Editorial: FEMA Fails Again

Tamara Glise doesn’t consider herself a crusader, but FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has turned her into one. To her dismay, Glise, interim director of Cedar Rapids Public Library (CRPL), IA, has found that her library is not entitled to FEMA funds to support services to the city’s residents when they need them most—after the 31' flood crest that devastated downtown Cedar Rapids and its main library in June 2008. That’s because of a now-antiquated 1988 law, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, which doesn’t include libraries among essential city services—unlike animal shelters, which apparently make the cut, says Glise.

A lot has happened in libraries, and in society, in the last two decades to make the law’s rationale untenable. Libraries are ever more integral to the well-being of their residents in the aftermath of disaster. We saw what happened on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, when dispersed evacuees and nervous returnees lined up at library Internet computers to connect with relatives, fill out online applications for government assistance, and so much more. FEMA didn’t help with interim service (though it did fund replacement of lost buildings and their contents), but others stepped up: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, library vendors, and additional contributors helped establish temporary facilities like bookmobiles and storefronts.

In Cedar Rapids, FEMA has approved the funds for a new library, 90 percent of the cost of which it will reimburse. "[But our residents did] not have time to wait the two to four years it would take for a new library to be built," Glise told LJ. "[They] needed information on mold remediation, dealing with contaminated documents, how to muck out their homes safely, as well as local news concerning housing, free meals, and other basic necessities." With the shift to e-government, displaced or dispossessed residents also needed Internet stations to apply for FEMA and public assistance online—"and we had only two [to start] to offer thousands of people." Ironically, FEMA workers directed community members who had lost their homes to CRPL’s limited interim facility for help.

Now Glise is being forced to cut staff from the very management team that restored library service in several storefronts at the Westdale Mall within days of the Cedar River flood, which FEMA itself designated as the fifth largest national disaster in U.S. history. For their extraordinary efforts to set up an alternate facility—and to continue to provide library services at a time of dire need—the members of that Cedar Rapids management team were named LJ’s 2009 Librarian of the Year. Two of the 11 staffers honored, tech services manager Rebecca Bartlett and shelver manager Pat Schabo, are among those being let go, along with five others.

"It’s no exaggeration to say that every single public library in the country is vulnerable" under the Stafford Act, warns Glise. "In essence any public library that is completely destroyed (whether by flood, hurricane, tornado, etc.)...must do what we did—eke a temporary library out of an already skin-tight budget," which CRPL did with help from the city, Friends, foundation, and private donors.

As of this writing, FEMA is about to get a new head (confirmation hearings are in progress in the Senate for President Obama’s nominee, Craig Fugate), and Glise is awaiting what will likely be rejection of CRPL’s final appeal to FEMA to fund a temporary building and vital services. Even if CRPL and its political backers are successful, the decision will serve only as an exception to the Stafford Act. It’s time for the library community to force FEMA to make the connection between libraries and disaster survival and recovery. It’s time to let the new head of FEMA know the essential role libraries play in the 21st century.