HELP BUNGLED AND DISORGANIZED By Martin Mann and George Nicholas Exclusive to The SPOTLIGHT Washington, DC -- One after another, two violent, cataclysmic disasters struck the United States in the fall of 1989. Hurricane Hugo roared through the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Carolinas in September. Within weeks, northern California was shaken by the Loma Prieta earthquake that left hundreds of thousands of victims and billions of dollars in damage in its wake. Having spent "over $25000000000 on setting up FEMA," American taxpayers were entitled to expect "quick and efficient help" from it in the face of such shattering calamities. But the response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to these upheavals was "bungled" and "disorganized," says Ray Groover, who reported on the hurricane for a San Juan, Puerto Rico, newspaper and is now studying for a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York. Since the Disaster Relief Act of 1988, FEMA has been responsible for coordinating the "[disaster] preparedness, response and recovery actions of state and local governments." Unable to live up to these responsibilities during the 1989 crisis, the agency drew sharp criticism from the press and from Congress, whose leaders assigned the General Accounting Office (GAO) to conduct the first-ever detailed investigation of FEMA. For a year, GAO field examiners interviewed hundreds of disaster victims, state and local relief workers, journalists and other witnesses. The agency has assembled a 71-page report on U.S. relief operations. WATCHDOG AGENCY RATES FEMA Having obtained an advance copy of that survey, a team of SPOTLIGHT reporters found that the congressional watchdog agency rated FEMA's ability to deal with natural disasters as being "inefficient," "weak" and "dilatory." Noting that "emergency management includes three phases: preparedness, response and recovery," GAO probers warned that FEMA failed to operate "as efficiently as possible" in all these areas. There was evidence of "inadequate planning ... inadequate or no standard operating procedures ... [and a] lack of coordination" wherever FEMA's bureaucrats intervened, the GAO report concluded. Among the results of these botched relief attempts were "delays in providing disaster assistance and duplicate payments for some [of FEMA's] activities," the congressional overseers discovered. One example of FEMA's failure cited by the GAO survey team involved 4000 low-income units wholly destroyed in California's devastating October 1989 earthquake. "Thirteen months later, only 114 units had been processed and approved for [rehabilitation] funding," the report reveals. Similarly, 10 months after Hurricane Hugo, most of the families left homeless "had not yet been provided with housing assistance from FEMA." DIRECTORS SHELL GAME Warned that the GAO report will expose FEMA as incompetent and wasteful, President George Bush fired agency Director Julius Becton, an elderly three-star general, whose principal qualifications for flag rank was Henry Kissinger's wish to promote "minority" officers, Defense Department sources say. Becton was replace by Wallace Stickney, a former New Hampshire state official whose colorless and low-profile reputation is expected to dampen the fireworks the GAO report might otherwise touch off about the inadequacy of federal relief operations. But simply shifting directors "does not answer the real question: If [FEMA officials] seem uninterested and negligent when it comes to disaster response, what are FEMA's thousands of bureaucrats working on?" asked Groover. The answer, a SPOTLIGHT investigation has found, is that FEMA's leadership is developing programs that will not merely "[ensure] the continuity of the federal government in any national emergency-type situation," as decreed by President Gerald Ford in Executive Order 11921, but REPLACE the nation's Constitutional statecraft with a centralized "command system."