Former FEMA director Brown among critics of California wildfire response RAW STORY

Published: Wednesday October 24, 2007



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Print This Email This A 52-page GAO report, released on June 1, 2007, warned of the Bush Administration's inability to effectively handle a disaster like the wildfires currently blazing in southern California, given how substantially increased funding for the United States Forest Service, and the Department of the Interior, was being allocated. President Bush, presiding over FEMA during the much criticized handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in 2005, promises those affected by the fires that "they can rest assured that the federal government will do everything we can to help put out these fires," in addition to approving reconstruction grants for uninsured residents and business owners. "I want the people in Southern California to know," says Bush to reporters, "that Americans all across this land care deeply about them." "If you don't have goals and strategies for carrying them out, you're in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode," says the GAO's Robin Nazarro, lead author of the report, to the Huffington Post. "They say they are using 5 to 10 year averages, but each year the fires gets worse, so they're always underestimating what they need." White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says, in response to questioning on Bush's post-Katrina disaster response etiquette: "We have learned those lessons and those lessons are being applied." Former FEMA director Michael D. Brown, however, laments the fact that National Guardsmen that could currently be assisting with the efforts in California have instead been occupied in Iraq. Said Brown in a telephone interview with WJLA-TV, The White House needs to recognize that we are overstretched and that there is a problem. Continues Brown: They need to increase the size of the regular Army and stop relying so much on the National Guard. "The fact is that there are plenty of people on the ground," rebuts current FEMA director R. David Paulison to CNN. The Orange County Register indicted the federal government, while lauding Governor Schwarzenegger's efforts to the contrary, on limits put on the use of DC-10 planes used to drop fire retardant on affected areas, citing "bureaucratic overkill." "If we had more air resources," says Orange County fire chief Chip Prather to the Los Angeles Times, "we would have been able to control this fire."

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