Thousands of volunteer feds staff Katrina relief effort
Published: November 5, 2005
The number of federal employees who left their day-to-day jobs to volunteer in Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts has surpassed 7,500 and the Federal Emergency Management Agency continues to receive offers from civil servants interested in lending a hand.
“We’re still using [the volunteers] and we’re still getting more people calling,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker.
The volunteer count is from all federal agencies, including the Homeland Security Department, Walker said. She said that it took three days to compile the number for Government Executive, as a comprehensive count was not readily available.
FEMA officials “were still in the ‘Oh my God, let’s get people there quick’ type mode,” said Homeland Security Department spokesman Larry Orluskie. “I don’t know if there was somebody counting beans as much as they were just trying to get people down there.”
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown sent a formal request for 2,000 DHS volunteers to department Secretary Michael Chertoff on Aug. 29. After contacting FEMA’s Human Resource Operations Branch, employees able to volunteer were sent to either Atlanta for community relations training or Orlando for all other kinds of training.
Volunteers were to be sent to a disaster joint field office when conditions were safe and they had completed training, Brown’s request stated.
According to the request, it was “beneficial” for FEMA to seek volunteers from within DHS, for efficiency reasons. Employees from the department already had been subject to background investigations and had travel cards and badges, eliminating the normal delay experienced when preparing a surge workforce.
Ultimately, though, FEMA accepted some volunteers from outside the department. The agency could not provide a breakdown of how many of the 7,500 federal volunteers came from the Homeland Security Department versus other agencies. Officials also could not say which agency sent the most volunteers.
The U.S. Fire Administration is one example of an agency that was able to send a number of volunteers, FEMA said. Fire Administration employees performed community relations work, including door-to-door distribution of flyers containing updates on the situation.
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