(11:00 am) August 29, 2005: FEMA Director Requests 1,000 DHS Volunteers to Assist in FEMA-Community Relations

Around this time, FEMA Director Michael Brown sends a letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, requesting 1,000 additional DHS employees within 48 hours, and 2,000 within seven days. Based on the letter, Brown seeks volunteers to serve as community relations liaisons. Describing Katrina as “this near catastrophic event,” Brown describes the role of the requested volunteers as follows:
Establish and maintain positive working relationships with disaster affected communities and the residents of those communities.
Collect and disseminate information and make referrals for appropriate assistance.
[Identify] potential issues within the community and report[] to appropriate personnel.
Convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the public.
Perform outreach with community leaders on available Federal disaster assistance. [Federal Emergency Management Agency, 8/29/2005 ] Natalie Rule, FEMA representative, will later confirm that Brown is seeking volunteers to “answer phones, do community relations and help set up field hospitals,” and similar “non-emergency tasks.” [CNN, 9/7/2005]
Note - When this memo becomes public, many will criticize Brown, charging, for example, that “Brown waited until about five hours after the storm’s landfall before he proposed sending 1,000 federal workers to deal with the aftermath” [Time, 9/11/2005] , or, as the Boston Globe reports, that “[Brown] did not ask the authority to dispatch FEMA personnel to the region until five hours after the storm had passed.” [Boston Globe, 9/11/2005] However these reports fail to recognize that, at the time Brown requests these volunteers, FEMA has already deployed more than 1,000 staff members workers to the area (see August 28, 2005). [CNN, 9/7/2005]