Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 22, 1993 TAG: 9302220079
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LARRY LIPMAN and ELLIOT JASPIN COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
DISASTER AGENCY FOCUSED MAINLY ON NUCLEAR WAR
The federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters has spent most of its time and money over the past decade on a top-secret $1.3 billion program to make the government a moving target during a nuclear war.Only 20 members of Congress - those with adequate security clearance - know that rather than concentrating on natural disasters such as last year's Hurricane Andrew, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been gearing up for Armageddon.
Even FEMA's natural disaster specialists have been largely unaware of the 11-year-old secret program.
Set up with the help of former White House national security aide Oliver North, it has grown to Dr. Strangelove scale:
A fleet of 300 vehicles in five mobile units scattered at sites from Washington state to Massachusetts, from Denver to southern Georgia, to rural Texas.
The mobile units can operate for a month without support. They include generators capable of powering a three-story airport terminal and a fuel tanker that can suck up diesel fuel from whatever service stations survive the nuclear blast.
Sensitive radio, telephone and satellite gear - much of it classified - is stored in custom-built trucks that resemble mobile bank vaults. One truck, which also carries a pop-up satellite dish, weighs 24 tons.
Budgets totaling $1.3 billion over the past 10 years appear annually as a single line - "submitted under a separate package." For every dollar spent on responding to natural disasters, almost $12 have been spent on plans to keep the government running during a nuclear war. Nearly a third of FEMA's employees are in the top-secret project, three times as many as work on natural disaster programs.
Despite the obvious communications power, no complete mobile unit has ever been used in a natural disaster - although parts of three units were used after Hurricane Andrew. Most FEMA employees assigned to deal with Andrew didn't even know about the agency's full strength because of what congressional investigators dubbed "a black curtain" of secrecy.
So when Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida six months ago, FEMA came to the rescue with the wrong tools.
For example, the city manager of Homestead, Fla., which was ravaged by the hurricane, pleaded for 100 hand-held radios because the town had only one working telephone. Instead, FEMA sent high-tech vans, capable of sending encrypted, multifrequency radio messages to military aircraft halfway around the world. The vans were used to provide electricity and 36 telephone lines to local, state and federal officials in Miami.
FEMA's equipment could call in an air strike, but Homestead never got its hand-held radios.