FEMA puts post-Katrina steps in place, but Earl slinks by East Coast

Federal officials on Saturday morning issued an all-clear signal for Hurricane Earl along the New England coast, with a slight tip of the hat to rules that went into place after the government's much-criticized response to Hurricane Katriana in 2005.
 
The second major hurricane of the Atlantic season -- a Category 4 storm at one point -- made landfall around 10 a.m. in Nova Scotia on Saturday, but damage was minimal and federal officials said they were winding down. The storm's only other impact in North America was a brush of the North Carolina shore on Thursday night.
 

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate said all storm watches and warnings have been dropped.
 
"Preliminary reports coming in are that there's very minimal impacts. Some power lines down. Some isolated, limited flooding," Fugate said. "At this point, FEMA is now beginning to conclude our operations. All in all... we were prepared for potential impacts of a significant hurricane.

"A lot of people say 'Well, you spent all this time and effort to get ready and nothing happened.' That's actually the best possible scenario for us. We'd much rather be prepared and have minimal impacts."
 
Fugate, who previously led Florida's Division of Emergency Management from 2001 to 2009, which included Florida's disastrous 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons -- including storms that fell outside the normal seasonal hurricane calendar --  stressed that the danger was not over and that September was the peak month for hurricanes in the southeastern U.S.
 
Four hurricanes hit Florida in 2004, under Fugate's watch, making it the deadliest and costliest hurricane season in recent history. Two more hit in 2005, the year of Katrina.
 
"We are still 87 days away from the end of hurricane season," Fugate said. "We still have tropical weather out there. There are no active storms out there for now, but it's still early in the hurricane season...  We continue to keep an eye on the tropics."
 
Fugate said preparations for Earl were made easier after the controversy surrounding Katrina in 2005, pointedly by removing a requirement that a state government's approval be necessary for federal resources to prepare for a storm. Yet he stressed that Katrina was "not a parallel storm" to Earl.
 
"All of these storms are different," Fugate said. "There's enough difference there that I would not draw too many conclusions based upon our prep for Earl. I think the lessons learned, however, were that we had to go get ready early.

"A lot of the stuff that we do is, in part, because of the legislation that Congress passed in 2006, the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act. It allowed us to move teams and get resources into the area without formal requests from the governors. So those were steps that were taken. But I wouldn't try to draw to draw any more conclusions... Two different storms, two different types of tracks."
 
Fugate said there were not yet any available cost estimates for the preparations the agency took for the storm.

---