According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, most people say their families and local emergency agencies are ready for the next natural disaster, but the federal government is not.

The poll was released as R. David Paulison, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was telling Congress that the update of the federal disaster plan – due to be completed by the June 1 start of the hurricane season – has not been completed.

Paulison told the House Homeland Security Committee that the plan should be completed next month, and noted that he had already notified Congress that the update would not be ready by the June 1 deadline. The following week, the FEMA director was actively seeking to counter that failure by telling a conference of emergency managers in Florida, “don’t believe the stories that you’ve heard that FEMA and the federal government are not ready” to respond to hurricanes. He added, “You won’t see what happened with (Hurricane) Katrina happen again in this country.”

The poll found that two-thirds of people said their local first responders were prepared for a disaster, while nearly as many said their hospitals and families were ready. Only three in 10 expressed the same confidence in the federal government, underscoring earlier polls that showed a lingering wariness from the slow response to Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 devastation of Gulf of Mexico coastal cities. The telephone survey of 1,007 adults was conducted from April 13 to 15. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Poll: Public Ready for Next Disaster But Doubt Federal Government Is (AP 3/16/07)

FEMA Says It’s Ready for Hurricanes, But Disaster Plan is Not (USA Today 5/16/07)

May 22, 2007