FEMA’s Forgotten Hurricane Follies
Jim Bovard
Lots of folks remember FEMA’s snafus with Katrina. But its history of screwups goes much further back. Here’s a recap on FEMA’s record with Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The conclusion might prove relevant this time around:
“Hurricanes and governments have developed an odd, symbiotic relationship. When the former threaten to make their presence felt, the latter demand equal billing. By the time the weather calms, it’s not clear which of them caused the bigger mess.”
The American Spectator
November, 1999
The Floyd Fiasco: Like TV weathermen, the Feds love the hurricane season.
by James Bovard.;
James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press).
Hurricane Floyd -- perhaps the most overhyped hurricane in Weather Channel history -- wound up killing at least 70 people and causing billions of dollars in damages. But most of the deaths and damage occurred in New Jersey, parts of Virginia, and North Carolina, where flooding kept thousands from their homes in the eastern third of the state for weeks. In Florida and South Carolina, by contrast, which contrary to expectations escaped the brunt of the storm, federal and state government reactions ended up disrupting far more lives than were seriously threatened by the hurricane itself. No wonder Southerners labeled Floyd “the King of Chaos.”
In an unusual act that may now become standard operating procedure, President Clinton pre-emptively declared federal emergencies in several states even before the hurricane touched the continental U.S. -- and, according to a FEMA employee, “before the governors asked for assistance. This isn’t permitted by the law, but when was the last time Clinton obeyed the law?” With FEMA’s encouragement, Southern states issued mandatory evacuation orders to nearly three million residents of coastal areas.
Administration officials wasted no time spinning what was quickly called ”the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the United States” as a major triumph. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt praised
state officials for their rapid and thorough response, and Vice President Al Gore quickly declared, “All things considered, it’s gone very smoothly.”
State officials were also pleased with their work. “Overall, we’ve never moved so many people so far with so few problems,” said David Bruns, a spokesman for the Florida Emergency Operations Center. “It was astonishing it went as well as it did, but of course, you probably didn’t feel that way if you were sitting in a car for hours.”
And hundreds of thousands did sit in their cars for hours as the evacuation orders produced some of the worst traffic jams in the history of the South. Florida drivers were stuck in 30-mile-long backups. According to the Los Angeles Times, some Floridians were caught in traffic jams with no movement for 12 hours. Some of the worst gridlock occurred exiting Charleston, South Carolina. It took some people 16 hours to drive from Charleston to Columbia -- normally
less than two hours away.
In 1989, when Hurricane Hugo whacked the Charleston area, Gov. Carroll Campbell had quickly ordered that all lanes of Interstate 26 be reserved for westbound traffic out of the city. But on the grounds that this exodus strategy was too disruptive, state officials this time dragged their feet for eight hours before allowing lanes to be reversed. By then the backups were already massive. If Floyd had sped up and caught the jammed motorists, the result could have been
the biggest hurricane disaster since Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley was outraged and denounced Gov. Jim Hughes, a fellow Democrat: “What you’re doing is running the risk of killing my people.” The Charleston
Post and Courier editorialized: “The state was unconscionably inefficient in its evacuation effort.” What’s more, “because the state wasn’t ready to do its job, the negative legacy of Floyd now extends to the potentially tragic perception that staying at home during a hurricane beats trying to leave.” The mayor of Isle of Palms, South Carolina, told the Associated Press that “one woman vowed never to leave after she had to stop by the road to relieve herself in front of a long line of traffic.” (It’s not known whether FEMA has made any effort to offer her one of its ” crisis counseling” grants.)
Clinton was quick to defend the forced evacuations. “There may be some people who question…whether we did the right thing to recommend all the evacuations,” he said on September 19. “But now that we have this technology at the National Weather Center, we have to act on it.” Will pre-landfall federal panic-mongering become the rule in future hurricanes? In defending the evacuations, Clinton and other officials sought to shift attention from whether state governments and emergency planners were guilty of a stupendous misjudgment that exposed hundreds of thousands of people to greater risks than they would have faced if they had stayed home.
Clinton and Witt also painted the evacuation as a success because of the limited number of fatalities caused by Floyd itself, ignoring that the evacuation cost an estimated $2 billion, almost all of it borne by the evacuees. Predictably, news of Floyd sent politicians scrambling for a handout. Even before the storm landed, Florida Governor Jeb Bush asked Clinton for 100 percent reimbursement of state and local government disaster-related costs. In his letter to Clinton, Bush claimed that computer models were predicting Florida would suffer an astonishing $7 billion in damage. (Later he conceded this was “purely a guess.”) Once Clinton issued his pre-emptive emergency declaration, state and local officials were free to rev up spending and send the bill to Washington. Florida, which would suffer little damage, was promised the feds would cover 75 percent of overtime for police, firefighters, and other government workers and other related costs in response to the proclaimed emergency.
The more the federal government gives, the more demanding state and local governments can become. Florida Insurance Commissioner Bill Nelson is now pressuring FEMA to compensate state residents who had extra gas and lodging costs because of the evacuation order. After FEMA did not jump at the opportunity, Nelson -- who is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate next year -- announced that he is considering ordering insurance companies to compensate homeowners, even when their homes suffered no damage. The Tampa Tribune noted that such an order “would earn political points along the Atlantic seaboard…. But it would likely be unpopular in the rest of the state, where homeowners would have to foot much of the bill.” Florida Insurance Department spokesman Don Pride observed: “If people aren’t reimbursed when they’re ordered out, it may be a disincentive for them to obey.” Under this theory, the threat of losing one’s life is not sufficient to leave the coast -- unless the government also promises to force other citizens to pay for your gas.
After the storm was over, President Clinton began urging North Carolina residents to “take advantage” of the federal aid elixir. “The American people know that no individual can handle this alone,” he said, announcing a special distribution of federal food stamps to people who would not normally qualify for such handouts.
In a speech in Tarboro, North Carolina, Clinton recited a long list of federal benefits available to flood victims and urged the audience: “So you all need to take advantage of these things.” A White House press release listed the array of benefits -- from disaster housing assistance (to cover the cost of a hotel while people are forced out due to home damage), grants to low- and moderate-income individuals, Small Business Administration loans for business and personal property disaster, Agriculture Department emergency loans to farmers who suffered crop or chicken losses, reimbursement for paying the cost of clearing roads and carrying away downed trees, and more.
All of this post-disaster benevolence almost makes one forget that it was government policies that helped place many in harm’s way in the first place. Floyd’s devastation in North Carolina is a reminder of how federal flood insurance spurs development along “hurricane alley.” At a televised press conference at FEMA headquarters Clinton was asked, “Mr. President, with federal flood insurance, is the government encouraging coastal development at a time when we may be in a new cycle of more dangerous and more frequent storms?” FEMA Director Witt jumped in: “You know, without the Federal Flood Insurance Program, without 19,000 communities across America being in that program, it not only has saved probably close to $750 million a year in disaster dollars that taxpayers pay. And the federal Flood Insurance Program is supported by flood premiums, not taxpayers’ dollars.”
Witt has peddled this schlock ever since he arrived at FEMA in 1993. In reality, the NFIP is more than $700 million in debt to the U.S. Treasury because of heavy borrowings to cover its massive losses in recent years, even before the surge of claims pending from Floyd. The Treasury Department has written off more than a billion dollars in previous loans to the NFIP, thereby promoting the fiction that the program is not an actuarial rathole. American taxpayers currently face over $400 billion of exposure from NFIP policies.
“Forget-and-forgive” is FEMA’s attitude toward repeat flood claimants. A National Wildlife Foundation study estimated that two percent of properties covered by federal flood insurance had “multiple losses accounting for 60 percent of the program’s total claims, and more than 5,600 properties had collected claims exceeding the total value of the property.” Almost $3 billion has been spent in the last two decades “repairing and rebuilding the same structures two, three and four times.” One Houston home suffered 16 floods; its owner collected more than $800,000 in compensation for repair costs.
FEMA’s repeated bailouts of flood victims and local governments are hell on the environment. The Charlotte News & Observer noted in 1997 that FEMA’s ” bailout (after earlier hurricanes) has reimbursed resort towns for just about any piece of public property that blew away in the storm…. (It) has undermined years of efforts to discourage unwise development.” Consider the experience of Topsail Island, a 26-mile island off the North Carolina coast. At a time when North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt sought to discourage rebuilding on the island, FEMA came in and deluged the area with more than $100 million to rebuild private and public facilities damaged by two hurricanes in 1996. In 1998, the island was hit by another hurricane -- and FEMA rushed in to spend another $10 million. The 1998 damage was greater than it otherwise would have been because FEMA had extended the sewer system after the previous hurricane, thus opening the door to new development. Federal relief spending over a three-year period amounted to more than $10,000 for each permanent resident on the island, according to the Associated Press. And once again, FEMA will come in and bail out Topsail Island, the lucky spot where Floyd finally made landfall.
Hurricanes and governments have developed an odd, symbiotic relationship. When the former threaten to make their presence felt, the latter demand equal billing. By the time the weather calms, it’s not clear which of them caused the bigger mess.
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2012/10/30/femas-forgotten-hurricane-follies/ --
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