New facility tracks supply shipments
By BILL WALSH
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
WASHINGTON — A string of 15 electronic red dots stretching on a map from Texas to Massachusetts was beamed on giant plasma screens Thursday at FEMA’s shiny new operation’s center.
Each dot represented a water-stocked tractor-trailer heading to the Northeast in case Tropical Storm Beryl turns toward the coast. Each vehicle was equipped with a transponder so Federal Emergency Management Agency officials in Washington could monitor its progress.
The high-tech tracking system is just one of the improvements made since last year’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. It was part of the $3 million renovation of the National Response Coordination Center -- the federal government’s hurricane nerve headquarters — unveiled Thursday as officials voiced optimism that the new tools will translate into better performance in a crisis.
“We are light years ahead of where we were last year,” FEMA Director R. David Paulison said as he stood in a state-of-the-art conference room where disaster managers can conduct video conferences, get real-time video updates from the field and watch multiple television news channels on wall-sized screens.
Michael Brown, the FEMA director when Katrina made landfall Aug. 29, sounded just as confident in his preparation. He was forced to resign two weeks after the storm when the scope of the federal failure became apparent.
“While I’m happy that FEMA is improving its command center and using new technologies, I don’t want anyone to think that new gadgets alone, however helpful they may be, will fix the real problems of that troubled agency,” Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said. “Progress with FEMA will ultimately be measured in stable leadership, command and competence — not just new buttons and blinking lights.”
The most obvious technological enhancement at the response center, housed inside FEMA headquarters a few blocks from Capitol Hill, is the ability to track commodities.
In the wake of Katrina, FEMA had little idea where food, water and ice were needed or whether shipments had arrived. One truck driver who claimed to have made a delivery was later found asleep in a parking lot while New Orleans received tons of unneeded ice based on false reports that 10,000 bodies would be found in the flood.
This year, FEMA will be able to outfit about 2,000 tractor-trailers with transponders that use satellite signals to update the location of their loads every 30 minutes.
“We have great visibility on all of our FEMA assets,” said Mary Anne Lyle, manager of the response center. “Last year, we ran like a little airline and we used markers.”
During a hurricane, Lyle, a 19-year FEMA employee will coordinate the activity from behind a bank of large, flat-screen computers that can simultaneously track the storm, the response and press coverage.
She will look out over a room of disaster experts from more than a dozen federal agencies — including health, defense and transportation — coordinating their own slices of the response from high-tech workstations. Once housed in their own offices around Washington, the new center puts them in seats next to each other.
“Now you can lean over your little cubicle wall and say, ‘Where do you want these buses to go?’ ” said Aaron Walker, a FEMA spokesman. “This whole floor is designed to cut down on response time and make quicker decisions with better information.”
Another innovation will be sending video-equipped FEMA teams to the heart of a disaster zone to send back to the response center real-time images of the event. Congressional investigations found that during Katrina, Washington received reports of levee breaches in New Orleans from a FEMA staffer but didn’t respond because those reports couldn’t be confirmed.
One of Brown’s most embarrassing moments came when he acknowledged not knowing that thousands of New Orleans flood victims had taken up shelter at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, which had no food, water or electricity. Media had been reporting it for a full day.
The abundance of television screens at the newly outfitted National Response Coordination Center suggests that if nothing else this hurricane season, FEMA will be watching the news a lot closer.