Heckuva job redux

One hesitates returning to the blame-game that engulfed and sullied the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other sinister storms of 2005, because – despite failures under former director Michael Brown and others in the Bush administration – the agency and its dedicated employees have done much to save lives over the years.
At the same time, rightly or wrongly, FEMA has again put itself in the position of fall-guy in connection with the Federal Communications Commission’s embrace of a consensus-driven technical blueprint for a voluntary mobile phone alert system. This time it’s not on Brownie’s watch.
In a Feb. 19 filing, Martha Rainville, assistant administrator of FEMA’s Office of National Continuity Programs, informed the FCC of a legal snafu that effectively puts coordination of the wireless alert system in limbo – at least temporarily. Rainville said FEMA’s current statutory authority restricts its oversight of key aggregator and gateway functions – as well as the Trust Model of the commercial mobile alert system – under certain circumstances. Rainville also said FEMA reserved the right to abstain from designating the common alerting protocol for mobile phones as the formal emergency alert system standard. She noted, too, that the Warning, Alert and Response Network Act is silent on the effective date for the operational start of the wireless emergency warning system.
The timing of FEMA’s filing and the uncertainty it has now created have become a source of irritation for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Michael Copps. “It would have been better, of course, if we had a federal entity in place now to take on the role of alert aggregator and gateway. We are hopeful that we have initiated the dialogue that will allow an appropriate federal entity to assume that central role in an expeditious manner,” stated Martin.
Copps, one of two Democrats on the Republican-controlled FCC who clashes with Martin from time to time, was less diplomatic. “If no agency assumes this role, the rules we enact today will never become effective and Americans will never receive the protection of emergency alerts delivered to their mobile phones. . The unwillingness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fulfill this role is especially disheartening because FEMA representatives were intimately involved in developing the idea of a unified federal gateway/aggregator.”
And then there’s the long forgotten backstory to all this:
Much will be made about how congressional and FCC actions on wireless emergency alerts responded to deadly events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings. But citizens – particularly the 257 million with cellphones – might find it disturbing to know that a White House-level report released shortly after the 2000 presidential election advocated doing essentially what the FCC did last week.