FEMA’s new leader has admitted that the all-important disaster relief agency has not completed its plan for hurricane season, which begins in just two weeks.
The stunning admission was made by David Richardson, who was named the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s interim leader by the Trump administration last week despite having no experience in emergency management.
Richardson told staff in a meeting he was about “80 percent to 85 percent” done with a hurricane season plan that he will give to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That plan is reportedly being drawn up “without the expertise of FEMA staff who are usually responsible for putting it together.” Richardson is an ex-Marine Corps officer who was the assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction at DHS.
The Journal added that FEMA “is already months behind schedule in its preparations for the hurricane season,” which forecasters expect will be busier than usual, like last year. The season’s official start date is June 1, but storm activity in the Atlantic has begun in late May in recent years.
Likely making Richardson’s task more difficult is that 20 percent of FEMA’s staff opted to take a voluntary buyout as part of a staff reduction push by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, sources told CNN last month.
“It’s likely to be a significant brain drain, which impedes our ability to respond,” an anonymous FEMA official told the network at the time.
The staggering number of voluntary exits may be partly thanks to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about FEMA, which he says he will shutter.
Richardson addressed the president’s comments in his most recent staff meeting, the Journal said. In his first FEMA meeting, he warned staff, “Don’t get in my way, I will run right over you.”
Richardson expressed “surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities” in his latest staff meeting, the Journal reported. This raised “concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency.”
“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’” Richardson said, according to a video obtained by the Journal. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves, and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”
FEMA employees sounded the alarm about the agency’s lack of preparedness in an internal review that leaked this week. That document said FEMA processes have “been derailed this year” because of staffing and other issues.
“It has not been normal hurricane season preparedness yet,” the review said.
FEMA is not the only federal agency scrambling ahead of storm season.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which issues critical forecasts about severe weather, including hurricanes, has 155 meteorologist vacancies it needs to fill by May 27, reported The Washington Post. That includes “key weather forecasting positions at offices in coastal Texas and Louisiana, states that could face threats when the Atlantic hurricane season begins.”
Such shortages have forced some National Weather Service offices to cease operating around the clock, which could be deadly if severe weather, like a tornado, unexpectedly strikes in the dead of night. These shortages have NOAA asking forecasters to move to offices that are in the most need, the Post reported.
Budget constraints have slowed hiring at NOAA and forced the NWS to pull back on key forecasting practices, like releasing weather balloons to gather information about incoming storms. Federal meteorologists said the nixing of weather balloons harmed their forecasts during a recent spate of severe storms and tornadoes in the American heartland.
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