"Operation Blue Roof."

[Aquawind]

Operation Blue Roof costly, ill organized

Lack of tarps, service contracts hinder FEMA

By LARRY WHEELER
THE NEWS-PRESS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Published by news-press.com on May 29, 2005

Four hurricanes that ripped through Florida a year ago caught the nation's principal disaster relief agency unprepared to fix thousands of roofs damaged or destroyed by the storms.

The emergency roofing mission fell short on two counts, a Gannett News Service/The News Press investigation found.

First, the Federal Emergency Management Agency didn't have enough plastic.

Second, the government failed to get advance agreements from roofing contractors to install the temporary plastic covers.

As a result, the government may have paid millions more than necessary for the repairs.

Still, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were able to help tens of thousands of Floridians whose homes were damaged by the hurricanes.

The massive federal aid program provided temporary roof repairs to about 143,000 Florida homes, more the FEMA had ever attempted.

Gannett News Service analyzed thousands of computer records and interviewed more than two dozen government officials, contractors, manufacturers and homeowners to create a comprehensive portrait of "Operation Blue Roof."

Before the hurricane season began, FEMA had 58,000 rolls of plastic roofing material stockpiled in warehouses, some of it 6 years old. Those supplies proved inadequate.

FEMA managers, in fact, had decided the agency would get out of the business of making temporary roof repairs after disasters.

"We had not done a large temporary roofing mission since 1998 in Puerto Rico," said William Carwile, III, federal coordinating officer for FEMA's response to the 2004 hurricane season. "A lot of people in our agency thought we would never do it again and were committed to the idea of never doing it again."

After the hurricanes hit, FEMA spent $26 million to buy an additional 120,000 rolls of plastic.

NO CONTRACTS

Roof repairs in Florida also were hampered because FEMA had no contracts to mobilize thousands of workers to install the blue plastic sheets. The agency routinely signs advance contracts for other types of disaster assistance such as water, ice and emergency power generators.

But FEMA and its partner, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, decided to enter the 2004 hurricane season without advance arrangements with roofing contractors.

That decision slowed the start of roofing repair operations in Southwest Florida and may have caused the government to pay more than it should have, $1.75 per square foot, for the work.

The final tab was at least $630 million, according to interviews with FEMA and Corps officials. That works out to $4,405 per roof.

Florida roofing contractors who did not participate in "Operation Blue Roof" said $1.75 per square foot is more than they would charge.

"Even at that time, you could get a brand-new roof in that price range," said Steve Munnell, of the Florida Roofing, Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association.

Carwile defended the contracts.

"We're not talking about putting on a roof during a nice day under no sense of urgency," he said.

Corps of Engineers officials conceded the hurricanes caught them by surprise.

"We really didn't anticipate anything of this magnitude in the United States," said Ed Hecker, the top Homeland Security executive at the Army Corps of Engineers' Washington headquarters. "It was a gap in our readiness."

The overall cost of Operation Blue Roof is still undetermined. FEMA officials, for example, could not provide an estimate of what the agency paid the Corps of Engineers for staff who spent weeks away from home.

CALLED A SUCCESS

Operation Blue Roof was largely a technical and public relations success, according to many of those interviewed.

When Hurricane Charley blasted ashore on Aug. 13, it caused heavy damage to homes in Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and along a line northeast of those communities.

With about 34,000 homes damaged in Charlotte County alone, it was apparent plans to put hurricane victims in hotels or other temporary shelters were inadequate.

Florida officials asked FEMA to help hurricane victims stay in their homes by providing temporary roof repairs. Federal officials agreed and "Operation Blue Roof" 2004 began.

FEMA officials called on the Corps of Engineers to execute the mission.

Wayne Sallade, director of emergency management in Charlotte County, gives the Corps high marks.

All FEMA did was provide the tarps, he said.

"For a first effort, I thought it was a hell of a job," Sallade said of the Corps' handiwork.

Charlotte County alone had 84,000 tarps placed, he said, and some homes needed up to three tarps to cover their roofs.

The tarps were not meant to be a long-term fix or last nine months in the Florida sun, he said.

That's what happened to Linda Wallace, 67, who lives on Beeney Road in Port Charlotte. Her blue-tarped roof was replaced less than four weeks ago.

"I applied for everything FEMA had. They basically turned me down except for the blue roof," Wallace said.

Her one complaint is that the Corps didn't come soon enough. Two to three weeks went by in which rain caused further damage to homes in the area.

"They did do a magnificent job when they tarped," Wallace said.

Todd Trulock, chief of the Corps' emergency operations center in Jacksonville, guided the initial blue-roof response.

"You don't have time to get overwhelmed," Trulock said. "It's kind of organized chaos. There were many, many times when I had people talking to me on both cell phones."

Initially, Trulock sent teams of federal workers and volunteers into neighborhoods to get homeowners to fill out "right of entry" forms to give contractors permission to come on private property to make roof repairs.

Eventually, the door-to-door campaign gave way to a more efficient method Trulock described as a "lemonade stand" approach.

"We would set up outside a Publix or Big Kmart and spread the word," Trulock said. "People would start coming to us en masse."

Faced with reports of a huge swath of destruction left by Charley, FEMA officials committed most of their blue plastic sheeting, 51,000 rolls, to Southwest Florida.

Each roll weighed more than 100 pounds and measured 20 feet by 100 feet. It took 1.5 rolls to cover the average roof.

Operation Blue Roof was gathering momentum when workers were told to seek shelter as Hurricane Frances approached Florida's east coast. After the storm made landfall near Fort Pierce, FEMA and Corps officials set up a roofing operation on the Atlantic Coast.

FEMA officials rushed to order more polyethylene sheeting from plants in New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere. Corps officials hired additional contractors to install it.

After Ivan's winds shredded the Pensacola Bay area on Sept. 16, there weren't enough FEMA or Corps personnel on the ground to set up sites to collect right-of-entry forms.

To make do, private work crews distributed the documents and collected the completed forms, turning them over to government officials when they could find them.

"We were on site with a lot of manpower before they arrived," said Gene Oden, senior project manager at LJC Defense Contracting Construction of Dothan, Ala. "We set up collection centers and let the local radio stations know where we were and that people needed to fill (right-of entry forms) out."

FEMA's Carwile said contractors stepped in while the federal agency struggled to find enough people to staff a third hurricane zone.

"That was an extreme situation," Carwile said. "That wasn't the way it was designed."

Supplies of the blue plastic remained tight for weeks. At times, the material was rationed.

In Pensacola, plastic supplies were so depleted roofers were forced to stand down for days at a time.

PROJECT TAKES OFF

Once the hurricanes ended, manufacturers produced enough new plastic roofing material within 90 days to replace the pre-hurricane stockpile twice over.

Roofing crews swarmed from house to house.

"At the peak, we were installing 600 roofs per day," said Chris Sammons, a spokesman for Shaw Environmental of Baton Rouge, La.

In late November, workers patched nearly 4,000 roofs in one day, according to the Army Corps of Engineers' roofing database.

The presence of roofing crews also served as an emotional balm to shellshocked residents.

"People were crying and saying 'thank you,' " National Roofing's Crispino said. "It's not often in our business that you get to help people like that."

— The News-Press staff writer Mary Wozniak contributed to this report.

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 90510/1053

Well informed and prepared alrighty..No contract signed yet?..geesh..Gov't cuts it close..

Paul

[T'Bonz]

Bloody heck, FEMA is a giant clusterf**k. It needs a serious kick in the butt.

I hope I never, ever need their services.