Michael Brown is now channeling Stuart Smalley. "I'm moving on with my life," he said. "I'm doing a lot of good work
with some great clients. . . . My wife, children, and my grandchild
still love me. My parents are still proud of me.
He learned his lessons, and now they're for sale.
Ousted FEMA
director Michael Brown, who was vilified over his handling of the
Hurricane Katrina disaster, plans to make a fresh start in Colorado,
selling his expertise about how emergency planning can go right or so
very wrong.
"You have to do it with candor. To do it otherwise
gives you no credibility," Brown said Wednesday. "I think people are
curious: 'My gosh, what was it like? The media just really beat you up.
You made mistakes. I don't want to be in that situation. How do I avoid
that?' "
In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Brown
acknowledged key mistakes he made while overseeing the federal response
to the hurricane that ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi. He also lashed
out at the media and discussed plans to base his fledgling consulting
business in the Boulder-Longmont area of Colorado, where he lived
before joining the Bush Administration in 2001.
"Look, Hurricane
Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need
for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness
is," he said. "So if I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be
better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses
_ because that goes straight to the bottom line _ then I hope I can
help the country in some way."
Brown went from a little-known
political appointee to national lightning rod status just days after
Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29. Over the next several
days, national television viewers were outraged by images of evacuees
still waiting to be rescued or suffering in over-crowded shelters.
Although some congressional critics pointed the finger at state and
local officials for failing to order mandatory evacuations soon enough,
Brown took the heaviest fire over the federal response. Critics seized
on his appearance on ABC News' Nightline program, when he implied that
he was unaware of hundreds of people suffering without federal help at
an overcrowded New Orleans convention center.
"Don't you guys watch television?" host Ted Koppel asked pointedly.
Brown said he had simply misspoken, but that he never was able to recover public confidence.
"That was a mistake. That was a real tipping point for me because I
hadn't slept. I misspoke," Brown said. "People were seeing pictures of
these people in the convention center that FEMA had learned about 24
hours before that. When I said, 'We just learned about that,' people
misinterpreted that as, 'You mean this has been going on for 24 hours
and you don't know about it?' "
Brown said criticism comes with the territory for any public
official. The irony is that he was just days away from resigning his
job before Katrina struck.
"The original plan was to be gone
before the start of hurricane season," he said. "It couldn't quite get
done in time, and so . . . my leaving was delayed slightly. And the
rest is history."
He said that he and his wife, Tamara, have put
their Virginia house on the market. They plan to move to the
Boulder-Longmont area full-time, while he plans to commute back and
forth to a second office and apartment in Washington.
More details about Brownie's new disaster preparedness consulting firm,
"it seems that Brown's actual angle may be providing not generic
emergency response consulting services but rather consulting services
to incompetents who've been saddled with emergency preparedness
responsibility and fear becoming national laughing stocks when they
turn mid-size disasters in to full-on catastrophes through gross
mismanagement."
It's important to keep close tabs on everything going on in your disaster so as to avoid the true catastrophe of having the press think you're not on top of things.
Michael
Brown's consulting job is to teach people how NOT to be like MICHAEL
BROWN. Amazing! Is this is a Great country or What?
