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                                                                                DISASTERS, Page 42

Catastrophe 101


Will the government learn from Hurricane Andrew's stormy
aftermath?

By CATHY BOOTH/MIAMI -- With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Homestead
and Ted Gup/Washington


    Hurricanes as wicked as Andrew are thought to come along
perhaps twice a century. Earthquakes shudder on and off, but the
big, continent-cracking convulsions tend to space themselves
out over generations. Biblical floods are rare, like killer
tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and the other cyclical calls to
humility in the face of nature's destructive power. But last
week it somehow seemed that the clock was running fast: Typhoon
Omar menaced Guam, a tornado attacked Wisconsin, fires burned
out of control in California, a four-story tidal wave in
Nicaragua dissolved whole neighborhoods, and the residents of
South Florida spent Week Two picking up the pieces of their
damaged homes and disrupted lives.

    Catastrophes may come by surprise, but it is no surprise
that they come. Their victims cannot expect the government to
prevent them or even always predict them, only to know what to
do when they arrive. But to many Floridians last week, it seemed
as if each time the government has to learn all over again. The
debris that Andrew left behind include a whole set of
assumptions about how to handle a natural disaster, who should
be giving the orders and who should pick up the bill.

    "I'm sure people can take issue with the way we've acted,"
said Colonel Terrence ("Rock") Salt, tears welling up in his
eyes after a week of frustration and sleepless nights. "These
people have been rained on, they're hungry and they're thirsty.
In terms of people without basic survival things, I've never
seen anything like it in my life. But we're really trying,
really we are." Ten days after Andrew struck, the army's tent
cities finally opened and relief supplies were so plentiful that
residents became choosy, disdaining cans of lentils and
demanding Tide over Cheer. By then it was safe to launch the
debate about what needs to change so that next time, the help
is there as soon as the storm has passed.

    One plump target was the tradition of civilian control of
the military. If only the bureaucrats had stayed out of the
way, victims complained, the soldiers might have got the job
done. As upwards of 20,000 troops flooded into what Dade County
officials call the war zone, the army had clearly won new allies
-- unlike the haggard representatives of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency. Soldiers bivouacked on the ground, sharing
prepackaged MRES (meals ready to eat) and carrying groceries for
tired refugees. Day and night, they put up tents, folded linens
and stuffed welcome packages of toiletries for tent cities that
will eventually house 17,000 of the county's 250,000 homeless.
They also helped channel the extraordinary outpouring of
supplies sent south by churches, charities and countless
concerned citizens.

    The energy and efficiency of the troops were in such
contrast to the first sluggish response that the idea was
revived of automatically bypassing civil authorities in the case
of big catastrophes and sending for the soldiers immediately.
"Neither the locals nor FEMA has the capacity to deal with a
major catastrophe like Andrew," argues Linda Lombard, the
Charleston County councilwoman who battled FEMA for relief money
after Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989. "A major disaster is a
war. And the people who are in that business are the U.S.
military. When is the lesson going to be learned?"

    President George Bush indicated that he had already
learned at least half the lesson. His decision to send Secretary
of Transportation Andrew Card to Florida to mastermind relief
efforts suggested that even he didn't think FEMA was up to the
job. Florida's senior Senator urges a rethinking of military
involvement. "In the post-cold war era, this could be an
important new function for the military," says Democrat Bob
Graham, "not something done after hours, but as an ongoing
significant part of the military task."

    Congressman Dante Fascell argues that an advance agreement
should make military mobilization automatic when a hurricane
kicks into a category 4 or 5 with winds over 130 mph. Governor
Lawton Chiles incorrectly thought the disaster declaration,
signed by Bush on the day of the storm, was the same as a
request for military help. Nobody at FEMA advised him otherwise
or nudged the White House when the reality of the damage finally
sank in. "I don't think it's wise to declare martial law," says
Fascell, "but when we know we have a catastrophe headed our way,
we should have a highly visible disaster czar with a definite
command structure to deal with it early on, and obviously that's
the military."

    Yet without declaring martial law, even the military
cannot impose its will on a civilian area. Unlike Desert Storm,
there is no unified command, no General Norman Schwarzkopf. The
Army, for instance, promised to have tent cities for 20,000 up
and running by the first weekend after Andrew. But for the next
week military and local jurisdictions quarreled over sites,
facilities, building codes and, in the case of Florida City --
a city virtually wiped out by the hurricane -- a federal demand
to kick in 10% of the cost.

    Not everyone is thrilled with the Army's increasing
involvement. "There are legitimate worries about military
intervention in domestic affairs," says Ralph Lewis,
disaster-response expert at Florida International University.
At one shelter in predominantly black Richmond Heights, the
soldiers seemed more interested in raising the flag while
exhausted Red Cross volunteers struggled to feed 6,000 people
a day. "I'm trying to use the military as much, but they like
to do things their own way," sighed music teacher Thomas Moore,
29, the Red Cross volunteer in charge of the shelter. "It's true
the Red Cross is disorganized, but who else is going to take
care of these people?"

    Certainly not FEMA. Established by Jimmy Carter to
coordinate the relief efforts of 27 federal agencies and the Red
Cross, it was never meant to be a disaster-response team. One
scathing congressional report notes that the agency is widely
viewed as a political dumping ground, "a turkey farm if you
will." Bush left the agency politically orphaned when he failed
to appoint a new director for almost a year after his 1988
election. During that time survivors of Hurricane Hugo and the
San Francisco earthquake blasted the agency for arriving late
and gumming up assistance efforts with red tape.

    FEMA has handled 160 disaster missions in the past five
years. When it functions like an insurance agency, doling out
grants up to $11,500 for hard-up families, it works marvels. But
at the moment of crisis, the agency sometimes lacks even common
sense. A relocation-assistance center for migrant workers, for
instance, was first based at Miami airport, miles from the poor
workers down in Homestead. FEMA's temporary relief centers
along the roadways of south Dade are labeled simply DAC: nothing
else, no clue to the befuddled homeowner that these are disaster
assistance centers.

    A delegation of Hurricane Hugo veterans from Charleston
has already warned Dade County officials that the worst part is
yet to come. "They document you to death. You have to document
every nail on every roof," says Councilwoman Lombard sourly. "We
had 600 miles of ditch to be cleaned. To document it, we had to
walk it. Dade's got 200 miles of canals. Rest assured that FEMA
will make them swim it to document it." Though Bush promised
total reimbursement for storm cleanup efforts, the island city
of Key Biscayne is already squabbling with FEMA about
reimbursement for early debris removal.

    Secretary Card is one of those who argue that it is FEMA,
not the military, that needs to be doing a better job. "The
military is not necessarily the best first response," he said.
"But FEMA is much too bureaucratic. We need a more streamlined
response that addresses people's concerns more than governmental
concerns. People don't understand a DAC or an ERP, EST, DFOS.
People at FEMA should be trained in the needs of victims so that
if not empathy, they feel sympathy before they get here."

    Faced by multiple simultaneous crises last week, the tiny
federal agency and its 2,500 employees bristled at all the
criticism over the Florida effort. "I can't tell you how much
this annoys me," FEMA director Wallace Stickney wrote to
employees in a memo last week praising them for a "great job."
FEMA official Grant Peterson, sweat dripping from his brow after
a visit to Capitol Hill, groused about the bad press. "We've got
five disasters on our plate right now," he said. "If there is
any morale problem here, it's because people are taking unfair
shots at us."

    One FEMA official, observing the magnitude of Hurricane
Andrew's destructive force and the governmental disorder it
caused, had an even gloomier thought. He wondered how Washington
ever imagined FEMA could handle its ultimate disaster
assignment: preserving the civilian government in a nuclear war.
For FEMA, and indeed for the entire government, Andrew has
provided an unwelcome lesson, one in humility.