An Outsider Peers into the FEMA Trailer

Our hero sets out to do a good deed by helping FEMA rebuild the Gulf Coast. But he finds himself waylaid for weeks by a strange tribe of nomad bureaucrats in an outpost near a Mississippi Piggly Wiggly

Last fall I made a phone call to test the FEMA waters. I was quickly pulled into a riptide of inertia.

A few months after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s in city planning, I still had not found the Philadelphia planning job I wanted. It was November 2005, and a friend was doing debris cleanup after Hurricane Katrina in Florida. FEMA volunteering seemed like a way to use my degree, get a basic per diem, and help some people out. My friend connected me with Mark, an engineer in Chicago, who told me that I would be on a team of ten to twenty planners, architects, and engineers creating a Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Days later, Mark called me at my temp job and asked if I wanted to go to Mississippi. I had to be there in three days.

I showed up at the airport with only a driver’s license and got a ticket to Jackson, Mississippi, courtesy of the engineering firm. At the Budget Rent-a-Car, I gave my name, used the magic word “DirectBill,” and received the keys to a car. The same routine worked at the hotel in Jackson. Pretty soon I was watching cable TV and drinking a High Life with the A/C on 60.

The next day I went to the address Mark had given me to look for my contact, known to me only as Michelle. After getting through security—no easy task—I found her. I told her my name and expected all the secret FEMA doors to open.

“It’s Doug Giuliano.”

[Blank stare.]

“It’s with a G. G-I-U...”

Michelle turned her back on me and asked her colleague: “Why do they keep sending me these people? I have no idea who this is. Why do they keep sending me this shit?”

Michelle then began to openly sob in her cubicle.

This was my introduction to government bureaucracy. The next few days felt like an anthropological field study: I had uncovered a new tribe of nomadic North American bureaucrats who, once a year for a few months, take temporary shelter in an office building in the vicinity of a recent natural disaster. Most of their communication happens through paperwork. When they communicate verbally, it is through acronyms. A complex code determines if you belong:

“Are you URS?”

“Umm, I don’t know.”

“ERPMC?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“What’s your code?”

“I thought you were gonna tell me that one.”

“Do you have an I-pass?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You shouldn’t be on this floor.”

The small staff of permanent FEMA workers reproduced and increased exponentially. New staffers consisted of people like me, who had no preparation and only knew where to show up. We received computers and phones and badges and cameras and parking passes.
The outfitting is only one small task for FEMA, whose broad instructions boil down to: wait for a disaster, staff it, outfit the staff, send them to the field. Just this simple task is like waking a hungry, hibernating bear and making it catch a deer for dinner. Not impossible, but awkward.

For the next three months, I was careful not to expect anything. I spent every day as if it might be my last in that town. The branch I found myself working for was called ESF-14, Long Term Community Recovery. After a storm event, various branches of FEMA respond, and many federal agencies assist in different aspects of recovery. ESF-14 helps communities make sense of all the agencies. In theory, we were fashioning a plan to coordinate applying for and disbursing funds. Of course, each member of the twenty-person ESF-14 team had their own idea about what this plan actually was.

After a while in Jackson, a few team members were sent south to Waveland, Mississippi, to attend a town meeting. Waveland had been decimated, and Robert Orr, a designer of the New Urbanist Shangri-La, Seaside, Florida, would be unveiling his plans for the new town. We arrived at night in a gigantic, gold Infiniti SUV donated by a local Nissan plant. In the town of 2,500, you would be hard-pressed to find ten habitable homes. Airplanes flew overhead spraying for mosquitoes. Two hundred people showed up to attend a meeting in a modular home that could hold fifty.

The next day we attended a planning symposium at the Imperial Palace Casino in Biloxi, one of the few usable spaces in the area. One hundred FEMA employees gathered to hear Andrés Duany introduce yet another New Urbanist solution for the Gulf Coast. It directly contradicted the plan the FEMA mitigation staffers had in mind. FEMA wanted to designate a strict flood zone that called for a town built on stilts. Duany warned the audience that they should be wary of FEMA’s presentations. “You cannot live in a town where everything is raised ten feet,” he said. The experience would be unsatisfying, he said, and the cost prohibitive.

After this stand-off, I was told to meet my field team of five at a McDonald’s in Wiggins, Mississippi, the seat of Stone County. Wiggins is 50 miles north of the Mississippi coast and sustained little hurricane damage, but was nonetheless part of the long-term recovery plan: any responsible long-term plan would recognize the town as the receiving area for an evacuation; it would also be a logical place to encourage well planned development.

At the McDonald’s, I met Steve, a former full-time FEMA employee and now consultant. He was our team leader and seemingly the most capable person in all of Mississippi. He managed to be professional and thoughtful while maintaining a sense of humor amongst all the frustrated and disgruntled FEMA staff. Steve scribbled some words on a Steno sheet that would kick off the intense ten weeks of recovery work I had long anticipated. On the sheet was a list of who’s who in Stone County: mayors, aldermen, sheriffs, wardens, business owners. We would interview them to suss out their visions for their county’s future. We would consult experts in the field. We would create and release this plan in three months so that Stone County would have a beacon in the fog of recovery.

In the next ten weeks, people came and went, rumors circulated, plans were drafted, forms were filled out, permission was given and taken away, relationships were built. And nothing happened.
By January all that was left of our team was Gary, a retired sheriff from South Dakota, and myself—an unlikely pair. Gary gained the trust of skeptical townsfolk instantly. We spent a month of twelve-hour days alternating between meetings in the town and our “office” in the back of an old supermarket in Wiggins, next to the Piggly Wiggly. This was 50 miles from FEMA’s Mississippi operations base, but it may as well have been 1,000. Communication with the rest of our branch was nonexistent.

We looked for work every way that we could. Everyone in town was sick of seeing us. FEMA culture severely discouraged us from talking with any FEMA workers outside the branch, and nobody within the branch had a clue what was going on. I waited every week for Saturday, when I would drive the two hours to Biloxi to meet with our branch. There was always the hope that this would be the day that they would take the leash off and let us go to work.

We did this for about a month. We lobbied. We said that our county, being the farthest from the coast and hit with the least damage, could complete a plan the fastest. It would act as a model that other counties could follow. But everyone was told by FEMA higher-ups to wait and not step on anyone’s toes. We were told that the state would provide direction. Finally, they did. They said that they would prepare the long-term recovery plan, and we should all go home. We had a week to get out of town, maybe less. That was it.

I still have no idea what happened. By that point, I was more than ready to go home.

Personally, I had little to show for my time in Mississippi except a speeding ticket and a new appreciation for buffet lunches. The work was difficult—not just because of the grueling hours or living out of a hotel—but because a talented, capable staff was denied the opportunity to contribute.