David Alexander's message is very welcome.  He reinforces my own central message which was not that FEMA ever was a "world leader," but that at a time in the recent past, FEMA was part of an international process of co-learning.  Just as the Italians, according to David, learned from FEMA in 1989, FEMA in the Eighties and early Ninties learned from other country experiences.  For example, a fire chief from the Los Angeles Fire Department went as an observer to Mexico City during the immediate response phase of the 1985 earthquake.  He brought back to the U.S. the seed of the idea of citizen based response, and that grew into the present day system based on a 18 hour course taught on weekends to lay people in such areas as light search and rescue, first aid, communications, fire suppression, etc.  It is referred to in this form as Citzen Emergency Response Training (CERT).

One -- but only one -- aspect of FEMA's decline under Homeland Security has been to cut off the two way flow of good practices and ideas between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Ben Wisner
Oberlin, Ohio
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-----Original Message-----
From: David Alexander <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sep 13, 2005 2:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FEMA's current status

Dear All,
Ben Wisner makes the point that, reduced in status by the Bush administration, FEMA may be in danger of losing its role as an international leader in emergency management, and that other countries' disaster preparedness services may be overtaking it.

That has not happened only in the last four years. In 1989 Elvezio Galanti of the Italian Ministry of Civil Protection visited the scene of the Loma Prieta earthquake to observe FEMA in action. He took FEMA's support function concept home with him and developed it into an entire national system of emergency management. Using legislation, incentives and some canny subterfuge he induced the 8104 municipalities, 109 provinces and 20 regions of Italy to adopt it. The result is an excellent system that is much more comprehensive, clear and robust than its US prototype. It is backed by a volunteer emergency management system that is 771 years old (it was founded in Florence in AD 1234), and has evolved to be very finely attuned to national needs. The Italian model of national civil protection organisation is functional enough to have provided, by EU directive the model for the whole of Community Europe. It has no equivalent in the USA. Moreover, further up the road in Germany, the volunteer rescue service Technisches HilfWerk has 670 branches and over a million participants. There is no US equivalent, and nor is there a European tradition of relying on a National Guard to do the field work, which Europeans would tend to regard as confusing one role with another.

The morals of the story are that (a) US emergency management has only ever been good in part (study the local level and huge gaps in strategic places are immediately evident) and (b) an emergency management system developed for a federal republic is not necessarily appropriate to any other kind of state, nor for a confederation of states, as in Europe.

The FEMA question compels me to make a plea for a sense of perspective. While it is clear that the New Orleans disaster was appallingly badly managed at all levels, on the positive side there are still many good things about FEMA. On the negative side, there seems to have been a tendency to exaggerate certain of the worst, most symbolic aspects of the current crisis, which does not help us to make sound moral arguments. The modern propheteer loves the breakdown of law and order, which has enormous symbolic value as a potential doomsday scenario. It is curious how this aspect has nourished the ardour of both left wing and right wing theorists. A visitor from another planet who read the US and British press would be left wondering whether it was the welfare state that caused this disaster or the lack of one. At least it is clear that, once the natural landscape had been altered in the Gulf, disaster would inevitably be a function of Human Nature.

Certainly it is cause for profound meditation when we get to the point that Bangladesh offers relief money to the United States.

David Alexander
University of Florence