Melissa Golden/Redux Pictures

Sensible, that shirt. So sensible. Nerdy, yes. But Craig Fugate's button-down does its job in about five separate ways. The billowing apron of big-and-tall sailcloth, large and simple choices. A wide man, one of many in a wide office connected to a Holiday Inn just blocks from the White House. But the shirt also bears the guy's what-for stitched directly on one breast: W. CRAIG FUGATE, FEMA ADMINISTRATOR. And there's a modest version of the FEMA logo stitched on the other. It might as well be Lowe's or Sam's Club — he'd kill that job, too, study the problem of it and reinvent the place modestly and swiftly. Especially when things got busy, really busy, as they did this year at FEMA, with a record eighty-seven disaster declarations — tsunamis, mudslides, murderous tornadoes, coastal hurricanes, wandering tropical storms — through the start of fall. A record. (The previous high? Eighty-one, in 2010.) Fugate would lean into the problem of being busy, of being in demand, so far as he can, which is to say pretty damned far — further than anyone thought post-Katrina FEMA could, that's for sure — while staying tracked on the task, remaining immune to the whining defunding threats by the gesticulating dummies on the C-SPAN feed, and running the best and most responsive big-box department store in the rotting strip mall that is our federal government. That guy, the one with his name on his shirt, he could do it, show which way was up, tell people to use the leg up they already have, to look out for the people around them. In 2011, the busiest year ever for emergency management, Craig Fugate has proven that maybe we can save ourselves.

The offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency are, at different times and in various modes of response, peopled by labeled blazers and vests for the purpose of identifying the personnel from across a room: Coast Guard liaisons, utilities coordinators, construction-mitigation officers. Personnel must be known by the services they will perform. They must be labeled. But Fugate, he's the boss, and it's unlikely anyone doesn't know him. In the almost three years since his appointment as a vaguely across-the-aisle pick by President Obama (Fugate worked as state emergency director for Jeb Bush in Florida), he has quietly reasserted FEMA's primacy as the central response-and-recovery program for disasters. This required shaking off the legacy of its previous incarnation, which bungled the recovery effort in New Orleans so badly that agents were discouraged from wearing FEMA jackets and vests in public lest they become targets of an angry mob.

Today Fugate is known. He has the ear of the president and of congressional leaders and has piped in some hard-won functional wisdom directly to the American public in places like Joplin and Tuscaloosa. His first job always seems to be recalibrating expectation. He isn't trying to save people. "In most disasters, we aren't responding so much as working on recovery," he says. "We're the federal government. We aren't that fast. We aren't built that way. We give warnings. We try to be sure people hear them. But if we try to get there 'in time' every time, we will fail. The reality is that the person who's most likely to save you in a disaster is not a federal worker, it's your neighbor. That's why I don't call anyone disaster victims. I call them survivors. It takes a hell of a lot more to survive a disaster than it does to respond to one."

Pens and pencils protrude from the breast pocket. His. Well used. It's not a uniform, not in the sense that anyone else at FEMA wears a shirt like this. Only Fugate does. He likes clarity without pomp. Function, not confusion. This is why he fought successfully to change FEMA practices that once required the agency take no action until invited into a disaster by the state in question. Under Fugate, that has become a key change in responding to an upcoming crisis. "I have said from day one, all I need is a boss who listens to me and allows me to respond and who lets me work this way: When we respond, we respond big. We get the trucks on the road. We have states responding to the needs of other states. We don't wait for an invitation. I tell our people: We don't lose time, because that you never get back."

This is Thursday in D. C., after a Redskins — Cowboys game. So there is requisite chitchat. Fugate sits — shoulders a bit fallen, weight compressing the standard-issue desk chair he's rolled to the other side of a conference table — folds his hands across his belly, and ticks off small talk about SEC football, his office fettered with fresh-from-the-den Gator paraphernalia for which he does not apologize. He's heard the morning briefing. FEMA teams are active in flood sites in upstate New York and Vermont, and throughout east Texas, where the wildfires threaten to rage for weeks. Five weeks before this, there was an earthquake felt right here in the FEMA offices.

Fugate has come to Washington from Florida not caring one bit about the Redskins. He checks his watch. Right now, he wants to talk about the flooding in Binghamton, New York. The situation there is three weeks old. Make no mistake, the FEMA chief is a downhill thinker, a man who overprepares for a sentence if he possibly can, the stories, the responses, the situations tumbling out of him — cheek-by-jowl parables of response, consequence piled upon action in an attempt to deconstruct what was missed on first pass.

He's had a lifetime in emergency management: a firefighter and a paramedic and two terms as director of emergency management in Florida, where he is remembered for deploying more than six thousand state workers to the Katrina-stricken Gulf Coast directly after the hurricane struck while the federal government slogged through its clueless paces. Yes, he can tell you plenty. But just now, Craig Fugate, the guy with the sensible shirt, wants to listen. "People always say they don't know how to describe it," he says, when they're talking about a hazard. (That's what Fugate calls disasters: hazards.) "But they do anyway. And part of responding is listening to those stories. Now I tend to concentrate on the consequence rather than the hazard. But I tell our agents, We have to listen." He learned as a paramedic that the patient can tell you more than the instruments can. "So, what did you see in Binghamton?"

Nothing. Not really. Floods are a matter of absence, first absence of space, then absence of spectacle. Afterward the water recedes. Water itself — the culprit, deadly, suffocating, ruinous — goes missing. There is so very little to see. In Binghamton, the water is mostly gone.

But the people who lived through it say the water was loud, churning, and ever-present, pulling them one way then another, lifting everything — every sock and CD, every necktie and candlestick on the first floor — and swirling it into a nasty, indifferent stew that floated above the windowsills. After the flood, there is nothing. Nothing but the soupy piles of a dozen more nothings. Pictures, bills, catalogs that blossom raggedly, dressers that warp into unimaginable and inconsequentially beautiful curls.

Three weeks after the water topped the levies outside Binghamton, the most prevalent reminder of the crisis is the dank smell of the morning, the pale wash of mud on squeegeed sidewalks and stairways, and the fact that everyone has an opinion of FEMA. There's a town-hall meeting tonight. Three weeks out, men are sitting once again on the back of pickup trucks, tossing newspapers at the doorways of businesses downtown. Three weeks after a seventeen-foot crest above flood stage and people are already eager for the consumption of news on the high school football team. This is something.

Through this, teams of FEMA agents walk two by two from house to house, passing out information, explaining and reexplaining their role in the process of recovery, unspooling the process once at each house, then starting over at the next. Sometimes they are met with a kind of ambiguous anger, its target — the flood? their mere presence? — unclear. Sometimes the agents are met with tears — that's just people overwhelmed. Sometimes people say thank you. But because a lot of people don't seem altogether clear on what it is FEMA does, exactly, they make sure they explain themselves quickly. "Mostly," one of the agents says, "we're just pointing them in the right direction. Where do they get the grants, how do they apply for loans. It's just listening otherwise. I just try to be sure they've heard the information they need through. I want them to repeat it back to me before I leave." When you work for Craig Fugate, spreading accurate information is more important than dropping a bag of Band-Aids and bottled water from the sky, which is probably what most people think FEMA does.

Most houses look utterly normal, save a mossy flood line etched against the vinyl siding, five feet from the ground, or eight feet from the garden bed, depending on the lay of the land. By then, many homeowners have pressure-washed the outside of their homes, a neighborly reflex of exterior pride or civility, even as they tear every ounce of Sheetrock, lathe, plaster, and wiring from the inside.

The FEMA agents press deeper into neighborhoods, where one house is ruined and the next is a spectacular skeleton of two-by-fours. They knock, lean in the doorways. They ask if anyone has questions, if everyone there has filed for the need-based FEMA relief packages (capped at $30,200), for the small-business loans (up to $240,000 low-interest refinancing for homeowners). They are met as what they are — federal workers, far from home. Outrage, misapprehension, exhaustion, sometimes sympathy. They get offered iced tea. They go to the next house.

On one block in the town of Vestal, a thirties-era Sears bungalow rests in a quiet collapse, having been pushed off its foundation, its window marked with a spray-painted X in a circle — unsafe to enter. Across the street, a family of four adults has successfully stripped the entire first floor of their house to the studs. A block away, two boys are throwing a Frisbee to a dog. Standing in what remains of their garage, a woman says, "Smells like potatoes, doesn't it? Like really bad potatoes." Her husband is due back any moment. A former Lockheed Martin computer engineer, he'd been out of work for twenty-two months and was starting a new job the day the flood struck. There is a good deal of acknowledging the Lord, and then the husband shows at the end of the driveway. He seems happy to see the FEMA agents. "We got the check," he says. "Tuesday. Two days after you were here." Later, as he tells them about his new job, he makes reference to the check — or to the job, or to the work he is doing now as a youth pastor. "It's not enough," he says. "I mean, it'll get us through. But we have no walls. Winter is coming. We had a fireplace and a flat-screen right here. This was a cozy place."

Next door, a black man talks about how he almost got sucked under his own house on the night of the flood. "Right through the window," he says. "Wanted to pull me in, wanted to, but I wouldn't let it." He needs beds, he says, but he's not taking any FEMA money. "There are people need it worse than I do," he says, pointing a finger vaguely at his neighborhood. The FEMA agent explains that his taking money doesn't mean there will be less for others. Information, information. But it does not sink in. He talks instead about the sound of his house being pulled into the hole that his basement became.

Across the street, a man working on his house in solitude has scrawled a puzzling sign in his living-room window: "Am I a RICH man?" A simple enough question, though the answer seems to mean nothing in the wake of the flood. When the agents approach, he quietly looks up and says, with his teeth unclenched, "Don't even think about stepping on my property. Just stay back and I'll leave you alone." In his fingers, there is a wet length of Sheetrock and a broken coffee cup. They are nothing like weapons, except in the way he holds them. Here, in this yard, they have found him: the man Craig Fugate most needs to reach, the man whose opinion of the agency was ruined by Michael D. Brown — "Brownie," as George W. Bush used to call him. The man who thinks FEMA is there to screw things up.

The agents keep their distance but call out reminders of the loan-application deadlines. "Even if you don't take it, it's better to hit the deadline," a woman tells him, with friendly encouragement in her voice. He turns back to the sag of his living room and walks away.

Philip Scott Andrews/New York Times/Redux; Hans Pennink/AP Images; Doug Mills/New York Times/Redux

From the aspect of consequence rather than hazard, all disasters are somewhat the same. FEMA

is looked at initially as a vague means of salvation, then disappointment follows. There is no salvation in ruination. The funding is limited and the agency's function circumscribed. In the end, people must protect themselves — that is a fact of being human, not some bureaucratic rationalization. Or it's both. Everyone, every survivor in Binghamton, in Vestal, in Endicott, New York, relates this much: You have to protect yourself. Everyone seems to understand that this is their responsibility. "There's a lot of reminding in this job," Fugate says. "This is why we must speak clearly. The jargon of government becomes a kind of secret-society lingo. We think we talk in plain English, but even if it's English, it doesn't necessarily explain things to people. One of the things we hadn't done well was to engage the public in two-way conversations."

He spends his days worrying about getting people in the field. All office personnel are encouraged to work disaster sites now. "These are people who've been working at computers for two decades. Now they're out there slogging around, using latrines," he says. "The thing is, they got into this to help people, and they've wanted to go out to the hazard sites. No one asked them until now." Fugate did. Not because they know CPR or how to haul a trailer out of the mud, but because they are experts. Experts on FEMA and what it has to offer. Yes, FEMA gets the trailer-haulers and the EMTs and all of that to where they're needed, too. Of course it does. But that door-to-door work is what's changing the agency.

Pushing more agents into the field to increase responsiveness, working to express clearer, more useful warnings to broader swaths of the public, creating strategies for more rapid involvement of FEMA energies in preparation for the coming crisis — these are not revolutionary management techniques. "Yes, but they are techniques," says Mississippi emergency-management director Mike Womack. "And Craig is a really excellent manager, which is worth a lot. A lot. But he's an excellent strategist; he likes an unsolvable puzzle because he can solve it. The trouble isn't what was wrong with FEMA. That was easy for him — he ran Florida so well for so long. The trouble is always something you can't see. Two things happening at once. Like the events of this year, when things pile up. The truth is, Craig has handled it as if it weren't the worst year on record, and let me tell you, it was. It still is."

Fugate writes off the failures represented by the federal and state response to Katrina, although he was critical of it at the time, when he was heading up Florida. "You know, Katrina was not a failure of FEMA so much as a failure of the whole system," he says. "I can honestly say we were underfunded and understaffed. That's not the issue any longer."

Fugate would never suggest that he has reinvented FEMA. But it seems vital enough now that it's hard not to reflect on how, in the aftermath of Katrina, members of Congress sought to turn emergency response back over to the states. It's even less comprehensible that the current Congress has more than once put the existence of FEMA into funding peril, potentially bargain-chipping it into oblivion. Shortly before he sat down to be interviewed for this story, Republicans in Congress were threatening to hold up replenishing FEMA's funding — money that would help people whose homes had been washed away by Hurricane Irene — unless Democrats could cut the same amount of money from elsewhere in the budget.

Fugate refuses comment on that stuff. He can't worry about it until it happens. He focuses instead on the business at hand. "The biggest challenge is not the bad thing that occurs with some frequency. That's a rather simplified response. The events that are high consequences and low frequency are our biggest challenges. That takes a lot of imagination."

And what he imagines is a country in which no disaster victim sits around waiting for a FEMA check or a FEMA trailer or a FEMA representative going door to door. "Truth is, we aren't the only ones thinking that the federal government isn't particularly suited to creative responses. Getting the public to consider their own responses, even briefly, to the emergencies that might come down the road — that's where we'll save money and lives," he says.

He never moves inside that shirt. Not significantly, not until the very end of the conversation, when he leans into the table and says, "I was a paramedic. That's where it began for me. That gave me a pretty basic sense of fundamental responses, to trust myself to use them. Every situation is different, but the basic plays are pretty simple. And as a paramedic, I was just one person with a set of plays."

Pulling people out of holes, from under the roofs of collapsed motels, from inside flipped cars — these are all plays of a sort. "But in an extreme hazard, the government won't be there for any of that. We can't be everywhere. We're going to have a power grid to get back in place or something on that scale. That's the best place for our energy. We're a federal agency, we're not adept enough to pull people out of every wreck at the very moment they'll need us. If we spent every dollar there was, it would not be so." And it becomes clear that the label sewn into his shirt — administrator — is both unnecessary and essential, because it reminds him and everyone else of what he is and what he does. He does not parachute in and dam the floodwaters and dig tornado bunkers. He makes sure that the people who do the real work of emergency recovery — that would be the American people — have everything they need. He knows that if he doesn't show up to make sure they have everything they need, a man might be left standing in his front yard clutching a handful of soggy drywall and a broken coffee cup. And Fugate has the sense to know that if you can do something to help that man, you have to at least try.

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