Kristi Noem's Feral Emergency Management Drives Search And Rescue Chief To Resign
The fallout from the Texas Clusterflood continues.
Frustrated by how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “cost-cutting” measures delayed search and rescue deployment to the floods in Texas for three days, the head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue branch, Ken Pagurek, resigned on Monday. CNN reports that, according to two insiders, Pagurek told colleagues that the penny-pinching and botched response in Texas were the last straw that led him to leave the agency, following months of distress over Donald Trump’s attempts to kill off FEMA altogether.
The New York Times adds (gift link) that Pagurek “told associates that his concerns had been mounting since the start of hurricane season and that the administration’s changes to the agency were causing ‘chaos.’”
As you’ll recall, Noem imposed a new DHS policy requiring that she personally approve any contract or grant costing more than $100,000, even though disaster response routinely costs millions of dollars — not because of government waste, but because moving specialized people and equipment is expensive. As a result, FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue teams, drawn from a network of specialized first response teams around the country, weren’t staged in advance as they had been in other disasters. Instead, Noem didn’t approve deployment of the teams until three days after the flash floods, after which they still needed to travel to Texas. FEMA teams finally arrived a week after the floods, when there was still plenty of searching to do, but the window for rescue had long closed.
In addition, the Houston Chronicle reported yesterday on the chaotic situation faced by first responders in Kerr County, site of the worst flooding (gift link). Not only were ordinary people stranded and in danger, the county’s emergency services were overwhelmed as the floodwaters arrived in the early morning of Friday, July 4.
“She is frantic,” a dispatcher told firefighters at 4:28 a.m., roughly an hour into the flooding that ultimately killed more than 100 people in Kerr County. “She said her children are on top of one of the cabanas and they are trapped.”
“There is no way we can get to them,” a firefighter responded 18 seconds later. “The water is over the river, and we are all stuck.”
Obviously, any disaster is chaotic in the early hours, and even when the best-trained first responders are doing everything they should, some things are beyond their control. But the whole point of emergency preparedness is that competent people who know what they’re doing can help mitigate that chaos by coordinating the people and resources on the ground. In the Texas floods, it’s clear that federal agencies like FEMA and the National Weather Service were bogged down by the Trump administration’s efforts to make government stop working at all.
Experts Not Needed
In his resignation letter, seen by CNN, Pagurek very diplomatically didn’t mention the Texas clusterflood, but instead noted that he would be returning to the Philadelphia Fire Department, where he also managed FEMA’s regional Pennsylvania Task Force 1 for the last decade, rising to lead the agency’s urban search and rescue services at the national level for the last year and a half.
As you’d expect, DHS Minister of Propaganda Tricia McLaughlin framed Pagurek as a disloyal troublemaker, and his concerns about the damage being done to FEMA as a foolish addiction to wasteful spending.
“It is laughable that a career public employee, who claims to serve the American people, would choose to resign over our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight,” she said referring to Mr. Pagurek.
“We’re being responsible with taxpayer dollars, that’s our job,” she said. “Attempting to spin a personal career decision into some big scandal is ridiculous.”
McLaughlin didn’t say whether Pagurek will face prosecution for treason for his besmirch statements against better people than him, but we won’t be surprised. Needless to say, Noem insists that the FEMA response to the floods have been far better than any disaster response in “many, many years,” and that any criticism is just “playing politics with what happened to Texas.”
Heck, we bet more people died because they didn’t believe fervently enough in Great Leader and his endless benevolence.
Besides, as defenders of the new cheapskate approach to emergencies point out, some other federal search teams managed to show up sooner than the FEMA teams, So there. Really, it was great, and please also disregard the canceled contracts that meant FEMA’s call centers were understaffed for five days after the floods, leaving thousands of calls unanswered. Somebody probably got to them eventually, maybe.
The Times also notes that Pagurek’s resignation “comes just weeks after the resignation of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA’s disaster command center, which coordinates the national response to earthquakes, floods and other disasters.” Let’s also recall that, thanks to DOGE staff cuts and buyout demands, the National Weather Service office in San Antonio was without its warning coordination meteorologist, Paul Yura. In a “normal” disaster, Yura, a 32-year veteran with the Weather Service, would have shared information with local officials to help them prepare for the approaching storm, but his job wasn’t filled after he was pressured into early retirement.
Michael Coen, FEMA chief of staff under Joe Biden, treasonously told the Times that forcing out senior officials represented a worrying loss of institutional knowledge. He said, “The people that are there will work hard, but when you lose that experience its hard to replace,” but that’s just how a wasteful bureaucrat defends paying people to know stuff instead of hiring on the basis of loyalty to Trump.
Doing Their Best, But Overwhelmed
The Houston Chronicle details, using recordings of 911 calls and public records from the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, how the first responders were often unable to reach people because emergency crews were themselves cut off by the rising water. The Chronicle notes that while it received a log of 400 calls to the Sheriff’s Office, it’s still waiting to get records from the Kerrville Police Department, “which initially receives and routes all 911 calls across the county,” so it’s not yet clear what else there is to be learned about the response.
Many of the audio snippets are heartbreaking to listen to, like a firefighter near Camp Mystic, who told a dispatcher near 5 a.m. local time that onlookers were putting themselves in danger by trying to rescue children themselves, then needing rescue too. “We are trying to keep people out of the water, but they are trying to go in on their own to get those children,” she said. “We need some law enforcement down here now.” According to scanner traffic, the nearest boats, probably from San Antonio’s water rescue team, were still 10 minutes away.
Another firefighter told a dispatcher at 4:48 a.m. that they has spotted an RV floating in the Guadalupe River, but five minutes later, reported, “The RV that we were trying to keep up with, that we thought had people in it, it hit a tree and came apart.” Another call, at 5:20, came from a police officer near an RV park, who told a dispatcher, “We had an elderly man and an elderly female calling for help. No longer hearing calls for help.” After the flood receded, at least 28 people who had been in RV parks along the river were found dead.
Several of the radio exchanges with dispatchers were from responders who were simply unable to get their boats into the river. One of the most chilling recordings came at 5:30 a.m., when a dispatcher told a firefighter who’d asked who was in charge of incident command, “Sir, we don't have an incident command right now.” The firefighter acknowledged that and asked, “Please advise, do you have an assignment for us?”
Notably, the article doesn’t attempt to identify where the disaster response may have gone wrong. There’s plenty of reporting yet to be done, and in what used to pass for normal, a rigorous federal investigation would also determine where systems broke down and could be improved. Maybe that will happen eventually, but by all indications, we’re afraid we expect the official findings will be that no one could have seen this disaster coming, probably because of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but that the Trump administration nonetheless won the day with the best search and rescue effort ever known in the history of the world, period.
[CNN / Houston Chronicle (gift link) / NYT (gift link)]
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Sigh. Now that I've had to remind two people, let me clarify that the Rules remain in effect. Yes, the administration is full of ghouls. No, you do not have to say anything nice about them. But we are fucking sivilized around here, so you will also not post your own sick torture fantasies, which will not be seen by their targets, but which *will* steer the tone of this good place toward the toilet, when our minds belong more properly in the gutter.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/kristi-noems-feral-emergency-management
"It is laughable that a career public employee, who claims to serve the American people, would choose to resign over our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight,”
With a straight face...
In other news, the market price of gall has collapsed, due to the federal government emptying the national reserve.