Welcome to Knight Talks, the University of Florida Colleg of Journalism and Communications produced by students for student I'm Dazion Prosser, a senior studying journalism.

And our guest today is Craig Fugate.

He's the former Director of the Division of Emergency Management from 2001 to 2009 and the former Administrator of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from 2009 to 2017.

He now consults in the areas of management and crisis response.

Hi, Craig.

Thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

Your experience at county, state and federal lev of emergency management is amazing, though let's start back when you attend Fe College, studying to be a par What led you to this field and w inspired your passion for helpin I grew up in a little town just north of here, Alachua.

I wasn't out of high school, but maybe a couple of months.

And some local folks who knew me because its a small town and everybody knows you, said, Y we need some new volunteer firef Would you be interested?

And I knew a lot of people, a lot of people I went to church And so I said, Well, that sounds interesting.

So what do I got to do?

And so they would have like weekly meetings and they do some You hold the hoses and squirt wa and I'm like, Well this is cool.

And they said, Oh, we need you to go to EMT school.

And I'm thinking, Oh, okay.

Well, it turned out there was like an age difference The older people that were in th department weren't interested in up all night and run calls becau when you got a lot more emergenc So I went to EMT school and it was done through Santa Fe at that time, Santa Fe Community And I went through that course and got my EMT.

I got some people saying, Hey, why don't you go down to the Florida State Fire C and get your minimum standards?

So I went down to the Florida St College and I went to the fire academy d and I took all the requirements to become a professional firefig but I was still a volunteer.

And then I got out of that and t like I got hired by Alachua Coun I started driving ambulances.

And so my next step was to go to paramedic school.

So all through this, it wasn't that I'd grown up wanting to be but I grew up watching this old that if you grew up and my generation was like this really cool show call Emerg And it was interesting because it was a show about Los Fire Department, a rescue squad and paramedics.

And it's really the first time the idea paramedics was being in to people across the nation.

Yet here in Alachua County, we had paramedics.

One of the earliest counties to have like 911 and a paramedic and doing the pre-hospital care.

So, you know, I always remember and I always saw myself, Johnny and all the stuff they would do and I was like, That's really co So I kind of migrate in that dir Alachua County kept growing, beg providing fire services, and ult I was starting out in the county I was at the EMT.

Then I was a paramedic.

And ultimately I became a lieute with Alachua County Fire Rescue.

You start out, you know, working as a basically brand new employe You move up, you now began getting more supervisory roles.

And so by the time I made Lieute I was now responsive for supervi the day to day as well as during the emergency You served as the Emergency Mana for Alachua County from 1987 to What were some of the events you oversaw in this role and what action could be taken in a case of the worst emergency Well, we would have occasionally chemical emergencies.

Those were actually some of the biggest ones.

There was a chemical facility out near the Gainesville Airport They had a chemical release and it crossed basically across State Road 24, got into some of the mobile home parks there and big cloud.

So we ended up having to do a lot of evacuating, sheltering We had a lot of people now showing up in the emergency room because of irritations.

That went on for the better part of an evening to get that resolv One of the things that I think and it was an early lesson and that was during this chemical emergency, we had this very toxic white clo crossing the road and people were driving through And, you know, the law enforceme trying to stop people in there driving through it.

And what were they doing?

They were driving home to get th Afterwards, I got a lot of criti because we said shelter in place People called up and complained tell them to bring their pets in Most of the complaints we actual about that involved pets.

And a lot of people were very dismissive o But it started to teach me very valuable lesson.

When we were talking about disasters, companion anima there's a tendency to separate t and go, Well, they're not as important as peop And I'm like, You're looking at this wrong.

It isn't a pet problem.

It's a people problem.

Because if people are going to g harm's way to rescue their pets, then you need to figure out how you're going to rescue their In 1997, you were appointed Bure for Preparedness and Response for the Florida Div of Emergency Management.

What led to that appointment?

I got a phone call.

Everybody says, you know, how do you get all these jobs?

I said, I answered my phone and they think I'm kidding.

I'm like, No, I got a phone call state director one weekend.

His deputy had left to go back to the state Carolina to become state directo His name was Eric Tolbert.

So the director at the time, Joe called me up and says, Hey, Eric I want you to come in and be the bureau chief.

It was a good time because I'd been at the county and done pretty much everything that I could do with what I had.

You know, we built a good team.

I was like getting where what's And so when the phone call came, I was ready to go.

Joe interviewed me.

He offered me the job, and I went to work for And it was like May of 97.

I can remember I gave my notice to the county and then two weeks later started working in state.

And I literally worked my last d in Alachua County on a Friday.

And the next Monday started to my job in Tallahassee So that really no break.

You kno people say, yeah, you take two w You know, I went from one job to the next job over a weekend.

So in 2001, when you became the of the Florida Division of Emergency Management Was this a role you were working Not really.

I had reached a point where I'd gotten about as far as I was going to go in t I didn't ever really see myself as being the state director.

I wasn't politically connected.

And I had some conversations with people at FEMA about going and working in the response section up there.

But then my boss, Joe Myers, per that brought me to the state, decided to leave, go to the private sector.

Governor Bush appointed me as the Interim Director.

And so we went through that hurricane season.

I wasn't sure what they were loo They said are going to this national search, but they k Nothing was really going on.

I was actually at the national c for the state emergency managers Montana when 9/11 hit.

And so we came back.

We were dealing with the rest of hurricane season.

We're dealing with the aftermath of all the 9/11 stuff.

And Governor Bush calls me up.

I'm announcing the new Secretary of Health tomorrow and I'm going to announce you as the Director full time.

And I'm like, Im honored.

I'm h Thank you, sir.

And he says, but you have to change your affi And I'm thinking and I'm thinkin thinking, I don't know what to s I really want this job, but I'm not sure it's really wor I got to change my political aff And after a long pause, you said you turned me down, wou I said, Yes, sir.

So, I guess I have one Gator on and that was it.

He never once questioned my political affiliations.

To him, it was less important that I was registered as a Democ More important that my work and, you know, my qualifications.

So that's when it started.

It was right in the aftermath of You guys did a lot of training and he was very hands on.

So what were some situations where that training came to frui and how did it kind of play out?

I think, you know, there's this we call lessons learned after di And sometimes the lessons that people think they learned may not be what was important.

So after Hurricane Andrew, there was a big disconnect in the first day of what people thought had happened and what had really happened.

So the county EOC and the state were basically thinking they had dodged a bullet.

They werent getting a lot of reports of dama And where they did see damage, it was about what you expect from a hurricane, but it wasn't anything catastrop What they didnt know was essent Miami Dade County from about 122 south, there was no phone lines and it was total devastation.

And the lack of 911 calls, they thought indicated it wasn't So they lost about a day.

So the thought was after Hurrica we got to get in faster and do assessments to know it's and to send help.

Well, it turned out all that sen people down there to do the asse took about another day.

So we weren't really saving any I wanted to really just start re and send people in.

And theyre going, Well, how do it's bad?

How do you know how ma I was like, Its a hurricane.

We kind of know what those look We know where it's coming ashore We know how many people live the We can get a pretty good estimat And what I found was speed was probably the most important The faster we got in the communities in the after the storm passed, the bett the outcome was.

We got to the point where as soo the tropical force winds passed, we started pushing people in the We said we're not waiting for bl or sunlight.

We're going.

And that we kicked off with Hurricane Charley.

We did it through the rest of the 2004-2005 hurricane seaso And we got faster and faster to where I remember with Hurricane Dennis we were literally handing out su 12 hours after the storm past th By 2005, when we got hit by Hurr Wilma, towards the end of that y there was already a lot of resources had been soak because of Katrina and Hurricane There wasn't much stuff left.

And while we were struggling to get things up and running, we really weren't paying attenti to the fact that the private sec like Florida chains like Publix and Winn-Dixie and others, where normally when the power would be their stores were closed.

Well, after the 2004 hurricane s they began bringing in generators, extra cr restocking their stores.

And it turned out in most cases, they were open before we got there to set up and we in many cases found ourse setting up where they were alrea to hand out free supplies.

And it was now evident that we w A) competing with the private se but B) we were missing the most vulnerable communities.

And so in talking with the priva talking with Governor Bush, we kind of changed our philosoph rather than just coming in and s automatically after the storms, we would talk to the private sec in that initial phase.

We werent going to slow anythin But what we would do is if you'r or you can get open, we're going to draw a circle aro that and go, We're not going to put anything and then we're going to look for where the gaps are.

It turns out where the gaps are tended to be the rural poor area areas of the state that we didn' to often until the second or thi Now, we could get there on day o because we weren't having to sen into the heavily populated areas because in many cases the private sector could get those supplies up and We could go to the Pahokees and Belle Glades that we weren't getting to until day two or day Instead of focusing on West Palm where it turned out, there was a lot of open grocery even with a power out, because they had learned in the season in the last couple of yea they needed to get generators, they needed to get open.

And so that really started changing the dyna of going from government centric to really looking at what ultima we started calling the whole com But, like, what can the private sector get?

And the different question we ne ask: what do you need from us to instead of what can you do for u And this is where the Waffle Hou index came from.

If the Waffle House is closed because of the disaster, it's re If it's open with a limited menu it's yellow.

And if it's open, got a full men its green.

And it would have probably stopp except we kept getting hit by hu Remember I said we weren't going to know how bad it was.

Problem is, if you're driving ou on Interstate 10 like for Hurric you're going to start seeing dam before you get to where it went So the question is when do you stop and go to work?

And so they began using this kind of rough rule of if the Waffle House is open, got a full menu, it's not that b Keep going.

If the Waffle House is open and limited menu, we've had power ou May have disrupted water.

That's mass care.

That's not a search and rescue.

But if you get there and a Waffl House is closed because of the s those are heavily impacted areas Go to work.

And that's the origin of it.

And then we would brief on that and people found that fascinatin But it was interesting that it gave us the ability to l something that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, doesn' and has shown a history of getting open quickly after di as a way of doing quick assessment of impacts to a commu by looking at infrastructure, in this case a restaurant.

Its kind of followed me around.

But it's interesting that it wor pretty good from being able to like a quick snapshot of how a community is faring.

Just think about if a Waffle House is open, that means workers had to have a place to stay.

They had to be able to get there So the roads may have debris, but they were able to get there.

The buildings got to be safe enough to operate They can operate without water or electricity.

They have ways, you know, they'l bottled water and stuff like tha And customers can get there.

If they're closed, none of that And if they're open and got a fu there may be damages.

But, you know, now that your pow and water system is pretty well and that a lot of what you're going to be doing is just There's not going to be a lot of things you have to do for that recovery That's interesting.

So tell us about 2005, the response to Hurricane Katrin and why Florida launched a mutua aid response in support of other A lot of things, what I call the era of emergency management in F goes back to Hurricane Andrew.

And after Hurricane Andrew, the late Governor Chiles, Govern at the time realized that in these types of states would be the fastest assi to each other.

There was this tendency to alway upon the federal government.

But Governor Chiles realized that states could help each othe So he launched a compact between the Southern governors to assist each other responding to disasters.

And then that grew and became what's called the Emergency Mana Assistance Compact.

And when Hurricane Katrina was o Florida was a signature of that.

And so we had people came and he during 2004 hurricanes from Alabama, Mississippi, Louis So when Katrina hit Florida, peo forget this, but it hit as a Cat Went across the Everglades, came was originally heading towards u and the panhandle.

We had gotten a lot of resource because the thing we learned is you don't get time back.

So we wouldn't wait to the storm to start moving people.

Florida's big state.

So we were moving people out of Florida, southwest Florida, central Florida and northeast co And we were moving them and stag which means basically parking th and the equipment just outside of the storm.

And s a lot of people at the Tallahass fairgrounds and surrounding area And when the storm track moved further to the west and Florida was outside of that a lot of people thought, Well, w We can go home.

And I'm like, I'm pretty sure somebody's going to So we were talking, we were doing conference calls with our neighboring states and we kind of worked it out.

Texas would support Louisiana.

We would either get hit or we'd support Mississippi because my counterpart, Bruce Bauman in Alabama and I both knew that the Gulf Sh and Pensacola were too close.

So if we get hit, we're busy.

So what Bruce said, Hey, Craig, if you guys aren't hit, just go I'll deal with I got because I'm not going to b If you're not hit, I'm not hit t And as soon as I can get, folks well go in.

And so that night when Katrina h we actually had search and rescu moving across the state.

Now, this is coordinated between the states.

And when our first crews got out there and again, this is like the sun has even co They were already seeing the dev And as we talked to Mississippi, it became evident that they were hit and the Tennesseans focus on the But that storm had actually gone up to the middle state.

So they had damages all the way at the Jackson.

They couldn't get down there.

Roads were all blocked.

It was actually turned out easier to get from Florida to those southern coastal counti in Mississippi than it was for Mississippi to g from the middle of the state dow because of all the damage.

So we increased our response, ultimately sent about 6000 responders, volunteer agencies, private sect Again, it was our whole team.

We basically took the approach that those southern coastal counties, whatever they we were working through the stat We would treat them like a Florida county.

So that was the largest response that the st had ever done in a mutual aid.

But it was all based on the lega and lessons that we learned from Hurricane A Absolutely.

So in 2009, you were sworn in as FEMA administrator by Barack Did you have to campaign at all for the opportunity or were you surprised when he selected you?

No, it's the classic: I got a ph I got a phone call.

People that were involved in the transition team, would you consi And I'm like, well, my first ans not to say, but I'm not looking.

Hung up.

Couple of weeks later, I got ano Could you put it down on paper your resume and stuff like that?

Well I dont really have a resum I'm not looking.

I'm happy.

At that time, I was working for Governor Crist Well, could you put something do So I put some stuff down and I s and I thought, will that be the And then I got another call.

Would I come up and meet the new secretary of Homeland Se And I'm like, sure, When?

Well, can you come up tomorrow?

Well, what about Friday?

No, I'm I have a job.

Ive already sched Well, you do understand this is the secretary of Homelan wants to interview you.

And I'm like, Yeah, I got that, but I already have a job.

I can be up there next Wednesday And they were a little bit, you disappointed that I didn't rush So I go up there, I meet with it was Janet Napolitano.

I meet with her and we talked for a while.

She was asked me about my philos about response, and all this stu She was a governor of Arizona, s about state emergency management And so we went through this thin The only two questions that real I remember because everything el kind of a blur was did I pay my And had I ever had an undocument working for me.

And I'm like, No, ma'am, I work for state government.

We can't afford- And then I went home.

It was never said what I was interviewing for.

Later that week, there was an ar that came out in the Washington talking about, you know, the guessing game of who's getti And my name was mentioned as one of the possible candidate for FEMA Administrator.

Now, I had told the governors staff I got calle and they were very supportive of Governor Crist calls me up and congratula I said, sir, I'm not even sure they haven't told me anything.

And then I get this call from Wh Office of Personnel.

Now they start the vetting proce Now I get serious because now I've got to go through backgroun I got to go through the security clearance checks.

They go through all your financial records.

I mean, it was like a very invasive proc They still haven't told me what And, finally I get the call their intention is to nominate m to be the FEMA Administrator and they're going to announce it So I said, Well, before you announce it, I got to tell- There's three thi I tell my wife, you know.

I said, obviously I need to tell I need to tell my governor.

I remember one thing Governor Cr is, Craig, I don't want your res We don't know how this is going You're my guy.

If it doesn't turn out, you're still my guy.

So when you get confirmed, you'l As you look back, how do you def you time and success at FEMA?

There's a lot of things we did.

We had a lot of responses and th I thought we did better and thin we could have done better and things we didn't do well at We changed what we were calling people in disasters.

And you'll still see this on news and stuff, they call the people in disaster And I said we're not using that We're going to call them survivo And the reason why is I look at as part of the team, and if we're calling them victim we're basically saying don't do or you're not going to do anythi and you got to be saved by us.

And I'm like, I've been to a lot of disasters.

Nobody's waiting to be saved by so let's get it through our head They're the survivors.

Our job is to support them.

The victims are the ones we lost and will mourn.

But everybody else is a survivor And don't think one minute they' on you to tell them how to survi What we need to do is be supportive and get in ther and make sure we're helping the and local governments get things back online.

But we need to see the public as part of the team.

Second thing was when I got ther I went out and met with a lot of You go out, you get paraded arou and so one of the groups I met was the Native Americans, the tribal governments.

And they were used to agencies coming in and talking at them.

And they were pretty resigned to So I went in there and I remember they had me in th They had me up on the stage and I'd got some, you know, good sta They were telling me the back st and stuff like that, things like Okay, we're gonna do something d I ain't doing a speech.

I set down the stage.

I said, Tell me what I need to k And the tribes unloaded.

Well, first of all, it turns out we recognized them everywhere else in the federal g as sovereign governments, except The way Congress wrote our statu they're treated as political sub of the states theyre in.

So if you're familiar with the Seminole tribe, the Seminole tribe is a sovereig government not subjected or under state gov But in a disaster, we would tell the Seminole tribe if you want federal assistance, you have to go to the state and they wouldn't do it.

And this is true across the entire country.

And I said, okay.

It took us about almost, this was in the beginning, it took us about six years to get the legislation changed.

It actually we got it changed actually, the fifth year.

We got it changed in the afterma of the Sandy disaster.

We got a lot of things done.

One of the pieces we got done is we changed the tribal government from being part of the political subdivisions of the states to being in the same category of territories and federally recognized tribes.

And so to me, it was righting so that I found that was grievously But most people said, well, this is going to be too much wor It's going to be too hard.

You're going to add over 500 gov now that can ask for disasters.

This is going to get out of cont And it turned out it didn't.

And to me, that was probably of all the thi legislatively was the one that f something I consider very wrong, that we were treating our federally recognized tribes you know, basically subdivisions of a state government when they I think that's amazing.

So describe your interaction with the press media.

Was it useful during crises or did it create its own hazards to effective emergency messaging Well, I was well trained and I w trained by the school of Journal here at the University of Florid And I never took a course here.

But there was a professor here, Tom Krinsky, who would take his journalism st and send them over to interview just about anything you could th whether it was getting ready for hurricane season or the shipment of nuclear waste on highways or, you know, chemical storage.

And so to a certain degree, I got trained doing these interv because I was doing that on a fairly frequent basis, and they thought they were getting the training.

They were training me.

I learned some valuable lessons.

First of all, when you asked me a question, I don't have to answer the quest I can say whatever I want to say that two, you know, listen to the question and what I got taught was the media has a production sched It's like a clock.

And if you understand that clock you should then time your press and your press conferences so it fits their clock.

So don't be doing a press confer 5 minutes before they go live with the new unless you're the live shot.

Because you think about during d there's two roles here.

We need the media to help us com and tell the public what's going They also have the job of report what we did well and more importantly, what we didn't do well.

But you can't confuse the two.

If you don't know something, tha but let us know how long it will take you to find that out so we'll know when to come back for that, you And don't make stuff up.

Don't feel you have to say somet because we're asking the questio you don't know.

Saying, I don't know and when I or here's what we're doing to ge the information is a perfectly a answer.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So most recently, you're consulted on emergency ma What kind of services do you pro and do you still interact much with the national media?

Yeah, I get a lot of calls because I'm like the has-been.

They'll call me up and I'll get about what about this?

What about that?

So I get those kind of questions I'm also involved in a lot of the policy space.

I do work.

I'm on a couple of boards with American Public Television So all of the PBS stations, I do work in advising for Florid Public Media, which is NPR and the PBS stations in Florida.

I do a lot of the stuff I used t when I was full time, except I don't manage people.

I pick the projects I want to do because, you know, the one thing I told everybody w I was coming back home to Gaines Everybody says, Well, you know, could do a lot better if you liv or somewhere else.

I'm like, I do pretty good in Ga so I'm home.

Thank you so much for your insight, Craig.

And thank you so much to our viewers for joining us.

Until next time, goodnight.