The guy who wrote the song, “It Never Rains in Southern California,” was wrong.
It does rain in Southern California. Often.
When it does, it often comes in torrents, leaving local leaders in a pickle. They’re not prepared for the disasters these storms leave in their wake and must turn to others for help.
That was the situation in January 2023, when the Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District noticed above-average, torrential rainfall was filling the usually dry Twitchell Reservoir to a point beyond its capacity.
The threat of flooding, of the dam holding back approximately 6 billion gallons of stormwater and sediment bursting, was suddenly very real.
Problematically, local officials, whose yearly budget was just $820,000, had neither the equipment nor personnel on hand to prevent the disaster that was obviously about to occur.
They turned quickly to Mitigation Solutions LLC, and Barnett Southern Corp. for help preventing a breach that would have left thousands homeless and caused tens of millions of dollars or more in damage to the Santa Maria Valley.
The Georgia-based construction company, which has extensive experience in disaster recovery and prevention, moved quickly, deploying barges, pumps and heavy equipment at the reservoir along with the personnel needed for an around-the-clock effort to prevent the situation from reaching the critical stage.
They weren’t alone in this effort, which, after some touch-and-go, was a success.
Mitigation Solutions/Barnett Southern worked with the local water conservation board and with state and federal partners, including the California Office of Emergency Services, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has recently been much in the news, to mitigate the pending disaster.
“Had the emergency work not been performed,” according to Barnett Southern CEO Ames Barnett, “the district would have been forced to release dangerous levels of floodwaters and sediment downstream or else risk facility failure, endangering the health and safety of the 100,000 or more residents and thousands of properties in the Santa Maria area.”
Everything worked out. Everybody should be happy, but they’re not.
In something that’s not quite the shock it should be, FEMA, which has the responsibility to pay MSL/BSC for the work it performed, is refusing to make good on its obligations.
This may seem like a small thing, being only one project out of hundreds overseen every year by the agency, but it’s not.
It’s symptomatic of a much larger institutional problem that needs to be addressed.
Think about it. When was the last time you heard of FEMA doing anything right? Remember the praise then-President George W. Bush heaped on then-director Michael Brown after Hurricane Katrina demolished much of New Orleans?
“You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Brownie” ranks high on the list of all-time quotes the utterer wishes they could claw back.
California, Florida, North Carolina and Puerto Rico are just some of the places that have captivated our attention after they were visited by torrential storms, raging wildfires and other natural disasters where FEMA is supposed to mitigate damage, manage cleanup and help reconstruct.
It hasn’t been getting it done. At least that’s what President Donald Trump concluded while visiting North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
Trump said he would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA,” according to news reports at the time.
He was serious. Unfortunately, acting-FEMA head Cameron Hamilton didn’t understand that.
One day after he told a congressional panel that eliminating the agency was not “in the best interest of the American people,” he was bounced from the job.
Too bad for him, but good for us.
If FEMA cannot manage after two years to pay a small Georgia contractor for work it did in the middle of a developing crisis to prevent the Santa Maria Valley from being flooded out, preventing billions of dollars in property damage and the loss of many lives, what good is it?
Making whole MSL/BSC and all the other folks sitting around waiting to be paid for work they’ve already done should be the administration’s first order of business.
“You pay what you owe” is a time-honored Americanism that someone like Trump, who made his fortune developing and redeveloping some of the nation’s most impressive real estate, knows well.
But he also understands, as we should, that bureaucratic red tape is the enemy of quick response.
It’s OK in some places, where it’s essential to dot every I and cross every T, but not when lives and property are on the line.
What needs to happen, and what Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem want to do, is to reimagine FEMA rather than rebuild it.
There are good ideas out there, ones that increase the authority of state governments and local communities while limiting the role of the federal government to paying for much of the work that needs to be done.
That’s an idea worth exploring. Block grants are a better way than bureaucracy to manage the diverse problems that occur in emergency management.
Let’s hope for action soon.
