December 2006

A year after presiding over the Federal Emergency Management Agency during its disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown returned to Boulder after five years in D.C. He now heads up Michael D. Brown, LLC, a disaster-preparedness consulting firm. He shared his thoughts about Katrina, recovering from natural and personal disaster, and the risks we face in Colorado.

[Natural disasters] were totally pushed off the radar by September 11th. All of a sudden, the administration became: "It's all about terrorism."

You're going to have hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes, everything else all the time, but because you're focused on terrorism, you don't care about that stuff. And that's what marginalized FEMA.

We still face the risks from Mother Nature.

People tell you when they're in a car wreck time slows down and all of a sudden they're in a time warp and they can just see the accident coming. That's how I felt the day before landfall. It was awful. It was just a pit in my stomach.

Being a true leader, I use my mistakes as an example of what you shouldn't do.

I consider myself a strong-willed person, and yet I found myself in that political situation and not exercising those traits because I was too busy deferring to the political aspect and not doing what in my gut I knew was right.

To this day I regret not crumpling up [my White House- and Homeland Security-approved talking points] and looking in the camera and saying to the American public, "This is really a catastrophic disaster. Things are not working well."

I've taken my share of the blame, because I think I made mistakes. Everybody made mistakes. There's enough fault in this disaster to go around to everybody.

I had spent three minutes painting this bleak picture about how bad things are, and then the President comes out and says, "You're doing a heck of a job." I didn't need that right then. That will be the line across the obituary.

I'm very disappointed in the administration. I'm disappointed in my party. They hung me out to dry when there's so many other things that we could have done. And I'll say this, did things get better after I left? No.

In the Hebrew tradition, you would heap all of the sins of the village onto the goat and send the goat over the edge of the cliff to be killed, so all of the sins would be taken off and the village could stand up and be pious and righteous and proud.

I think it's a uniquely American political attitude that we can create a risk-free society.

It absolutely boggles my mind that in this country, with its wealth, with our amazing ability to do things, we shove things off and don't level with the American public about what the risks are.

Let's see, in Colorado, we have, what? The 10th- or eighth-busiest airport in the world. We've had the Big Thompson flood. We've had some of the hugest wildfires. [We have] tornadoes and blizzards out on the eastern plains. We have a major crossroads in I-70 and I-25 where there could be a huge chemical accident, and then there are evacuation problems for downtown Denver and the surrounding areas. We have a lot of vulnerabilities in Colorado that we need to think about.

I believe that the more informed citizens are, the more leeway they will give you, the more understanding they will have, and the more they will support you. It's when we start trying to hide information or start trying to spin it a certain way that the public becomes cynical.

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