Federal Emergency Management Agency

Besides the better-known military and intelligence reorganizations in the National Security Act of 1947, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) was created; the OEP, after various reorganizations, is the ancestor of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The director of OEP was made a statutory member of the National Security Council, so the original OEP, like the Central Intelligence Agency, directly reported to the President.

Civil Defense versus general emergency response

A Civil Defense Board, under Major General Harold R. Bull, had operated during the Second World War. At the end of the war, the wartime Office of Civil Defense was shut down by President Harry S Truman, with Executive Order 9562 on June 4, 1945. In 1947, however, MG Bull presented a report stating that even the management of civilian consequences of military attack, much less natural disasters, was an individual and local responsibility. . Such a view reflected notably different priorities than the Federal view of active military defense.

The OEP never really existed as an operational agency. With the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear weapon in 1949, Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration by Executive Order in December 1949. In 1951, the Federal Civil Defense Act formalized the organization and authorized a budget. This Administration was not a high-profile agency. Its first Director , Millard F. Caldwell, (1950-1951) was a former Florida governor and congressman. Caldwell, who had been known as a strong segregationist while governor, had his appointment protested, with suggestions he would protect only white Americans. In office, Caldwell had difficulties in working with state and local governments, a necessity for an organization that assumed much of the response was local.

An exception to its visibility came in 1954, while former Governor of Nebraska Val Peterson headed the Administration, and the Soviet Union tested its first thermonuclear weapon. Peterson was vocal that the previous "duck and cover" recommendation was inadequate, and it would be necessary to evacuate major urban targets. Peterson was especially aware of the potential, given that Strategic Air Command headquarters was in Omaha, Nebraska. Evacuation became the new approach, but with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the short warning time, shelters again became the approach of the sixtes. Evacuation drills showed both that cities could not be evacuated quickly, and there were no rural facilities for the population. This lesson, however, seems to have been forgotten in the hurricane evacuation planning for New Orleans.

There may have been a perception that in such an event, the military would be in top command, so the civilian emergency response organizations did not necessarily need professional leadership. President John F. Kennedy established the Office of Civil Defense within the Department of Defense, replacing the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.

Domestic emergency response

As the Cold War ended, the emphasis of the disaster shifted to response to natural disasters and major accidents; the role was to change again after the 9-11 Attacks.

FEMA response and its performance were not seen as a White House concern. Such Hurricane Hugo, hitting South Carolina in 1989, and Hurricane Andrew, affecting Florida in 1992, did cause much political criticism of a perceived poor response.

There was a break with political tradition in 1993, when James Witt was named FEMA director. This was a break because he was the first director with prior professional experience in emergency management. Under Witt, most of the subordinate appointive offices were filled with people with relevant backgrounds; they were not treated as political sinecures.

Post-9/11

It seemed logical to consolidate organizations with a more general emergency management response, but, when the overall DHS budget was concerned, in the event of competition between a terrorism-focused line item and a more general one, terrorism took priority. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had had the capabilities to manage response to three major disasters, which could consist of teams handling geographically distant or otherwise separable aspects of the same event. In DHS, the number of teams were reduced to two, which was a less-known part of the problems in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Given that the damage to the New Orleans area needed a full command team, yet there was equal or greater damage to less densely populated areas in adjacent jurisdictions, there was a problem of ICS/NR resource availability.

FEMA Operations

FEMA-funded/reimbursed assets

One area of success was creating emergency response units, or at least personnel that trained for unit deployment, that normally operated as part of a local government, but was federally-funded and deployable for national and international incidents. The first unit, under Fairfax County, Virginia, was established in 1986, with a specialty in urban search and rescue, including responding o victims trapped in rubble. Initially, it was funded for international response by the US Agency for International Development's Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID-OFDA). Its first deployment was to the 1988 earthquake in Armenia. In 1991, as FEMA refocused from Cold War to domestic disasters, it joined with AID in funding a number of local organizations with world-class capabilities.

In November 2008, it was dispatched to the school collapse in Haiti.

Not only was this unit deployable by FEMA, but internationally, by the Agency for International Development, as was a similar function under the Miami-Dade Fire Department in Florida

Jurisdictional issues

In the U.S., first-line authority is often at the state or local level, with federal involvement requiring a determination and proclamation under the Stafford Act. There is often a hierarchy of separately organized emergency response organization starting at local fire department, with the National Guard normally under the authority of the state governor.

Where a regional ICS program was in place, and mutual aid agreements existed under it, resources could flow smoothly. When a jurisdiction had neither adequate local planning nor preexisting mutual aid pacts, the population suffered. For example, the State of Florida, once a disaster exceeds local capabilities, activates a state-level center at the Joint Command level of the Incident Command System, which manages the dispatch of resources to the various Incident Commandes.