Organizations are tools; their masters need not use them for their nominal ends. The focus of FEMA under President Clinton was natural disaster emergency relief, and preparedness. Under the Bush administration the focus was shifted to combating terrorism, and disaster relief capabilities decayed. That left us unprepared for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This unpreparedness led to the massive organizational failures we have been treated to by a shocked media.

Following Katrina, for days air conditioned trucks with no supplies drove aimlessly past “refugees” who were without water or food or protection from the sun. Reporters came and went, but food and water and medical supplies did not (Staff 2005b). The Red Cross was not allowed to deliver goods because it might discourage evacuation (American 2005). Evacuation by air was slowed to a crawl because FEMA said that post 9/11 security procedures required a (prolonged) search for more than 50 federal air marshals to ride the airplanes, and to find security screeners. At the gates, inadequate electric power for the detectors held things up until officials relented and allowed time consuming searches by hand of desperate and exhausted people (Block et al. 2005). Their only food, emergency rations in metal cans, was confiscated because it was thought that cans might contain explosives (Bradshaw and Slonsky 2005). Volunteer physicians watched helplessly; FEMA did not allow them to help because they had not been licensed in the state (Tierney 2005). Without functioning fax machines to send the required request forms, FEMA would not send help that local officials begged for. Perhaps a fifth of the New Orleans police force simply quit, exhausted and discouraged, under fire from looters, or themselves looting. A large National Guard force hid behind locked doors in the convention center, saying they were unprepared to help. A Navy ship idled off-shore, waiting for days to be called. Almost five days after Rita struck, at least one severely damaged Texas town remained without any outside help, out of power, water and food, with an alerted TV camera crew being the first to arrive. And so on.

Did these failures reflect what have been called “prosaic” organizational failures such as all organizations are likely to have in times of stress? Were the organizations simply overcome by an unprecedented challenge? Or had the resources for meeting natural disasters decayed or been diverted towards terrorist disasters? If it was the latter, decay and diversion, we will have to explain why relief organizations other than FEMA also failed.

The failures involved government agencies and the military at all levels, not just FEMA. But FEMA was the organization most responsible for disaster response. What happened to it? It seemed to have performed reasonably well the previous year when four hurricanes struck Florida (though there were charges of gross mismanagement in the dispersal of funds). A review of its history is not encouraging, and will offer some possible explanations for its failures in 2005.