On May 24, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the current Homeland Security appropriations bill for 2012 fiscal year, and cut $1.1 billion from its fiscal 2011 level. It’s the first time the Homeland Security budget has been cut.
Looking inside the budget, there is a miniscule amount available for state and local government to take preventive disaster mitigation measures for their critical infrastructure. Those mitigation steps are intended to make sure buildings are structurally sound in advance of a disaster event.
Surprisingly, money does become available for mitigation once a disaster event occurs, according to Brock Long, an emergency management consultant with Hagerty Consulting, based in Evanston, Ill.
Sections of the budget targeting infrastructure protection include an $840 million joint program for Infrastructure Protection and Information Security, cut back from $859 million last year.
A $50 million Predisaster Mitigation Fund, just $1 million per state, is down from $100 million in 2010.
The funds are offset by a significant increase in the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund. Disaster relief gets $2.65 billion for 2011, a $1.05 billion increase from 2010.
The Federal funding pattern reflects a shift in how emergency managers do mitigation projects, from predisaster mitigation to postdisaster mitigation.
According to Long, local government gets greater access to mitigation funding through FEMA after a disaster in a Presidential declaration than they possibly can before a disaster.
“The predisaster mitigation program is a drop in the bucket compared to the postdisaster mitigation funding,” says Long who until last year was the Director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.
Irrational policy leads to irrational emergency management, according to Seth Stein, a Northwestern University earthquake geologist. Stein’s 2010 book “Disaster Deferred” focuses on government policy related to disaster preparedness for an earthquake on the New Madrid Seismic Zone that spans eight Midwestern states – Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.
“If you’re an emergency management agency how do you keep yourself funded when most years you don’t have a disaster? You could spend your time preparing rationally for disasters,” said Stein, “but that’s nowhere near as exciting” as focusing preparedness on disaster response.
“Exciting” is a function of the media spotlight that comes with a disaster event.
The media judge an emergency manager’s success or failure. 90 percent of an emergency manager’s assessment is rendered in the first 72 hours after a disaster, according to Long, “based on how well they were able to get water, ice and MREs out to the public and in front of cameras.”
Even if more money was available from Federal sources for mitigation projects, as long as it requires a local match then mitigation projects won’t be undertaken “even though there are plenty of them to do,” according to Long.
Again it’s the media playing a role. Its spotlight doesn’t account for mitigation. “How many times have you seen CNN or Fox News go in after a disaster and show buildings that were mitigated pre-event versus post-event?,” Long wonders rhetorically. “They never do. It’s not an exciting story.”
It’s true. “We are going to be assigned to go where the buildings fall down,” says Cheryl Jackson, a freelance CNN reporter and an adjunct instructor at Medill School of Journalism. “I can’t see any reporter doing a live shot in front of a building that survived a disaster.”
