Disaster Assistance

Within a three-week period, Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, and Guam were ravaged by storms that inflicted billions of dollars in damages and disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. As part of the government's response to Hurricanes Andrew and Iniki as well as Typhoon Omar, the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked the Defense Department to help provide humanitarian assistance to the disaster victims. This report (1) identifies the roles and the missions of the active military and National Guard forces that provided the assistance; (2) identifies problems affecting their delivery of assistance; (3) determines whether their participation affected their units' readiness and training; (4) determines whether the military needs to reorient its roles, training, equipment, and doctrine for these kind of operations; and (5) identifies the costs and the sources of funding associated with the military's participation in disaster assistance.

GAO found that: (1) the active military forces deployed to the disaster areas performed humanitarian services such as providing temporary housing and medical services and assisting in facility repair and debris removal; (2) Hurricane Andrew was the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) first opportunity to test its Federal Response Plan; (3) there were problems in implementing the plan, primarily due to the need for better coordination among providers, improved damage assessments, and better needs determinations in catastrophic situations; (4) according to Department of Defense (DOD) officials, the overall readiness of the forces was not adversely affected by short-term deployment for disaster assistance; (5) if deployments had been extended and units had missed scheduled training rotations, readiness could have been degraded; (6) DOD has the resources, equipment, personnel, and capability to respond rapidly to disasters, but DOD officials believe they should not have overall management responsibility for directing disaster relief efforts; and (7) DOD and the Corps of Engineers estimated that the total cost of disaster assistance they provided was about $559 million.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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