The man in charge of disaster relief under President George H.W. Bush spoke to students Tuesday on the U.S. Government's experience in the field.
Wallace Stickney, Bush Sr.'s director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), led an informal discussion of about 20 students, mostly engineers or members of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the group that brought Stickney to campus.
During his tenure at FEMA, Stickney signed the first integrated federal emergency response plan and directed response and recovery activities for multiple disasters.
"The goal here this evening is to talk about emergency efforts and how we got to where we are," he said in the ASEAN Auditorium.
Stickney detailed the history of disaster management in the United States. Some local programs began in the 1930s. Federal programs then began to emerge, including the Federal Insurance Administration, the Fire Protection and Control Administration and the Federal Weather Service.
The Office of Civilian Defense started during World War II. "All of this legislation was occasioned by disaster," Stickney said.
The Office went through over a dozen name changes before it became FEMA in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter combined the national agencies.
During his tenure at FEMA, Stickney said, the agency was only beginning to act as a single agency. "One of challenges with dealing with any sort of public policy is you have to deal with the ineffective parts as well as the effective parts," he said.
The first year he served in government, emergency response functioned in a two-pronged system. The first dealt with natural disaster, and the other dealt with response to national emergencies. The second part made up 80 percent of the relief and was totally secret, he said.
According to Stickney, there were six locations around the country with highly-equipped communication capabilities. If the United States was in extreme danger, each region would take directors, go into a cave and run the government from there.
Every state has its own emergency relief plan in addition to the federal emergency relief plan, and states are most important in organizing relief. "If there is a natural disaster or terrorist activity, the first people that are going to show up are the local fire department," he said. "Washington won't come until much later."
The Somerville Fire Department responds to about 12,000 emergencies per year, he said, and local relief systems only ask for help if the situation is beyond their control. "If the event overcomes the resources of a state, that is the point a governor asks the President to declare a natural disaster," he said.
He said dealing with the media was also important in disaster relief work. "If you can make people believe that you're doing well, then you're doing well," he said. "Once they think you're not doing well, it's hard to convince them otherwise."
Stickney answered questions from students on the assessment of damage after a disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, he said, emergency relief officials failed in many respects. Hospitals in Louisiana knew a large scale emergency was likely but did not prepare their facilities well enough, he said.
"Mother Nature is not a terrorist, by any means, but the power of Mother Nature, as we have seen over the past year, is stupendous," he said. "So how do we deal with it? We make plans."
