FEMA, Katrina, and operations research: better operations management would have helped FEMA in preparedness and response work before Hurricane Katrina—and still could now

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2008 by Richard Sylves

In the wake of the poor government response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, many questions have been asked about why the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with a host of other federal, state, and local emergency management agencies, performed so ineffectively. What went wrong? What is the future of the agency? How can a recurrence of the Katrina debacle be prevented? This article explores whether FEMA and other disaster management agencies may have overlooked the importance of "operations research" and "operations management" (OM) in preparedness and response work before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

Many investigations followed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in late 2005 through 2006. Communications problems were alleged to be a factor. Poor leadership of FEMA was another claim. Failures of intergovernmental relations, particularly between the president and the governor of Louisiana, were also put forward.

The congressional report, Failure of Initiative, constantly refers to FEMA's problems in maintaining "situational awareness." Might it be that FEMA, when it needed to function as a "machine bureaucracy" in the interest of accelerated response to public needs created by the Katrina catastrophe, did not employ enough managers with the requisite OM skill sets needed for such circumstances? Might it also be that FEMA officials were not prepared to make predisaster arrangements with private contractors and nonprofit organizations on the basis of sound OM principles?

"Operations managers" possess skills and abilities that could help deliver smoother, faster, and more efficient disaster relief.

FEMA and Katrina

Once Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, FEMA faced a disaster of catastrophic proportions. When the levees in New Orleans collapsed, a second catastrophe compounded the problem. Some allege that FEMA simply was not ready for a disaster of Katrina's complexity and magnitude. James Miskel argues that FEMA is capable of handling routine disasters but not catastrophic ones. He contends that no national government agency, regardless of state and local help, could be expected to manage a catastrophe, and he sees Katrina as a catastrophe. Confirming or refuting Miskel's claim is difficult because identifying the threshold that separates "routine" from "catastrophic" disasters is problematic.

After Katrina struck, tens of thousands of people were displaced from their homes, a thousand more were dead, and many needed rescue. FEMA found itself in the national spotlight. The agency, working under its new and largely untested National Response Plan (NRP), could not provide enough relief fast enough for all of the people in need. Examples of FEMA bungling were widespread, many recounted in Douglas Brinkley's extraordinary book The Great Deluge. Communications between FEMA and state and local authorities were inadequate.A major political" blame game" ensued as news media people and a host of elected government officials sought to identify who was responsible for the slowness and defficiencies in government emergency response.

In mid-September 2005, FEMA Director Michael D. Brown resigned from his position, helping to absorb or deflect considerable blame directed at the Bush administration. The reasons for the inadequate intergovernmental response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are many, so laying the blame on one or a handful of government officials is shortsighted. The system by which relief is dispensed in a catastrophic disaster is a major part of the problem.

Operations Management

OM is the part of the business world that focuses on the "process" a firm uses to provide a product or service to the consumer. At its most basic, it is the transformation process that takes raw materials, labor, and capital and turns them into final products or services, adding value for the customer. The goal of OM is to produce a product or a service in the most efficient way.

People like Henry Ford and Eli Whitney conceived and then applied their ideas to a working environment in which efficiency was given primacy. The assembly line and cotton gin are examples of OM thinking. These figures and many others throughout history were simply looking for the cheapest and most efficient way to produce a product.

Although people like Ford and Whitney were not educated in the field of OM, their approaches were perfectly consistent with it. In the early part of the twentieth century, the field began to flourish. OM is consistent with the scientific management approach, widely popular in public administration and the corporate world from the 1920s to the 1950s. The bureaucratic model associated with scientific management has a host of drawbacks, but operations research and management should not be abandoned. In the mid-1900s many in U.S. universities were drawn to the precision, logic, and functionality of operations research.

OM promotes skill sets that apply to many business fields. Inherent is the need to know how to run a business that produces optimal outputs. OM asks managers to gauge capacity planning, which means finding out how much your firm can actually produce and then planning to meet the demand of the consumer. OM also stresses the appropriate management of inventories. Does the firm possess sufficient inventory such that unexpected increases in demand will not cause product shortages or price hikes? Another OM skill set involves scheduling. Is everything where it needs to be at the right time in order to ensure an efficient process? Prepositioning commodities needed in the wake of a disaster is not a one-time task. FEMA, using OM principles, needs to become adroit and dynamic in identifying optimal locations and in monitoring available commodity inventories, particularly as they are drawn down by the big and small disaster responses they supply.