Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

In 1803 the federal government gave its first attempt at helping victims of a tragedy. For some people in a New Hampshire town this was a great relief after an extensive fire went through their town. After this incident, during the next century the government helped in over 100 times to aid victims of disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. In the 1930's legislatures passed laws and acts to further aid in the event of a disaster. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had been given authority to disburce loans for repairs and the reconstruction of public places. The Burea of Public Roads were able to provide funding for highways and bridges that had been damaged during natural disasters. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could implement greater flood prevention projects once the Flood Control Act had passed. With their being so much legislation going on it tended to cause problems between federal agencies requiring the President to oversee them himself.
In the 1960's and 70's The Federal Disaster Assistance Administration was established through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It provided relief over and over due to the large amount of natural disasters that occured:

• Hurricane Carla-1962
• Hurricane Betsy-1965
• Hurricane Camille-1969
• Hurricane Agnes-1972
• The Alaskan Earthquake-1964
• The San Fernando Earthquake-1971

These natural disasters brought about a lot more legislation and the National Flood Insurance Act was passed along with the Disaster Relief Act. Eventually hazards dealing with nuclear power plants and the transportaiton of hazardous materials were added as disasters. There were so many federal agencies involved that the National Governor's Association stepped up and asked President Jimmy Carter to centralize these efforts. in 1979 President Carter did just that, he merged many agencies together forming what is now known as FEMA. Under this change FEMA combined the following agencies:

• The Federal Insurance Administration
• The National Fire Prevention and Control Administration
• The National Weather Sevice Comminity Preparedness Program
• The Federal Preparedness Agency of the General Services Administration
• The Federal Disaster Assistance Administration w/ HUD
• The Defense Department's Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (civil defense responsibities)

In my opinion this was a great idea. There were a lot of different agencies involved. They kept their mission the same: to lead America to prepare for, prevent, respond to and recover from disastersa with a vision of "A Nation Prepared."

They needed someone to be the director and this position was given to John Macy. He taught how the civil defense activities and the natural hazards preparedness were alike and developed the Integrated Emergency Management System. This system included warnings for small events to much larger ones like war.

The Agency discovered just how hard it was to manage emergency disasters very soon. There were several events that can take credit for that and they include the contamination of the Love Canal, the Cuban refugee crisis, and an accident at a nuclear plant called Three Mile Island. A while later in 1989 the Loma Prieta Earhquake hit and in 1992 Hurricane Andrew came. When Macy left FEMA President Clinton appointed James L. Witt as the new director and he had a somewhat different approach to managing disasters. He had his employees to focus on customer service and he redirected the limited resources from civil defense into disaster relief, recovery, and mitigation programs.

With growing threat of terrorism FEMA joined what is known at the Department of Homeland Security along with other agencies. This was a better approach for both natural and manmade disasters. In August of 2005 the worst natural disaster to hit America occured: Hurricane Katrina. President Gearge Bush had to sign the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act into effect.