Michael Loewinger

But when I grew up, I was working.

What did your father do?

He was a farmer.

Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back.

And when he came to FEMA in 1993, he became the first leader in the agency's 14-year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters.

Witt comes in, and that's when he totally started turning everything around.

How did he do that?

Well, a lot of it was really common sense.

He knew there were all kinds of problems internal to FEMA.

So he sends a memo to all hands, first official action, open-door policy.

So all of a sudden, he's getting all these employees coming in and giving them an earful of all the problems in the agency.

He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an all-hazards approach to emergency response.

Okay, if the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster,

What kind of jobs are they going to have to do?

Let's train people for those jobs.

He also made rosters of who would be on duty when during the disaster.

And he said, okay, we're going to divide the employees here like into three teams, the red team, the white team, and the blue team.

Yay, the flag, right?

If you're on the red team, you're on call for disasters during January.

February, if you're on the white team, you're on call.