http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/fema"FEMA’s new administrator has a message for Americans: get in touch with your survival instinct."
In short, the guy got the job by being recommended by people in the emergency management field. He started out as a volunteer firefighter as a teen, then became a paramedic, and so forth.
Obsessively planning for horrible things he could not really control seemed to inspire him. “He is emergency management,” says Will May Jr., who worked with Fugate for more than 20 years and is now Alachua’s public-safety director. “That’s what he does. He spends practically all his waking life working in it, thinking about it, talking about it, planning how to do things better.”
Fugate is well respected, which is not the same thing as being well liked. “If they wanted a politician, Craig’s not your man...” Already, Fugate is saying things most emergency managers say only in private.
He criticizes the media for “celebrating” people who choose not to evacuate and then have to be rescued on live TV—while ignoring all the people who were prepared. ... You never hear the media say, ‘Hey, you’re putting this rescue worker in danger.’”
At his first all-staff meeting with FEMA employees, Fugate asked for a show of hands: “How many people here have your family disaster plan ready to go? [If you don’t], you just failed your first test … If you’re going to be an emergency manager, the first place you start is at home.” Already, Fugate is factoring citizens into the agency’s models for catastrophic planning, thinking of them as rescuers and responders.
