Good Move
From an editorial to be printed in tomorrow’s St. Petersburg Times: Strong choice to lead FEMA
President Obama avoided one of the most egregious mistakes of his predecessor Wednesday by naming Craig Fugate, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Unlike President Bush, Obama has chosen experience and competence over political connections to lead the national response to hurricanes and other emergencies. Florida’s loss will be the nation’s gain.
Fugate knows his stuff and has managed everything from wildfires to major hurricanes for the last 7 years. Now Florida has to worry about who will replace him, especially if he starts hiring some of his current staff. He will need people with experience in earthquakes, volcanoes, and Western wildfires, but he has done just about everything else. We may not do anything else right, but the state knows disasters.
6 comments
Our State knows disasters, too….just take a look at our current Governator.
cookie jill´s last blog post..skippy’s wednesday nite music club
Least you forget, I was once represented by Duke Cunningham and then, Joe Scarborough.
…I’ve never understood the failures of FEMA (or maybe I actually do). State and Federal land management agencies have for decades been able to use a team of 20 – 30 people to magically make a couple thousand people, all of the food and shower units and kitchen units necessary to feed them, communication equipment, vehicles, porta-potties, vehicles, medical support, helicopters, and a mind-numbing list of things big and little appear magically in the middle of nowhere to fight forest fires. Some of FEMA’s failures have been during disasters of a far larger scale than the average forest fire, but FEMA has far more resources directly assigned to the whole idea of ’emergency management’ than does the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Park Service, state forestry departments, and others who contribute employees (many of whom have other jobs) to these interagency Incident Management Teams…
I guess what I have never understood is why FEMA has been so resistant to adopt an incident management system like this for its response to emergencies…
I think that was where Witt was going until 2000, because FEMA under Clinton was a fairly effective operation. Witt has been working with a county based system in Florida because of the structure of the state, but he has the chops, except in the emergencies of the West.
Florida is flat, so fires get spotted early and don’t grow to the size of Western fires, and we don’t have earthquakes or volcanoes, so he needs to add that capability. He is a very organized guy and tend to adopt to what works from event to event.
We’ll have to see how it works out.
OT Rachael Scdoris has signed up for the Iditarod again. It starts this weekend.
Fugate is a great choice and as you say he has seen everything but earthquakes and mudslides in his time in Florida. It is about time someone was in charge of FEMA that actually knows something about emergency management.
fallenmonk´s last blog post..Something Good
They have an administrator, now we wait to see if he gets anything to work with after the Hedgemony. There’s a lot of “old business” from 2004 and afterwards that needs to be settled.