Alabama Gov. Bob Riley told a specially-formed House panel in Washington on Wednesday that Alabama could use more federal money and more flexibility when spending it to confront natural disasters.
According to the Mobile Register, Riley spoke for more than an hour about Alabama’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and forcefully defended his decision to require criminal background checks of adult evacuees housed at 13 state parks, saying he would do it again.
Riley lauded the performance of the much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency but implored lawmakers to grant states more freedom in dealing with a disaster’s immediate aftermath.
Likening the federal government to an essential but hard-to-maneuver battleship, Riley said, “What we need is more like a speedboat in the first 24 to 48 hours.”
For example, Washington should provide money for states to “pre-position” water and other supplies before disaster strikes rather than trucking them in afterward. And it’s “crazy,” he added, to keep state governments from providing generators to grocery stores and other private entities that can speed the return to normal life.
When the state in fact did put a generator in an Orange Beach supermarket after Hurricane Ivan last year, Riley said, residents not only had access to water and ice, “they could buy baby food, they could buy diapers, they could get whatever they need.”
He also asked for money to four- lane evacuation routes, such as Alabama 113, and criticized FEMA and Carnival Cruise Lines for taking Mobile’s one ship, the Holiday, to use as an evacuee shelter.
“If you’re going to move one, move one from a port where you’ve got eight or 10 or 15 ships. Why take one ship from one port where it is the only source of revenue?
“Overall, however, FEMA did a better job in Alabama than ever before, Riley said. He even saluted the agency’s former administrator, Michael Brown, for maintaining a “constant level of communication.”
Topics Natural Disasters Alabama
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