Michael Loewinger

Then he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts.

Now, this does not take like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this.

And people could say, God, this is common sense.

And my answer is, yeah, but nobody did it before.

And when did you get a sense that like people out there in the public were taking notice?

Oh.

Well, there was one of the other really smart things that Mr. Witt did.

Back in the Cold War days, FEMA kept the news media at bay, like, go away, keep out, keep out, keep out.

And so that just added the suspicion.

Well, Witt opened the doors to it.

The news media could come into our Emergency Operations Center right there in Washington, D.C., and they could observe things, and they could even interview us.

Witt relished speaking with the press.

He seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked.

Within a year of joining FEMA, he began chipping away at its secret black budget, declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters.

The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt's first major test as administrator.

It started in 1993 with the flood on the Mississippi River.

Affected nine states.

And the devastation was just unreal.

The water kept on coming.

Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads, In this emergency, agency wins praise for its response.