How FEMA got ready for its chance at redemption

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept ashore from the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 29, 2005, President Bush telephoned R. David Paulison and asked if he would immediately take over the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the previous director, Michael Brown, resigned. At that point, FEMA might have been the most reviled organization in the country, so inadequate was the government's response to the disaster. The storm and subsequent flooding in New Orleans took the lives of at least 1,330 people, injured thousands more, and drove more than 770,000 people from their homes, hundreds of thousands of which were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. There were spectacular failures at every level of government, but for the agency whose name is synonymous with crisis response, the anger and ridicule were unprecedented.

"My first thought was, 'Why would I do that?' " Paulison remembers. But he didn't say that to the president. "The truth is, I immediately said, 'Yes, I'll do it.' "

In the April 2008 issue of Government Executive, Katherine McIntire Peters looked at Paulison's effort to retool FEMA before the next disaster struck.

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