Recommendation #9 to FEMA: Promote a whole community approach

Presenter: The FEMA Review Council wrapped up its work with 10 recommendations for transforming the agency. Today we’re looking at Recommendation #9: ‘The transformed agency should promote a whole community approach to national preparedness.’  At the White House May 7, a member of the FEMA Review Council and former acting FEMA Administrator Bob Fenton:

Bob Fenton (FEMA, regional administrator): I have the next recommendation, #9: ‘Revitalizing a unified national network for partnerships.’ When we talk about responding to disasters, it’s really a whole community approach.

And there’s a number of critical members beyond government that need to be integrated into this. And that is private sector, faith-based groups, nonprofit organizations across the country.

Our recommendations are return to an integrated network that leverages the strengths from all these sectors. American Red Cross, Team Rubicon: How do we integrate those and Americans that want to help into these disasters?

We need to build that capacity at all levels of government so that they have a way to help. We need to enhance public-private coordination. National Business Emergency Operations Centers at the federal level, the state level, the local level, so we can integrate private sector.

Private sector is responsible for so much in disasters and they own so much of the infrastructure or key capabilities that we depend on. And so we need to be able to leverage those retailers, those small businesses, and we need to give them a way to integrate into these events.

And then finally, we need to leverage technology so we have a shared situational awareness.

Presenter: The FEMA Review Council’s Final Report recommends ‘returning to a network that enables government, private industry, faith-based, and nonprofit partners to build toward shared capabilities and integrated resources. This formalizes and streamlines coordination between government agencies, critical private-sector partners, and nonprofit organizations.’ FEMA Review Council vice chair, the former governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant: 

Phil Bryant (Mississippi, former governor): Our North Star was simple. How do we respond to a disaster at a federal level? First, we recognize that it’s locally executed. It’s locally executed. It’s state-managed. It may be state-managed, tribally managed, territorially managed, but locally executed and federally supported. 

That was our North Star: Return leadership of emergency response and recovery to the states and to the tribes and to the territories. Nothing can be more important than empowering the states to take on this responsibility.

Reaffirm that individual American preparedness is the foundation for disaster readiness. Individual preparedness. Have your plan. We need to get back to those ideas. 

I remember as a child, when people had their own fallout shelters in their backyards. If they didn’t, they knew where the closest fallout shelter was. We took responsibility for food and water and to be able to respond to those disasters.

Presenter: A FEMA Review Council member, the executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Kevin Guthrie:

Kevin Guthrie (Florida Division of Emergency Management, executive director): FEMA should focus on setting the standard. We want FEMA to set the standard and then encourage creation of standards and then adoption of standards at the state, local, tribal, territorial level. 

We should incentivize building scalable, trainable resources. Our college and university systems are eager to get involved and help this process.

We should professionalize emergency management via professional certificate and development of that certificate. We should set a standard to catastrophic planning and exercise.

Currently, there is a limited ability to share and coordinate resources. Our urban search and rescue team is a methodology of where we have done a really, really great job of getting resources out the door. FEMA doesn’t own any of those 28 urban search and rescue teams. All 28 of those are owned at the local level, locally executed through a state-managed, federally supported program.

So we call on the implementation group that’s going to do this: Let’s enhance that. Let’s see how we can take that model and take it forward. Can we do that for recovery? Can we do that for mitigation?

The people who are doing this are at the state and local level, let’s figure out how to take that model and move it over and enhance that Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) resource; revitalize, expand, promote the unified resource catalog that is a part of FEMA already.

Let’s refocus grant investment on mission-ready teams, capacities, and infrastructure, not on sustainment. That goes back up to the mitigation and recovery piece of that.

Promote the integration of additional partners involving our volunteer and faith-based networks. We talk about them, but we don’t really, I believe proactively before the disaster ever happens, how can we take and make them a part of that?

Let me give you a very, very classic example. Private property debris removal. Not covered by the federal government, but in Florida, what we do, we work with our nonprofits to let them go on that private property, get that debris to the edge of the roadway where now we have the legal jurisdiction to go in and take care of that.

How can we do more of that before the disaster ever happens? And then incentivize investments in interoperable systems for comms and data sharing?

Presenter: Members of the FEMA Review Council share their overall approach as we take a close look at Recommendation #9, promoting a whole community approach to national preparedness.  One member of the Council encourages you to read the report for yourself. Kevin Guthrie:

Kevin Guthrie (Florida Division of Emergency Management, executive director): Read the report. Don’t read the executive brief. Get into it and read the report. So there’s over 150 recommendations, or, I shouldn’t say recommendations, actions. 

Presenter: The FEMA Review Council’s final report is available through our news website, KEPW-WholeCommunity.News.