Center for Domestic Preparedness: Not Nearly as Scary As We Thought

At about 2:30 Thursday afternoon, as FEMA Corps was returning from a 10-minute break, the myth of "FEMA Strict" was busted forever.

That was when my teachers enlisted a bunch of Corps Members to crumple up pages from USA Today, dropped a pile of paper balls on each of the six tables, and... told us to go to war with each other. I thought it was going to be some sort of disaster-related exercise, but no: we were just supposed to blow off steam, six and a half hours into a long day of training. "This is big, bad Anniston? This is the place where they'll kick you out if you so much as sneeze?"

It turns out that the TLs were either exaggerating wildly or just had bad information throughout our NCCC training. Y'see, Anniston was the TLs' chosen stick throughout the month of CTI (Corps Training something-or-other). Talking in class? "That won't fly at Anniston." Walking in a minute late? "They'll run you right out the door for that in Anniston." And it only made sense, you know? This is a Department of Homeland Security facility we were talking about, the ominously innocuous-sounding Center for Domestic Preparedness. This is where they train people to respond to terrorist attacks. This is where people go to learn what to do in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. They have a terrifying statue of three faceless men in radiation suits dominating their lobby. Of course they would be total hardasses; that's their job, right?

Not even close. The CDP has been incredibly accomodating, both in terms of our training and our treatment. They let us raid the snack rooms and actually brought boxes of snacks into class today when the break rooms in a new building didn't have them. You're welcome to lean back in your chair, stand against the wall, whatever helps you learn; we have big comfy chairs to sit in, notebooks and post-its provided for us, whatever luxury you might want. And the training itself! Far from just sitting and being lectured, there are group activities, presentations in front of the class, frequent brainstorming sessions that allow us to think creatively about problems (and exercise our La Mettrie-style brain muscles). It's as non-traditional a classroom setting as I've yet seen, excluding high school Political Theory. Either law enforcement officers, firefighters, etc. have a lot more fun in their lives than I thought, or the CDP has adopted a totally different playbook to train this totally different type of unit that we, FEMA Corps, are.

And it's cool. They're still feeling their way, but the result is welcome. I loved the exercise where we took somebody's hometown (Michael's origin of Hustisford, WI) and brainstormed what would happen to the town in the event of a flood. Where are the highways in and out of town? What's the topographical layout; where's the high ground? What charitable organizations are based in town? Where could people gather in the event of a flood? I love that kind of stuff. Thinking creatively is my bread and butter in a school setting.

But the drawback to having a laissez-faire classroom is you get laissez-faire people. I've written before about how this class is smart, dedicated, idealistic, yadda yadda... but we're still 18-24-year-olds and you gotta take that into account. We suck at being in school. Nobody is good at school, but my age group is especially poor at it. If you give people my age room to slack off, we will... not out of malice or as a reasoned decision, but simply because we suck at staying focused on something that you have to really try to stay interested in. (The inner workings of FEMA and its bureaucratic organization are interesting as heck to me, but I'm in the minority on this one.)

It's a fine balance that they have to strike. Yes, it's cool and practical to give us some freedoms (I'm sure nobody wants to ride herd on 240 ostensible adults), and it undoubtedly will help us learn and absorb information... but we're still kids, even the oldest among us, and we still need to be prodded to learn. (Personal view--I don't know when adulthood happens, but for the past six years or so, it's been perpetually "a few years away" for me personally. I have no idea when people become adults. Do you have to fill out a form or something? Is that what mortgages are--no wonder the root 'mort', i.e. mortician, mortuary, morbid is in there!) Maybe they can tinker with it with the Vinton class, who's apparently coming in right behind us. And people will undoubtedly be more engaged when specialist-specific trainings start to happen next week. It's just something of a culture shock, given everything that we were told coming into Anniston.

The Age of the Individual (In FEMA Terms)

We really are entering the age of the individual.

Back in college, I did my junior year thesis project on Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s postmodern masterpiece and a biting satire of huge, overarching bureaucratic institutions. Heller’s Air Force bureaucrats prioritized the written word over the evidence of their eyes, trapped airmen and soldiers in inescapable logical loops treated Yossarian and his compatriots as little more than pawns in an increasingly complex game. Yes, satire is exaggeration, but Heller had a point: in the early 1960s, with military and industrial bureaucracies mushrooming, they seemed a perfect villain for the postmodern age. Huge, impersonal and concerned only with their ends, the bureaucrats played hell with the lives of those under their thumb. The idea of blind, unfeeling, corporate authority has bounced around pop culture ever since.

I don’t know if my FEMA overlords have ever read Catch-22 (also, hi overlords! Thanks for reading!), but if they had, they might recognize Catch-22’s monstrous bureaucratic edifice as precisely what they’re trying not to be. In FEMA Corps’s first full day of genuine FEMA training, the emphasis was clearly on making disaster survivors feel included, not excluded; welcomed, not managed; part of the recovery, not a problem to be solved. We were reminded that survivors with disabilities should be housed in the same shelters as everyone else, so as not to set them apart. We were introduced to the “Whole Community” concept, in which everyone—regardless of class, race, creed, financial status, pregnancy and a dozen other things—was supposed to be included in the planning and recovery process following a disaster. In short, we were told that the people we were saving mattered. They are the entire point of all our efforts and should be treated as such. Big and complicated as it is—and any bureaucracy is—FEMA is trying to be a feeling bureaucracy, governing with as much personal interaction and attention as possible. That’s laudable.

This fits nicely into another concept on a somewhat larger scale, which I remember dimly from a political science class of a year and a half ago. For hundreds of years, individuals served the state. In the age of monarchy and long into the age of democracies, nationalism was the dominant ideology and individuals were expected to serve the State, whatever the political philosophy was in any given country. You gave your property, your taxes, your service in the army and even your life (if it came to that) because you were fighting for a Cause. You gave to the state; that’s how it worked. Your reward was being a part of the great machine, which hopefully won its battles.

Now, for maybe the first time ever, liberal democracies are coming around to the idea that it’s up to the state to serve the individual. I mean “now” in terms of the last fifty or sixty years, but it’s a relatively recent development when you consider the length of human history. The concept of universal human rights is a very new one. So is the idea that the government should provide basic necessities for its citizens, because that’s what government is there for. In the new world, it’s about providing individuals the tools they need to be successful, not individuals necessarily serving the state to make it stronger. The parallels to FEMA’s efforts to respect and elevate the individual, to include and help literally everyone affected by a disaster, are strong.

And individuals have their own responsibilities to go with all that freedom and power and advantage. Close to the last hour of today’s FEMA sessions was about actions that you as an individual can take to make you and your family safer. They hammered home the idea of an individual responsibility to prepare oneself and one’s home against future calamities. Yes, the government can and will help you in your time of need, but the best thing is for you to prepare so you won’t need it. It’s a different kind of individualism, but the same general result: they’re trying to make sure that you as a person are respected and treated in the way that you want, and preparedness helps you towards that goal.

A whole community, full of individuals, all of whom are having their own needs filled by an organization that cares about them as unique human beings. I can get behind that kind of an effort. Especially, as I suspect, if that transition over the decades—from Heller-style impersonality to individual assistance—is part of a larger society-wide movement towards greater recognition of and power of the individual. FEMA appears to be at the forefront of that movement, as much as any large bureaucracy can be, and I'm on board with that.

Another Enthralling Post: The FEMA and CNCS Budgets

At some point during the last couple of years, I started getting into one of the most arcane things in the federal government: the budget. Given that I’m now a government employee, working for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) via funding provided by FEMA, I thought it meet to go and explore the money that CNCS and FEMA get to do what they do. Here, then, are the numbers, straight from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012.

CNCS

The CNCS gets $751,672,000 for operating expenses. $82,834,000 of that is earmarked for carrying out provisions of the National and Community Service Act of 1990, whatever they are. The National Service Trust (NST) gets $212,198,000. The NCCC brass can also transfer funds from “Operating Expenses” to grants administered by the trust, as long as those grants support people engaged in national service. $83,000,000 is earmarked for administrative salaries and expenses, and $4,000,000 is for the Inspector General’s office (again, whatever that is).

The bill also contains several administrative provisions. The first one prohibits hanky-panky in the grant awarding process: nobody gets to know until the selections are announced, and significant changes to the process or requirements have to be made in public view. Another mandates that Americorps programs getting NST grants have to pick up 24% of the cost (I’m assuming that’s what “minimum share requirement” means) for the first three years that they have a grant. Afterwards, they have to meet some overall minimum share requirement specified under federal law. A third says that donations “shall be used to supplement and not support current programs and operations”, and a fourth stipulates that only veterans of Americorps programs get the education award that we’ll be eligible for after successfully completing this program.

I don’t have the numbers for FY2012, but in FY2010 the entire Americorps NCCC program—five campuses, 1,200 members, administrative staff, food stipend for a year, vehicles, miscellaneous expenses, etc., etc., cost just $29 million. In government terms, you can find that kind of money down the back of the sofa. I’ve heard our TLs say that training each regular Americorps member costs $24,000; my campus director of operations (DDO) says it’s more like $27,000 when you take the cost of renting the campus into account. FEMA Corps members, the TLs say, cost $36,000 because of the two extra weeks of FEMA training we do. According to my campus DDO, the FEMA Corps budget is still confidential, and I don’t feel like filing a Freedom of Information Act request to pry it out. However, the $29 million mark at least establishes a ballpark figure. I’d be surprised if the total cost of FEMA Corps was over $40-45 million—which, again, comes through CNCS but from FEMA.

Anyway, when you put together all the numbers, the CNCS gets $1,040,870,000 to fund Americorps, Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America (LSA), its three main programs. That’s FY2012. In FY2010, Americorps VISTA got $99,074,000, while LSA got $39.5m. Americorps NCCC, as I mentioned, got $29 million that year.

FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gets $895,350,000 for salaries and general expenses. $41.25 million of that is for the Urban Search and Rescue System, $5.493m for the Office of National Capital Region Coordination, $12m for improvements at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, and $13.662m for modernizing automated systems. $1,349,681,000 is for “grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, and other activities”; $50m goes to Operation Stonegarden and $100m for areas with a high risk of terrorist attack. The bill earmarks $231,681,000 for “training, exercises, technical assistance, and other programs, of which $155,500,000 shall be for training of State, local, and tribal emergency response providers.” One would assume that the Center for Domestic Preparedness is funded out of that pot.

An additional $675,000,000 is federal firefighting and protection funding, $350,000,000 is for emergency management performance grants, $44,038,000 for the United States Fire Administration and firefighting purposes, $700,000,000 for carrying out the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act--$24,000,000 of which is earmarked for the Inspector General for audits and investigations. Another $295,000 is for the costs of direct loans, authorized under the Stafford Act. $97,712,000 is for expenses incurred under the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, plus whatever state and local governments want to chip in for “cost-shared activities”.

 $171,000,000 goes to the National Flood Insurance Fund (NFIF). Apparently there’s an immense amount of money in the NFIF; The cap that you can take out in a given year is $132m for “operating expenses”, $1.07 billion and change for “commissions and taxes of agents”, $60m for flood mitigation and unlimited for interest on treasury borrowing. $35,500,000 is available under the Stafford Act for pre-disaster mitigation grants as well as $120,000,000 for emergency food and shelter.

That’s $4,418,596,000 by my count. In addition, in a different appropriations bill, Congress authorized $2.65 billion for immediate disaster relief (to be meted out by the director of FEMA within 15 days). That brings the total to $7,068,596,000 by my count, give or take a few million. Some of that pot has presumably funded FEMA Corps, from its inception as an idea of deputy FEMA administrator Richard Sorino to the present day (and far beyond).

Absolutely Nothing Happened Today, So I Wrote About NCCC Food. Enjoy.

Today I sat around and waited in, around and outside the Center for Domestic Preparedness for a non-exaggerated total of probably six hours. Outside of that, winning the solitaire trifecta (clock, Klondike, 7x5 faceup) and getting our equipment, nothing happened. So I’ll share what I wrote on the van ride yesterday: food. I figure I’ve written about plenty of graduation ceremonies and ropes courses, so it’s gotta be time for something incredibly mundane (yet terrifying).

The NCCC budgets $4.75 per person per day for food; that is what you live on. All of that money is pooled and put in the hands of your Team Leader; for a ten-person team like mine, that’s $47.50 a day. It’s doled out weekly, which pushes the amount up to $332.50. That buys weekly supplies, almost always purchased at Wal-Mart, and invariably made up of that store’s “Great Value” generic items. (I’ve joked before that the entire NCCC program is really just an indirect subsidy for the local Wal-Mart.)

 NCCC staples include wheat bread, pasta, macaroni‘n’cheese, salad that comes in a bag, drink powder that turns water into lemonade, frozen pizzas, occasional chicken breasts and sundry fruits and vegetables. Generic pasta is the most popular meal, made with store-bought sauce; tacos and rice are also quite common. All of these things are paid for with government dollars, tax-exempt, which REALLY helps one shop within the budget. Going over budget isn’t the end of the world, though. It’s pretty much expected in your first week on spike, for example, when you’re also buying base ingredients like salt or olive oil or ketchup. Now, it is possible to stay under budget until the end of an accounting period and then just have an extravagant meal at the end; you’re not allowed to roll over money into the next accounting period, as I understand it, so you might as well spend it while you can.

Cooking and cleaning duties are generally divvied up amongst the team. My temporary team had a four-person rotation per night; two people cook, two people clean for every dinner. You cook one night a week, clean one night a week and then have three nights free (on weekends, people generally fended for themselves during NCCC training). On my permanent team, that’s been shifted to one cook, one cleaner, at least in theory. In practice, we’ve had relatively few sit-down team dinners; everyone had different schedules and our kitchen wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone, so most people just followed their own schedules and ate whatever. This week, John made minestrone and Mariah made tater tot casserole, both of which were welcome changes. I’ve cooked once since getting here, a valiant attempt at homemade salad dressing and pasta sauce that mostly just came out bland. I prefer cleaning anyway; it’s less stressful.

All of the above is daily life, but there are some outliers. For example, today is a travel day, during which our budget jumps up to $15 per person per day. (During the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, when our power was out, we also got $15/person/day until the lights came back on.) That’s supposed to allow for three meals, but it doesn’t always work that way; on Friday, we only had to pay for one meal—breakfast was our stuff, dinner at Anniston was provided—and we went to, ugggh, Taco Bell. We each had $15 to spend… at Taco Bell. The amount of crappy food we ate as a team was just overwhelming. My friend Joe bought an entire cake there and, as of this writing, has eaten half of it.

We were lucky enough, as a Corps, to have the whole first week catered by a local Vicksburg catering company. During our two weeks at Anniston, which started today, we will also be catered to by the good people of the Center for Domestic Preparedness. Beyond that, NCCC is expected to take care of itself the rest of the time, absent random events like church dinners or barbecues thrown by the city of Vicksburg. I’d never had ribs before, and I’m now wondering how on earth I went 22 years without them.

That’s NCCC food. I’ve spoken in glowing terms about how we’re being trained in all sorts of ways for whatever may come our way and whatever whatever, but when you look at that aspect of our lives, we’re really being trained extensively for one more thing: bachelorhood or spinsterhood. At least I’ll have experience as a dishwasher when it comes time to look for a career path. (Kidding. Mostly.)

We Have Infiltrated FEMA's Sanctum Sanctorium...

...and all that's here is some well-manicured grass, large brick dorms, immaculate sidewalks and all manner of amenities and visitor-center stuff. Somewhat ominously, the fences don't have barbed wire, but foot-long curved spikes pointing outward. In other words, they keep people out, but if you really really need to flee, i.e. over the walls, the spikes won't keep you in.

I actually have no idea what's here, since we've yet to actually do anything. I just wanted to put this up to let folks know that FEMA Corps has officially migrated. Like birds in winter, we fled to the... east (shush, I'm tired) to the magical land of Anniston, Alabama, in the middle of a government facility.

So far, it's very nice. The staff was insanely accomodating--my group was the last of five, and we got there an hour late due to an overlong tour at another FEMA facility in Jackson, MS. Their cafeteria staff had supposedly long since finished up, but they brought out 33 boxes of pure Gulf Coast food--ribs, baked potato, crab still in the shell--and five or six staff members had stuck around to help with our initial processing. For the first time, somebody else was being "FEMA flexible" on our behalf instead of the reverse!

Adding to the good impressions, the facilities look quite nice. The rooms are basically hotel rooms: nice bathroom, TV, one good bed (we're two CMs to a room, thus somebody gets a cot), one giant black refrigerator that dominates the room like the monolith at the end of 2001. We have access to a computer lab and wi-fi, which I'm using in concert to type up this blog; there's a volleyball court, numerous gyms, the best foosball table I've ever seen and a storage locker filled with bikes. And that's just on the housing campus where I am right now; the Center for Domestic Preparedness is friggin' massive.

So yeah. We don't actually start training until Tuesday, but the next three days will be consumed with in-processing activities, from getting our FEMA badges to our training on the security protocols here to our FEMA equipment. Each of us will be getting a FEMA-issued laptop, which comes in a 20-pound case that could survive a cruise missile attack, a Blackberry and some sort of government internet chip, to aid us in our various specialist tasks. I should be getting a camera as well, since I'm a media rep, so I can better document what we're doing. (They want us to put up one blog post per week. I wrote 3,700 words today on the way here, not counting this post.)

That's the news from the Center for Domestic Preparedness, of which we have seen only a tiny piece thus far. We have wi-fi all throughout the campus here, so I should be able to post daily (I have a TON of mostly non-NCCC stuff backed up because I've been limiting myself to a post a day) for the next two weeks. Breakfast is at 0545 tomorrow morning, so now is already past my bedtime. Goodnight internet!

I Am Officially a Member of the National Civilian Community Corps

Today was it: the biggest day of the last five weeks, one of the biggest events--pomp and circumstance-wise anyway--of our service lives. Today is the day that the first-ever class of FEMA Corps Members officially became part of NCCC. There was a color guard, an Americhoir singing the national anthem (I sang in that), an Ameriband crooning Queen's "Somebody to Love" (I sang along to that), and all of our High Overlords giving speeches to a crowd of royal blue FEMA Corps T-shirts. We heard from Wendy Spencer, the CEO of the CNCS; we heard from Richard Serino, deputy administrator of FEMA; we heard from Charles Davenport, our temporary Region Director; we listened to Kate Raftery, the head of NCCC, and half a dozen other speakers. There were thanks, well-wishes, analogies and congratulations in all of those speeches, but one line in particular caught my ear and eye.

I believe it was Mr. Serino who mentioned the word 'sacrifice', as in the sacrifice that we're making by joining FEMA Corps. And I guess it is considerable; ten months of our lives, working for little pay and in lousy (literally, I bet) conditions, when we could be out in the world starting our permanent careers and living life the way lots of 20-somethings want to? My friend and unit-mate Michael struck a similar note on Tuesday night, speaking to a stuffed Corps after the City of Vicksburg's delicious barbecue had vanished into our stomachs. He spoke about the sacrifices that members of the military are asked to make, and challenged us to think about what more we could--or would--sacrifice in our lives for the sake of doing good.

Listening to both Michael and Mr. Serino, a "sacrifice" seemed to be the act of making a concession. You give up something for the good of others and to help others; you're being selfless, noble, honorable. But you see, I've been playing chess for most of my life, and chess has its own special language. Within that language, the word "sacrifice" means something entirely different; in a game of chess, you sacrifice a piece in order to gain an advantage, even win the game outright. In other words, you sacrifice what you have in order to gain what you need.

I think that definition is much closer to the truth of what we're doing. Yes, we're leaving behind worldly comforts and glittering prizes, but the members of FEMA Corps Class 19 aren't truly giving up anything. We've traded our old lives for something fresh and new, and there's not a person in the Corps who hasn't bought into our mission. We're doing righteous work, helping people in their times of great need, and learning an amazing amount about ourselves and each other along the way. Give up? We're gaining everything. What we give to FEMA Corps will be repaid a hundred times over in friendship, experience, knowledge and good works. As FEMA Corps packs its bags and prepares to head to Anniston for training, it's my firm belief that we've given up nothing. A fantastic year is just around the corner, and you can't put a price on what we're about to experience.

How to Be a Better Human: NCCC's Renaissance Men and Women

Four weeks of NCCC training are almost completely in the books. Our structured classes ended for good a week and a half ago; last Monday was a training on how to approach and aid people with disabilities, and then we headed off to Camp Lake Stephens to put our training to work. This week so far has mostly been loose ends and cleanup before our induction ceremony on Friday, when we become full-fledged NCCC Corps Members. (We’ll still have two weeks of FEMA training after that, but I’ll take my victories where I find ‘em.)

Looking back and taking stock, I’m struck—I was struck at the time—by how much of the training was focused on making us better, more well-rounded human beings. Traditional NCCC gives you project-specific training when you go out on spike, so I guess it makes sense that so much of the in-class training focused on the intangibles of how to live with one’s team. There were some very tangible classes—CPR/First Aid and van driving, for two—but they were far outnumbered by what I like to call the “Don’t be a dick” and “don’t be a dumbass” units.

Those are exactly what they sound like: how to live with your team and interact with others without screwing up. They were essentially reinforcing our common sense. Don’t send emails in an unprofessional manner; be courteous, polite and good-natured. Remember that what you’re doing matters, and do all you can to learn why. How to eat properly on a very low budget, conduct yourself ethically and properly, how to solve your issues with other Corps Members. Understanding and appreciating and allowing for diversity. Maintaining a high quality of life. We learned how to write in an office setting or work with the elderly or, as I mentioned, work with the disabled. There are numerous others, all equally holistic.

All of these trainings have two complementary purposes. Yes, they’re preparing us for everything we might encounter Out There in the big, disaster-hit world of spikes and sleeping in tents, and they’re teaching us how to live with the same people for nine months and not go shithouse crazy (I suspect that’ll be considerably more important than we think). But they’re also fulfilling half of that NCCC motto: “Strengthening communities, developing leaders”. The considerable investment of time and money spent on us (Americorps NCCC spent $29 million in FY2010, as an example) is expected to pay off in us. You don’t show young people the world and expect them to quit after a year; you’re recruiting the best and the brightest! We’re not supposed to do a year of NCCC and then go forget everything we’ve learned; we’re supposed to take what we’ve learned and go use it after 2012.

Yes, it’s holistic and can feel very soft at times, as if we were learning how to be namby-pamby goodie-goodies instead of spending more time on what we’re actually going to be doing. Well, that part is getting started three days from now. FEMA is holding down the job we’re actually going to do; NCCC is more invested in how we’ll do it and who we’ll be afterwards. As a practical-minded person, I’m impatient for the FEMA training to finally get here. As a participant-observer of and in the program, I’m glad to see that we get the NCCC training as well.