-mail a member of Congress and ask him or her to make disaster housing a higher priority. Or to spend an evening coming up with a disaster plan for a single family, (yours). Or, when you get that e-mail claiming to expose the evil conspiracy behind FEMA, to just not forward it, no matter how deeply it resonates.
But living through this recession -- one ignited and fueled by millions of small, individual acts of fraud, ignorance and greed -- I don't think we need a lot of reminding about the reservoir of potential we hold as a nation of 306 million people, about our history of accomplishment when we put our persistent optimism to work, about how we realize results only when each individual decides to act. Fugate stepped up into the lead-off position last Wednesday. Let that be your green light. ]]>Three Things Congress (Yes, Congress) Must Do to Fix FEMAtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1585532009-01-21T13:56:22-05:002011-05-25T13:00:22-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
In the words of poet Bryan Guinness, Obama's "speech is like rain, falling among parched thoughts."
Competent leadership will be welcome, but it will not be enough for FEMA to recover from its own disaster.
Real recovery will require action by Congress, especially when it comes to post-disaster housing. Of the many tragic failures of FEMA in the last seven years, those related to housing were among the most conspicuous. And they were caused in part by Congressional blunders.
Before the next big earthquake, or ice storm, or hurricane, Congress must take three critical steps:
1. Restore FEMA's status as a stand-alone, Cabinet-level agency. Lumping it into the Department of Homeland Security with 21 other agencies has added the drag of more bureaucracy with no discernible benefit. President Obama seemed to be speaking in favor of this when, in that same speech in New Orleans, he promised that his FEMA director would report directly to him.
2. Reverse the terrible decision to put HUD in charge of disaster housing. With the Natural Disaster Housing Act of 2006, Congress set up a never-ending labyrinth for shell-shocked disaster victims. First they see their homes shredded by weather or filled up with water, then they must navigate not one but two federal agencies. They must prove to FEMA they qualify for help, then they schlep to HUD to ask for housing vouchers (which landlords are wary of accepting). After that, they're likely to get sent to a public housing authority, agencies not exactly known for their agility and empathy. According to the Houston Chronicle, this Kafka-like limbo last year stranded more than 13,000 families displaced by Hurricane Ike.
3. Bring back Mortgage and Rental Assistance. The blueprint for disaster housing during the Clinton Administration, this program set standards, deadlines and expectations for helping people either keep or return to their homes. In 2000, Congress passed the Disaster Mitigation Act, which eliminated MRA and replaced it with a program that said, in essence, "Oh, and when it comes to housing, the President should really do something about that."
If the foreclosure crisis has taught us anything, it's that everyone suffers when large numbers of people default on mortgages and fall behind on their rent all at once. Where we once had one, just one, disaster housing program that worked mostly as it was supposed to, now we have a new housing program for each disaster. Sometimes, a disaster gets many housing programs, which means that some people get help when they need it, and others get fed into a bureaucratic meat grinder.
The human toll has been staggering -- discrimination, exploitation, and skyrocketing rates of homelessness and attempted suicide.
A few highlights:
Toxic Trailers
After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA moved about 144,000 families into these trailers, which we now know were contaminated with high levels of formaldehyde. Some were set up in trailer parks so remote it was impossible for residents to look for and hold down jobs. In other areas, FEMA crammed the trailers onto too-small plots of land, leading to health problems, crime and just plain misery for the people stuck there.
A study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that half of the trailer park residents were clinically depressed. The suicide rate was 15 percent higher than the national average; also, residents were 79 percent more likely to attempt suicide.
FEMA spent more than $3 billion on those trailers, giving no-bid contracts to four politically-connected, generous-to-Republicans companies: Bechtel, CH2MHill, Fluor and the Shaw Group.
The Freedom to Discriminate
By building "flexibility" into FEMA laws, Congress inadvertently created loopholes that made it easier for officials to treat some disaster victims more equally than others.
One program, which gave federal grants to homeowners so they could rebuild, required 70 percent of the money to go to moderate-income families. But Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Republican lobbyist and one-time chair of the Republican National Committee, persuaded the Bush Administration to drop that rule. The grants have since flowed easily to the wealthiest homeowners in Barbour's state, while lower-income families who owned shoreline property saw their applications languish. When they were good and desperate, casinos swooped in and bought their property from them, for below-market prices, naturally.
Moderate-income people who did not own shorefront real estate fared even worse -- evicted from FEMA trailers, they could not afford to rent any of the few apartments available in the Gulf Coast, where rents have doubled and, in some places, tripled.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, one of HUD's first actions as the point agency for disaster-housing was to approve and finance a plan to tear down public housing complexes, replacing 4,500 low-income units with 1,500. Private developers are using the money to build mixed housing -- a blend of public housing, affordable housing for people with slightly higher incomes, and market-rate housing.
In other words, tax dollars are paying to enrich private developers and gentrify huge swaths of New Orleans, while violating one of the most basic rights of disaster evacuees -- the right to go home.
And in Houston, tens of thousands of those evacuees -- who would like to return to New Orleans but can't because of the Gulf Coast's post-hurricane housing shortage -- have been shoehorned into slums. The Houston Chronicle reported last summer that the city rushed more than 20,000 mostly low-income, mostly black, Katrina evacuees into substandard housing. Since then, crime in those neighborhoods has soared while the buildings, already in poor shape, deteriorated rapidly.
Now you've got it; now you don't
While some Katrina evacuees got toxic trailers and some are living in decrepit buildings in Houston, others received housing vouchers to pay for apartments they found on their own. The vouchers were supposed to be good for a year, but FEMA abruptly and without notice cut them off for 18,000 people after about six months. The move touched off panic and confusion, as well as a legal battle during which the government announced that housing aid would soon return; a week later, FEMA reneged again.
Under Mortgage and Rental Assistance, disaster evacuees could get help with housing costs for up to 18 months.
Sisyphus' boulder is made of red tape
Putting FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security is a decision that created its own housing debacles. In 2005, two weeks after Katrina, the federal Department of Veterans' Affairs offered to let FEMA use 7,000 vacant houses that it owned in New Orleans.
VA workers were readying the houses for evacuees when DHS ordered them to stop, saying no one moved in until it worked out an inter-agency agreement. ABC News reported that the houses then sat empty for more than three months.
Hotels to homelessness
Just as abruptly as it cut off housing vouchers to some Katrina evacuees, FEMA announced five months after the disaster that it would no longer cover the bills for those living in hotels. The agency decided that "it was time" to end the hotel stays, even though housing in New Orleans was then still so scarce that FEMA's own website listed only five two-bedroom apartments for rent. Most of the 12,000 families still living in hotels had nowhere to go when they were kicked out.
Speaking of homelessness
About 12,000 people are homeless in New Orleans, double the number pre-Katrina. That's 4 percent of New Orleans' total population, or one homeless person for every 25 residents. It's the highest rate in the nation.
Taken together, these tragedies illustrate how, in the last eight years, the Bush Administration has exploited various loopholes in FEMA law to change the way the nation responds to disasters. It has moved our policy away from one that was efficient and fair to one that's more easily manipulated to punish political enemies and reward friends with lucrative contracts and discount prices on valuable real estate. (Naomi Klein calls it disaster capitalism; for more about how it's been deployed in New Orleans, see her book, The Shock Doctrine.)
Setting aside the human suffering caused by these policies for just a moment, I want to point out that this attitude toward disaster aid is also the polar opposite of how the American people want and expect FEMA to work.
Look at how Americans react after a hurricane or a flood or a particularly devastating tornado. They leap into action. They bring their own boats to pull strangers off rooftops, or rescue them from airplanes sinking in the Hudson River. They open their homes to the displaced. They hop in their cars and get on buses for the privilege of clearing debris or handing out blankets and water.
As a caseworker for the Salvation Army's disaster program for survivors of the September 11th attacks, I worked side-by-side with a father and son who closed their family business in Minneapolis for a week and drove to New York City to dish out lunch to our clients. About 100 members of one church in California came to help us write rent checks for people who were forced out of their homes. The people of Hawaii sent us 1,800 leis.
And after a disaster, Americans clean out their wallets. They gave September 11th disaster relief efforts $2.8 billion. After Hurricane Katrina, they gave $3 billion. Just a few weeks after Hurricane Ike, the tally stood at $19 million -- and that's in the middle of a global financial crisis.
But after that initial surge of goodwill, we expect FEMA and local government to handle the rest -- to clear the wreckage, to rebuild damaged communities, to restore our neighbors to their homes.
I believe this ideal springs from a deep vein of compassion that Americans are known for. But it also comes from an understanding of the true nature of disaster. We've all seen enough wildfires and earthquakes and tornadoes on CNN to know how random it is. We want everyone to benefit from disaster aid because we know next time, that could be us standing amid the rubble.
Of course, it's not all kindness and empathy. It's also practicality. It is bad for the economy, bad for the nation, to let entire communities wither and die; to let their residents, broke and traumatized, wash up on the shores of other communities that may or may not have the resources to absorb them; to leave infrastructures to rot.
Generous, practical and egalitarian -- that's the disaster policy Americans want. But for seven years, we've been given instead a policy that helps some, and leaves others to languish and blame themselves.
"I feel like I woke up and I am at fault for the hurricane," a Katrina survivor now living in Phoenix told the Louisiana Weekly. "And now, I am paying the price."
Congress can fix that. And it must. Now.
]]>Remember Willow Runtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1499502008-12-10T13:05:15-05:002011-05-25T12:55:17-04:00Kelly Caldwellhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-caldwell/
Congress wants to avoid getting burned again, so it is laying out its demands to the Big Three: $1 CEO salaries, more control over the restructuring, a Car Czar.
These conditions are necessary, but they are not enough. The Big Three have a history of creating an environment of desperation, extracting cash from the government, then closing plants and firing workers, demolishing the economy anyway.
If Congressional leaders are serious about this $15 billion bailout saving the economy, and not becoming yet another fat gift of corporate welfare, I have three words for them: Remember Willow Run.
In late 1991, during another recession, and another terrifying downturn in the auto industry (one we blamed on competition from Japan), General Motors announced a series of plant closings and layoffs that would eventually put 74,000 people out of work. As that chilling news sunk in, GM declared it would also close one of two assembly plants, either the Willow Run factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, or one in Arlington, Texas. But before making its decision, GM would give the plants a few months to come up with "cost-saving" proposals.
What ensued was a frantic competition for survival, pitting two already hard-hit communities against one another to see who could eviscerate themselves the most. The unions hashed out offers to slash wages, benefits, and overtime. The towns of Ypsilanti and Arlington, and the states of Michigan and Texas, each drew up plans to gut schools, lay off police officers, close libraries, abandon parks -- anything, in short, to accommodate the deepest possible budget cuts, and give GM bigger tax rebates.
For eight excruciating weeks, you could feel the desperation in both communities swell daily by degrees, as they traded sacrificial offerings. You'll cut wages 10 percent? We'll see your 10 percent and raise you health insurance co-pays by 20 percent! You'll close a library? Watch us bleed our schools!
In February 1992, GM named Arlington the winner. The Texas workers had offered to work three days a week without overtime, and the state of Texas and town of Arlington threw in a tax rebate for GM worth $30 million. Ultimately, it was that tax cut that killed Willow Run. Ypsilanti and Michigan could not match it -- because they'd given GM so much already.
Between 1975 and 1990, Ypsilanti granted repeated tax rebates to GM, at least 122 of them, for a total of $1.3 billion.
The final two rebates came under a state law that explicitly traded tax breaks for jobs -- a company that invested money in new or existing plants and preserved or added jobs could receive steep, lucrative tax discounts. Under that law, Ypsilanti granted GM and Willow Run a 12-year break worth nearly $14 million.
When, after only a few years, GM decided to close Willow Run, the town, the county and the state of Michigan sued for breach of contract. The billions in tax breaks weren't gifts to GM, they argued; they were made in exchange for jobs, specifically, 4,000 jobs at Willow Run for the length of the rebate, 12 years.
For a while, it looked as though Ypsilanti might prevail. The state law that created the tax breaks tied them to jobs, and the Circuit Court judge who first heard the case ruled in favor of Ypsilanti and Michigan.
That judge, the Hon. Donald Shelton, wrote in his decision that GM:
"... having lulled the people of the Ypsilanti area into giving up millions of tax dollars ... [cannot be] allowed to simply decide that it will desert 4,500 workers and their families because it thinks it can make these same cars a little cheaper somewhere else. Perhaps another judge in another court would not feel moved by that injustice and would labor to find a legal rationalization to allow such conduct. But in this Court it is my responsibility to make that decision. My conscience will not allow this injustice to happen."
But Michigan's State Appeals Court quickly overturned Shelton's ruling, and the state Supreme Court sided with GM as well. Willow Run closed for good in 1993.
As for the "winners," the workers and citizens of Arlington, the sacrifices they made were nearly as steep as those made in Ypsilanti -- and they got similar results. Within two years, NAFTA took effect, and GM spent its Arlington "cost savings" on building new plants in Mexico, investing $356 million there in 1995 alone.
Slowly, GM siphoned jobs out of Arlington. In 1992, nearly 4,000 people voted to cut their take-home pay to keep working; last year, only 2,500 jobs remained.
Today, in the middle of a year-long recession, one being called the worst downturn since the Great Depression, it would be lunacy to suggest the automakers could be saved without layoffs. But it is equally delusional to give $15 billion to GM, Chrysler and Ford and expect that somehow, this time, we'll fare better than Ypsilanti and Arlington.
Congress must give the Car Czar the authority to demand some job preservation -- in writing -- as part of any bailout. If it doesn't, we can watch the automakers cash our check and plow that money straight into China or Mexico, as GM did in 1995. Or perhaps they'll do as the airlines did in 2001: Congress passed a $15 billion bailout for that industry that allowed its top executives to keep their multi-million dollar salaries, but, after heavy lobbying by the airlines, cut out provisions to help laid-off workers with job training, unemployment benefits, or health insurance. The airlines laid off 100,000 workers that fall; one airline used bailout money to preserve pension and health benefits for its most senior executives.
Despite the hemorrhaging of jobs to Mexico and China, the Big Three automakers still employ about 250,000 Americans, and another half a million jobs, at least, depend on the their survival. Jobs are the reason Congress is even considering a bailout for the automakers. Preserving them must be condition No. 1.]]>