| Bush fema hire knew arabian horses { September 8 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5602574.htmlhttp://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5602574.html
Last update: September 8, 2005 at 12:07 AM New storm brews over FEMA chief Spencer S. Hsu and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post September 8, 2005 BROWN0908
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Michael Brown has been called the accidental director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian sporting horse group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
Amid the swirl of human misery along the Gulf Coast, Brown admitted initially underestimating the impact of Hurricane Katrina. As the nation reeled at images of the calamity, he appeared to blame storm victims, saying the crisis was worsened by residents who ignored a mandatory evacuation order.
By all accounts, it was not experience in managing disasters that brought Brown, 50, a lawyer from Oklahoma, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 2001 as its general counsel. It was his 30-year friendship with Joe Allbaugh, who managed George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and became his first FEMA director.
But when pressed yet again to give his qualifications at a news conference Monday, Brown said he oversaw responses to 164 presidential declared emergencies and disasters as FEMA counsel and general counsel, including the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster and the 2003 California wildfires.
"So, yes," he said, "I've been through a few disasters in my life."
Brown has been a hands-on FEMA manager, trudging through each new scene of devastation, dispensing aid and encouragement. Since Hurricane Katrina, he has been a constant presence on television, citing statistics on people rescued and meals delivered.
But he stunned Americans last week with the admission that he did not know about the 20,000 evacuees at the New Orleans' Convention Center until Thursday, 24 hours after it was featured in news reports.
By last weekend, facing mounting calls for his resignation, he said: "People want to lash out at me, lash out at FEMA. I think that's fine. Just lash out, because my job is to continue to save lives."
An agency strained
More broadly, Brown and the agency he leads have become the focus of a broad reappraisal of U.S. homeland security efforts four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. At a time when experts called for greater domestic focus on preparing for calamity, Brown faced years of funding cuts, personnel departures and FEMA's downgrading from an independent, Cabinet-level agency.
As recently as three weeks ago, state emergency managers urged Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his deputy, Michael Jackson, to ease the department's focus on terrorism, warning that the shift away from traditional disaster management left FEMA a bureaucratic backwater less able to respond to natural events such as hurricanes.
Brown's defenders say he is the scapegoat of a cataclysmic storm and failure of New Orleans' levee system that, in the words of Bush and Chertoff, could not be foreseen.
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said Friday during a tour of the region.
Allbaugh -- a college friend, former Bush campaign manager and past FEMA director who hired Brown as FEMA general counsel in 2001 -- offered a qualified defense. Allbaugh called the government's overall performance "unacceptable" but added: "Blaming one agency, you cannot do that."
Still, he acknowledged that FEMA had lost independence and clout with the White House. "I had a unique relationship with the president, having been his chief of staff," Allbaugh said. "If you don't have that kind of relationship, it just makes things tougher."
Unusual job
Brown has practiced law, worked for the Oklahoma Senate and served as counsel to an insurance company. He has headed the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority and served as a City Council member, an examiner for the Oklahoma and Colorado supreme courts and an assistant city manager. He lost a race for Congress in 1988.
But the job he did for a decade before joining FEMA is curiously omitted from his online résumé. From 1991 to 2001, as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, Brown enforced the rules administered by judges at the association's 300 annual horse shows. His decisions provoked a series of lawsuits, including one from David Boggs, a trainer whom Brown accused of having cosmetic surgery performed on horses.
Brown's critics in the horse world say he was forced to resign; a friend and lawyer of Brown's said he negotiated a settlement after withstanding numerous lawsuits.
Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Brown and other top federal officials were briefed as much as 32 hours in advance of Hurricane Katrina's landfall that its storm surge was likely to top levees and cause catastrophic flooding.
"They knew that this one was different," Mayfield said this week. " ... They were told. ... We said the levees could be topped."
Louisiana officials have blamed FEMA and Brown for bureaucratic bottlenecks, accusing FEMA of ignoring pre-storm offers of aid.
Bruce Baughman, Alabama's emergency management director and head of the National Emergency Management Association, said Katrina will leave its mark.
"It's time to realize, whoever is in charge of FEMA does need an emergency management background," he said. "... It's something you learn by experience, and a lot of that experience is gone."
The New York Times contributed to this report.
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