You may have seen mention of the "Hurricane Pam" exercise in press coverage of Louisiana's emergency preparedness, or lack thereof. I used to work for IEM and was at the Hurricane Pam exercise, and I think maybe I can clear a few things up.
As with most IEM projects, the Hurricane Pam exercise was put together at the last minute, in a blind animal panic with no time for refinement, testing, or subtlety, but it still was a remarkable and bold idea.
(Originally blogged at http://suspect-device.blogspot.com)
First, let's get one simple one out of the way:
Ivor Van Heerden of the LSU Hurricane Center had nothing to do with the conception or execution of the Hurricane Pam exercise. In fact, the participation of the Center was limited to presenting the same tired computer animation they've been trotting out to all the networks, and arguing with the data and assumptions provided by
Innovative Emergency Management, my former employers and the company that designed and facilitated the exercise, at the behest of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, and with the cooperation of FEMA. I don't know if Ivor is playing the media or if the media is simply enchanted by Ivor's hair, but he didn't do dick except piss people off.
Hurricane Pam was a week-long simulation (not a tabletop exercise) with a difference: while response to the fictional Hurricane Pam, a slow-moving category three storm making steady progress up the Mississippi and landing just to the west of New Orleans, was the designated activity, the purpose of the exercise was to create a series of plans and recommendations which would be presented to the State of Louisiana and adopted as the official Hurricane Response Plan.
Attendees included emergency managers from all across Louisiana, representatives from the EPA, the National Guard, the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the DOTD, the Red Cross (who I remember as being marginalized and tolerated at best, with more than a little eye rolling from the "professionals"), the State Police, and many others. Also taking on important roles were representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA, who provided facilitators, computers, and a great deal of support.
Here's how it worked: Daily information regarding the progress of the Hurricane was distributed in the form of briefings, presentations, and maps. Details of wind damage, flooding, displaced populations, communication outages, and much more, was available through handouts and detailed maps. Participants were divided into small groups with a single (albeit sometimes multi-faceted) issue to tackle: Search and Rescue, Power & Water & Ice, Dewatering, First Aid, Evacuations, etc. There was cross-communication between rooms, and persons with particular expertise would often be called in to provide detail. Notes were taken and a draft plan was created and presented to the Command Committee (or whatever it was called) at the end of each day, with a final plan presented at the end of the week.
Now. There has been considerable talk in the press about this exercise being one of the instances of experts admitting that the NOLA levees could be breached. This is true, but only to this extent: there was uniform agreement that water would overflow the NOLA levees or migrate around gaps in the St. Charles Parish levees, but I heard no serious or sustained talk about levees breaking. In fact, one of the first priorities of the dewatering teams was to blow (they preferred "open") the levee drain gates in order to send the accumulated toxic soup down into the gulf. (the EPA was okay with this, according to their rep -- really, what choice would they have?) Reps from NOLA held that they could begin pumping water out of the city within two to five days and could complete pumping within a few weeks (remember, this was assuming that the levees were holding and that water could be drained out through them). This was also assuming major flooding, perhaps even worse than what we've seen with Katrina.
There was a certain amount of contention, a few turf wars, some loud talk. None if it consequential, in the end, because of the single greatest emollient: FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency promised the moon and the stars. They promised to have 1,000,000 bottles of water per day coming into affected areas within 48 hours. They promised massive prestaging with water, ice, medical supplies and generators. Anything that was needed, they would have either in place as the storm hit or ready to move in immediately after. All it would take is a phone call from local officials to the state, who would then call FEMA, and it would be done. There were contracts-in-place with major vendors across the country and prestaging areas were already determined (I'll have more to say about this later, but this is one reason FEMA has rejected large donation and turned back freelance shipments of water, medical supplies, food, etc: they have contracts in place to purchase those items, and accepting the same product from another source could be construed as breach of contract, and could lead to contract cancellation, thus removing a reliable source of product from the pool of available resources. I'm not saying I agree with this -- in fact, I don't, and think it's boneheaded -- but the reasoning is that if they accept five semis of water from the east Weewau, Wisconsin, Chamber of Commerce, the water supplier who is contractually bound to provide 100,000 gallons per day will be freed from that obligation.
The organizers of the exercise -- particularly the former commender of LOHSEP, Col. Michael Brown (not that one) -- insisted that the plans contain no "fairy dust": no magical leaps of supply chains or providers: if you said you would need 500 semis for your part of the plan, you had to specify where the 500 semis were coming from. Everyone tried to keep the fairy dust to a minimum, and they did so, for the most part, despite having big plans: LSU, Southern, Southeastern and other campuses dismissed for the semester and turned into giant triage centers/tent cities; acres of temporary housing built on government-owned land; C-130 transport planes ferrying evacuees to relatives in other states, and so on. Bold plans, but doable, with cooperation. A comprehensive plan was beginning to emerge.
Except that it didn't. A followup conference, to iron out difficulties in some of the individual plans and to formalize presentation of the final package, scheduled for either late '04 or early '05 -- I can't remember and can find no mention of the followup event on the web -- was cancelled at the last minute, due to lack of funding (which agency called the cancellation, I'm not sure, although the lack of funds would take it all back to FEMA, in the end).
So: Louisiana did have a hurricane plan, but was devising a new one, to be based on recommendation from the people who would actually be doing the work. The need to evacuate people from impact areas, including those without transportation or the means to obtain it, was discussed, despite media assertions to the contrary. The possibility of levee overflow was discussed (levee breaching may have been discussed at some point, but I was in the dewatering room, and I never heard it mentioned. A rescue and evacuation plan, including sheltering, was reasonably firm. There were and are officials in Louisiana, including New Orleans Emergency Management, who know the limitations of current planning and who have been trying to come up with a better solution.
The problem is FEMA, and by extension the Department of Homeland Security, which gobbled FEMA up in 2003. FEMA promised more than they could deliver. They cut off deeper, perhaps more meaningful discussion and planning by handing out empty promises. The plans that were made -- which were not given any sort of stamp of authority -- were never distributed or otherwise made available to those who most needed stable guidance; they vanished into the maw of FEMA and LOSHEP (probably when Col. Brown was removed from his command due to financial "irregularities" -- the project was tainted after that). Adoption of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) would have made most of the plans moot anyway -- FEMA's adherence to the untried NIMS is a primary reason for the chaos and ineptitude surrounding their relief efforts.