PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Disaster Official Stands Fast in the Eye of Political Storm

“I am not the disaster czar here,” an obviously exasperated Kate Hale, Dade County’s director of emergency services, had said early Thursday during an emotional press conference at which she blasted President Bush and the federal response to Hurricane Andrew.

“I am the local resources manager.”

Whatever her title, Kathleen Cavanaugh Hale, 41, found herself at the center of another maelstrom after she lashed out at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross and even the Florida National Guard for what she called their inaction in the face of what is being described as the nation’s costliest natural disaster in history.

“You fired a pretty good broadside there,” Florida Lt. Gov. Buddy McKay told Hale several hours later as he met her when she returned to her office.

He told her that her outburst apparently had had an immediate effect: Eight Army battalions from Ft. Bragg, N.C., had been ordered to South Florida, along with tents and portable kitchens to help hurricane victims, McKay said.

Hale, a career bureaucrat who has been preparing for disaster in South Florida for years, is known for her purposefulness, her compassion and her fiery temper.

As she slumped into her desk chair late Thursday afternoon--after a three-hour county commission meeting, dozens of media requests for interviews and her fifth consecutive day with no more than two hours of sleep--she acknowledged that the anger and frustration she had voiced at the televised press conference ultimately may cost her her job.

“I’ve often said that after the big one I might as well collect the three pieces of wood and the two nails and do it myself,” said Hale. “Someone is not going to be happy.”

Nonetheless, Hale vowed not to be the scapegoat for foul-ups in communication and distribution that have hampered the flow of water, food and medicine to the more than 180,000 people left homeless by the hurricane. “I am going to continue doing my job.”

The native of Flint, Mich., worked in the county’s economic opportunity office for several years before becoming deputy director of emergency services. She was named director about four years ago and spent much of that time--all hurricane-free in South Florida--rewriting the preparedness manual.

Longtime friend Elvia Thompson said Thursday that she spoke to Hale two weeks ago--when Andrew was barely a blip of bad weather on forecasters’ radar screens. Hale worried aloud then about what to do with the thousands of homeless people in Dade County, many of whom suffer from tuberculosis, Thompson said.

“She faces Third World problems there in Miami, with a staff of seven,” according to Thompson, herself a former Dade County employee who now works in Washington.

So often had Hale warned of the dangers of a major hurricane that she had earned the nickname “Miss Doom and Gloom,” Thompson said.

As she sat at her desk late Thursday, eating a McChicken sandwich sent over by a friend who saw her drained, exhausted face on television, Hale bristled again at criticisms that Dade County has been overwhelmed by the magnitude of Andrew’s destruction.

“We are the victims here--of politics and the hurricane,” she said. “Dade County is down here on its own trying to provide these services in this catastrophic disaster. And all we’re getting is criticism for it.”

In fact, as she spoke, Hale did not know how her own home in hard-hit Kendall, or her dogs and cats, had fared in the storm. Ironically, her pets are being looked after by friends who left their home in Miami Beach to stay in Hale’s house because they thought it would be safer. Miami Beach did not suffer severe damage.

Hale had not been home since Saturday and was dressed in a borrowed blouse and blue jeans.

“I have got to go home, take a shower and get some rest,” she said, even as her secretary confirmed the details of a “Good Morning America” interview set for dawn today. “And of course I don’t know yet if I’ve got a roof.”