New FEMA blueprint seeks to clarify emergency response roles

The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday released a final version of its new National Response Framework, the blueprint for coordinating responses to future emergencies large and small. The document affirms the FEMA administrator's role as the president's principal adviser on emergency management and clarifies the roles of the principal federal official, the federal coordinating officer and the state coordinating officer.

An earlier version of the framework was heavily revised after the agency received thousands of comments from federal, tribal, state and local government officials, as well as the private sector.

"This is not a federal response framework; it is a national response framework designed to operate at all levels of emergency management and to deal with the smallest localized disaster, scalable all the way up to a major national catastrophe," said Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Homeland Security Department, FEMA's parent agency, at a briefing for reporters.

The document aims to lay the groundwork for a unified, coordinated response from all levels of government, something that was woefully absent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It also does away with the term "incident of national significance," a designation that triggered federal participation.

"We recognize that the framework is really an ingredient of all of the disaster response we do, and that we need not wait until some formal legalistic threshold is crossed before we put into effect the lessons that we've learned," Chertoff said.

The framework, along with 23 supporting annexes, can be found at the NRF Resource Center, created by FEMA to provide stakeholders at all levels of government and the private sector access to relevant documents and training materials.

On Feb. 5, FEMA will begin training on the framework and by mid-April will have 24 separate courses on its Web site focused on key elements of emergency response, said agency Administrator David Paulison.

"Starting June 1, I want all the federal family trained, all the federal responders and as many first responders and emergency managers out there, ready to go to understand how we're going to operate in the country before hurricane season," Paulison said.

In a joint statement, Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mary Landrieu, D-La., praised the new framework, but emphasized that it is only the beginning of reforming the nation's disaster response capability. "We still have a lot of work left to do before the federal government moves beyond the planning stage and can respond quickly and effectively to a catastrophic disaster on the scale of hurricanes Katrina and Rita," said Landrieu, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's panel on disaster response.

Daniel Rothschild, associate director of the Katrina recovery research project at the Mercatus Center affiliated with George Mason University, said the framework still falls short.

"When it comes to recovery, the most important thing the federal government can do is make decisions quickly, carry out those decisions and then get out of the way so that local groups, which includes businesses, churches, schools, community groups, volunteer groups, local leaders, can get down to the business of rebuilding," Rothschild said.

The framework fails to recognize that "the most effective responses are those driven by the grass roots and from the ground level up," he said. "For example, the framework talks about a unity of effort through unified command. In a disaster situation like Hurricane Katrina, where the area of land affected is twice the size of the United Kingdom, you're going to have a very difficult time doing that."

"I think what the framework could have done very effectively was to say 'here's what the federal government can do for each of these scenarios,' then not promise more than it's possible for the federal government to deliver," he said. "The framework should not be trying to make the private sector and the nonprofit sector subservient to the federal government in disaster response, which is exactly what the plan tries to do."

The framework undoubtedly will evolve as officials at all levels of government and the private sector gain more experience in future disasters. "I guarantee you there will probably be another version of the National Response Framework in a few years," Chertoff said.