FEMA liquidates its free ice policy

Don’t expect to get free ice anymore from the federal government after a hurricane, the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday.

That was the first major announcement from FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison during his visit to the National Hurricane Conference here. And when the leader said he intended to resign soon, it quickly created a media stir.

Paulison issued a swift clarification, saying he planned to step down by the time the Bush administration ended its tenure in January, which he noted was standard Washington protocol.

He said he might go sooner -- but not before the 2008 hurricane season ends in November. “I wouldn’t leave during hurricane season,” Paulison said.

Before taking the helm at FEMA, Paulison spent 30 years with the Miami-Dade County Fire Department, the last 10 as its chief. In the last six of those, he also was the county’s emergency management director.

President Bush appointed Paulison in September 2005 to replace Michael Brown, the former FEMA chief who became the focal point of blame for the agency’s failures in Hurricane Katrina.

Those blunders were underscored by thousands of homeless New Orleans residents begging for food, water and ice in the days and weeks after the Aug. 29, 2005, storm left most of the city under water.

In Katrina’s aftermath, Paulison set about changing the agency’s culture -- to the point that he called it “the new FEMA.” He doubled the agency’s full-time staff, to about 3,400 workers, as well as its budget, to about $9 billion.

“After Katrina, FEMA was, for all intents and purposes, broken,” said Craig Fugate, Florida’s emergency management director. “Dave put it back together.”

Paulison said he had already chosen his likely successor: Nancy Ward, a veteran FEMA regional administrator based in Oakland.

“It’s time to go back and spend time with my family,” he said. Even if Bush’s successor were to ask him to stay on, the FEMA chief said, he probably would decline.

The government disaster agency has been dogged by criticism since Katrina, most recently for housing hurricane victims in trailers with toxic levels of formaldehyde and for staging a fake news conference.

As for providing free ice to states hit by a hurricane, Paulison said, “I just don’t think that’s one of FEMA’s jobs. We’re going to focus on the basic needs of people, and that’s food and water.”

Floridians shouldn’t count on the state providing much ice either, as it is low on the critical-needs list, behind medical supplies, water, food, shelter and emergency fuel, Fugate said.

If stores such as Wal-Mart or Publix open after a storm, Fugate said, residents probably would have to go there for bags of ice and pay for them.