Preparing for a Catastrophe: The Hurricane Pam Exercise
Statement before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
Madhu Beriwal, President and CEO, IEM
January 24, 2006

Chairman Collins, Senator Lieberman, and members of the committee, I appreciate the
opportunity to testify today on Hurricane Pam and its role in catastrophic planning and
preparedness. My name is Madhu Beriwal and I am the President of IEM. IEM was the
prime contractor for the Southeast Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane planning workshops
generally referred to as “Hurricane Pam.”
First, I would like to mention my background and that of my company. I have 25 years of
experience in emergency management and homeland security, and the application of
information technology to these areas. I began my career with the State of Louisiana,
working in floodplain management and hurricane emergency preparedness for New
Orleans and the surrounding areas. In 1985, I founded IEM, a disaster consulting firm
dedicated to keeping people safe—at home, at work, and on the battlefield. We have
worked closely with many federal, state, and local organizations to improve preparedness
for hazards ranging from natural disasters to those involving chemical, biological,
radiological, and nuclear threats. We have worked with the Chemical Stockpile
Emergency Preparedness Program for 15 years, helping to improve preparedness for
accidents involving lethal chemical weapons stored at 8 sites in the continental U.S. For
the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Grants & Training Office (formerly the
Office of Domestic Preparedness), we are providing state and local agencies with
technical assistance in developing prevention and preparedness plans and procedures.
Over the last 21 years, IEM has received numerous awards, including the National
Reinventing Government Hammer Award, the James S. Cogswell Award, a Profiles in
Innovation Award in Emergency Preparedness & Response Excellence from GOVSEC,
and, in 2004, the first DHS Emergency Preparedness and Response Under Secretary’s
Award for Superior Service awarded to a contractor.
At IEM, we base our work on sound science to provide objective solutions that support
difficult decisions about preparedness and protection. We strive hard to create solutions
that allow all stakeholders to collaborate effectively. IEM is known as an “honest
broker.” Organizations like the Department of Homeland Security and Department of
Defense routinely rely on our company to function as an independent evaluator of
emergency planning strategies and tools. We are called upon to perform independent
validation and verification for mission-critical systems and to conduct comparative
analyses of various protective options, often in politically charged environments. But
most importantly, we at IEM are passionate about designing and producing effective
outcomes that help our customers and stakeholders keep people safe.

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 Hurricane Pam
IEM, with a team of three subcontractors, competed for and received a FEMA contract
for catastrophic planning for Southeast Louisiana and the New Madrid Seismic Zone on
May 24, 2004. Because of the urgency associated with the project, IEM personnel met
with FEMA Region VI officials and State officials from the Louisiana Office of
Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (LOHSEP) within 18 hours after verbal
notice of contract award. At this initial meeting, the overall purpose of the project was
presented by FEMA Region VI and LOHSEP. The goal was to develop a functional,
scenario-based exercise that would drive the writing of Incident Action Plans and build
the foundation for Functional Plans. Ultimately, the project was intended to create a
“bridging document” between local and state plans and the National Response Plan. The
first “Hurricane Pam” workshop was held 53 days after contract award. As the planning
proceeded, it became evident that multiple workshops would be required.
Hurricane Pam was an innovative concept that combined two facets of emergency
management: planning and exercises. Traditionally, a small group of planners first
develops an emergency plan, and then training is provided to those who will execute the
plan. The plan is then exercised to identify gaps, omissions, and areas for improvement.
Plans cover a wide range of hazards; hazard-specific plans cover from small-scale to
large-scale of the same hazard. Exercises are typically scenario-based and consider a
specific event that could happen. The full process takes time—plan development
generally takes 6 to 18 months, and training on the plan may require 6 to 12 months.
Then small-scale exercises lead to larger exercises where hundreds of personnel and
dozens of agencies participate to test the generic plan against a specific scenario.
Planning, execution, and evaluation of exercises will generally add 18 to 24 months to the
process. The full process of planning, training, and exercising can take 2 ½ to 4 ½ years
to complete. Hurricane Pam was a “planning exercise” designed to develop usable
information in a much shorter timeframe.
In contrast to the traditional planning and exercise process, Hurricane Pam allowed both
planners and operational personnel to collaborate in developing a plan based on a specific
scenario. Hurricane Pam focused on developing plans for a specific catastrophic
hurricane striking Louisiana. Thus, it was both a planning workshop and a scenario-based
exercise. All 13 parishes and most of the 20+ Louisiana State agencies, and 15 federal
agencies involved in Hurricane Pam had emergency plans or procedures and many of
them had hurricane plans. Hurricane Pam was designed to bring planners and
decision-makers together from all levels so they could begin to grapple collectively
with response issues for a catastrophic event and start the process of reviewing and
reconciling their existing emergency plans. The intent of Hurricane Pam was to
produce the preliminary “bridging document” addressing catastrophic hurricane response
between state and local plans and the National Response Plan. The Hurricane Pam
documents were designed to serve as a foundation for more detailed catastrophic
planning in the future, and to provide the architecture for an integrated catastrophic plan.
(Note: The National Response Plan was not finalized until early December 2004, while
the Phase 1A workshop was being conducted, and 5 months after the initial workshop
was conducted.)

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 The 300+ workshop participants at the Hurricane Pam workshop in July 2004 were
provided with a catastrophic hurricane scenario, a set of consequences that would result
from that scenario, and assumptions designed to stress the emergency management
system and force thinking on critical planning topics. In addition, they received a copy of
Louisiana’s Emergency Operations Plan, 12 parish emergency operations plans, the City
of New Orleans’ Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, and emergency plans
and related documents from Louisiana Department of Transportation, Louisiana State
Police, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and FEMA Region VI.
To create catastrophic conditions, Hurricane Pam was modeled as a strong, slow-moving
Category 3 storm preceded by 20 inches of rain, spawning tornadoes and storm surge,
and resulting in 10 to 20 feet of water within the City of New Orleans. A slower
hurricane builds a higher head of storm surge and is more catastrophic, as historically 9
of 10 storm-related deaths are due to drowning. (Note that according to a December 20,
2005, report by the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Katrina was a faster-moving
Category 3 storm when it reached the Louisiana gulf coast.)

Figure 1: Map from “Hurricane Pam” illustrating maximum height of water above ground in the
affected areas (storm surge and rainfall).

To present participants with a realistic situation and to provide context for the event for
which they were planning, IEM projected a detailed list of consequences that would be

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 expected from the hypothetical Hurricane Pam. For example, IEM calculated that 55,000
people would be in public shelters outside Southeast Louisiana prior to landfall, more
than 500 miles of major roads would be flooded by the storm, 1.1 million residents of
Southeast Louisiana would be displaced, and that 80% of the structures in the 13 parish
area would be affected by wind and flooding, varying from minor wind damage to total
structural collapse. (See Table 1 for a list of other projected consequences.) Affecting
more than 12,000 square miles in Louisiana and over 1.9 million people (residents and
tourists), Hurricane Pam presented a complex web of topics and missions to be addressed
in the planning for such an event.
Hurricane Pam was designed to be a series of workshops, conducted as “phases,”
focusing primarily on post-landfall response issues. Before August 29, 2005, when
Hurricane Katrina struck, four workshops had been completed. At the first workshop in
July 2004, there were over 300 officials from Federal, state, local, and voluntary
organizations in attendance. The second and third workshops had over 100 officials each.
The last workshop, completed four days before Hurricane Katrina struck, had about 80
officials. All total, there were more than 350 unique attendees from Federal, State, local,
and voluntary organizations. The atmosphere in these workshops was intense, focused,
and dedicated. Participants knew that they were facing a real threat, as articulated in the
detailed scenario. There were intense discussions on strategies—open, participatory, and
creative brainstorming on how best to protect a deeply vulnerable region from a massive
catastrophe.
Hurricane Pam Phase 1
The first Hurricane Pam workshop was conducted in Baton Rouge on July 16-23, 2004;
approximately 300 federal, state, and local officials attended. These included
representatives from FEMA, over 20 Louisiana State agencies and organizations, 13
parishes, the National Weather Service, over 15 federal departments and agencies staffing
the Emergency Support Functions (ESF), Emergency Management Assistance Compact
(EMAC) participants, volunteer agencies, and neighboring states of Mississippi and
Arkansas.
The workshop was organized by topics determined by FEMA and the State of Louisiana
prior to the workshop. These were: Hurricane Pre-Landfall, Schools, Search and Rescue,
Sheltering, Temporary Housing, Temporary Medical Care, and Debris Management.
Based on the consequences presented to them, the 300+ participants in Hurricane Pam
Phase 1 began developing action plans for these topics. As the week progressed, it was
evident that additional topics urgently needed to be addressed. These topics were added
and covered over one or more days of the eight-day workshop. These additional topics
were Billeting of Emergency Response Personnel; Hazardous Materials; Power, Water
and Ice Distribution; Access Control and Re-entry; Unwatering; External Affairs;
Transport from Water to Shelter; and Volunteer and Donations Management. Many other
topics could not be addressed within the 8-day workshop and were deferred for future
workshops.
Use of topics rather than Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) allowed cross-ESF
thinking on each topic. Since it was evident that many issues were interrelated, such as
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 Search and Rescue, Sheltering, and Temporary Medical Care, joint-topic committees
were formed during Hurricane Pam to address these issues together.
At the end of Phase 1, it was apparent that the complexity of particular topics necessitated
additional planning attention. Subsequent workshops were held to focus on these issues.
In particular, Sheltering, Temporary Housing and Temporary Medical Care issues were
all addressed more than once, some three times over the four workshops.
Hurricane Pam Phase 1A
Hurricane Pam 1A was held November 29-December 3, 2004, in New Orleans. Attended
by approximately 100 officials, this workshop focused again on Temporary Housing,
Temporary Medical, and Sheltering.
Hurricane Pam Phase 1B
Hurricane Pam Phase 1B was conducted July 25–29, 2005, in New Orleans, and was
attended by 100 officials. This workshop focused again on Temporary Housing and
addressed a new topic: Transportation, Staging, and Distribution of Critical Resources.
Hurricane Pam Temporary Medical Care Workshop
On August 23–24, 2005, the Temporary Medical Care Supplementary Planning
Workshop was held in Carville, Louisiana. It was attended by approximately 80 officials.
This was the third workshop that addressed medical issues.
Many topics were deferred for future workshops were not addressed before Hurricane
Katrina struck. These include: Security, Command and Control, Feeding,
Communications, Continuity of Government Operations, Banking and Finances, Missing
Persons and Family Reunification, Personal Records, and Recovery and Rebuilding of
Infrastructure.

Hurricane Pam Results
There is a maxim in warfighting “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” There is
another in emergency management “Plans are useless; planning is priceless.” Though the
plan was not finished, many elements of Hurricane Pam still proved to be highly useful in
response and recovery to Hurricane Katrina days, weeks, and months after the massive
storm struck the Gulf Coast.
The IEM Team developed detailed consequence assessments for Hurricane Pam over a
scant 53 days. Many of these consequences were eerily echoed in the impact of Hurricane
Katrina. Planning needs to be based on sound science of what can be expected during an
emergency. I am proud of the work of IEM’s scientists and technical professionals and
those of our subcontractors in developing a sound foundation for Catastrophic Planning
for Southeast Louisiana. Some of the many similarities and dissimilarities are listed
below. Please note that the data provided here for Katrina is based on currently available
data only. As more information becomes available, some of these numbers could change.

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 Table 1: Comparisons between projected consequences for Hurricane Pam and actual results
produced by Katrina.
“Hurricane Pam” Data

Actual Results from Hurricane Katrina

20 inches of rain

18 inches of rain

City of New Orleans under 10-20 feet of
water

Up to 20 feet of flooding in some areas of New
Orleans

Overtopping of levees

Levees breached

Over 55,000 in public shelters prior to landfall

Approximately 60,000 people in public shelters
prior to landfall

Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) shut
down pre-landfall and back on in 2-3 days
after storm – LOOP handles 12% of US
crude oil imports

The LOOP was inoperable from August 29 to
September 2 (5 days)

9 refineries shut down during storm

7 refineries in LA shut down during the storm

57 chemical plants shut down during storm.
Many flooded and with no power

More than 50 chemical plants shut down during
the storm

Over 1.1 million Louisiana residents
displaced (500,000 households affected &
230,000 children)

1 million Gulf Coast residents displaced for the
long-term; majority are LA residents

Leeville Bridge on LA 1 collapsed (west of
city)

New Orleans Twin Span bridge collapsed in
sections (east of city)

20,000 boat-based rescue missions and
about 1,000 helicopter-based rescue
missions

33,500 US Coast Guard missions; 9,313
National Guard missions; 2,911 DoD active
duty missions. The Louisiana Department of
Wildlife and Fisheries have rescued more than
16,000 people.

786,359 people in Louisiana lose electricity
at initial impact

881,400 people in Louisiana reported to be
without electricity the day after impact

Over 12.5 million tons of debris

22 million tons of debris in LA; 12 million tons
in Orleans Parish; clean up could take up to 2
years

Coastal marsh erosion

Coastal erosion caused by Katrina at landfall
equaled one year of erosion in that area (25
square miles a year)

Sewage treatment facilities not working in the
metropolitan area

Sewage treatment facilities not working in the
metropolitan area

233,986 collapsed buildings

250,000 homes destroyed

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 “Hurricane Pam” Data

Actual Results from Hurricane Katrina

15% of hospitals in a 13-parish area affected
to some degree

All New Orleans medical treatment facilities
affected by disaster. 2 weeks post-impact, only
3 out of 29 facilities in Jefferson/Orleans
parishes were fully operational; 2 main state
hospitals remain closed

$40 billion in damages to LA commercial and
residential structures

Costliest US hurricane on record – losses
currently estimated at $80 billion

Over 60,000 deaths

1,100 deaths reported to date in Louisiana;
over 3,000 still missing

36% evacuated prior to landfall

80-90% evacuated prior to landfall

In the days before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, copies of the Hurricane
Pam planning document were in great demand. From our review of the response to
Hurricane Katrina, it appears that parts of the Hurricane Pam plan may have been used. A
federal official guessed that almost 75% of it was used to a greater or lesser degree. Some
examples where parts of the Hurricane Pam plan appear to have been used include (note
that the data provided here for Katrina is based on currently available data only; as more
information becomes available, some of these numbers could change):
•

In Hurricane Pam we projected 36% of the 1.9 million residents and tourists of
Southeast Louisiana would evacuate out of the 13-parish region. For Hurricane
Katrina, over 80% and perhaps over 90% of residents evacuated out of the
region prior to the storm. Much of this can be ascribed to the accurate scientific
forecasts by NOAA and the excellent media exposure of the impending storm.
However, the actions of local, state and federal officials prior to the storm were surely
in light of the devastating fatalities projected in Hurricane Pam. The city of New
Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation for the first time in its history, at the urging
of the State of Louisiana and the National Hurricane Center. The effect of this high
evacuation rate is quite clear. The loss of life projected in Hurricane Pam was 61,290.
The actual loss of life from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana thus far is approximately
1,100—although more than 3,000 people remain missing.

•

During Hurricane Pam, participants developed the idea of a “lily-pad” type of
search and rescue operation, which was implemented during response to
Hurricane Katrina. Victims were rescued and first transported to a safe area of high
ground. From there, another group moved them to land, where they awaited transport
to a medical processing center. This allowed Search and Rescue personnel to focus on
their primary mission of saving lives. Somewhere between 65,000 and over 100,000
people were rescued during Hurricane Katrina by helicopter and boats. More than
20,000 of these were rescued by the valiant people from the U.S. Coast Guard and
more than 16,000 were rescued by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries agency.

•

The Temporary Medical Care section of the plan, specifically the concept of a
Temporary Medical Operations Staging Area (TMOSA) was implemented
during the response to Hurricane Katrina. The TMOSAs expanded the triage and

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 caretaking abilities of special needs shelters reducing the burden on medical facilities.
Three TMOSAs were anticipated in Hurricane Pam—Nicholls State University,
Southeastern Louisiana University, and Louisiana State University. Two TMOSAs
were set up in Hurricane Katrina at Louisiana State University and Nicholls State
University. Officially designated as a Search and Rescue Base of Operations, the New
Orleans airport effectively functioned as a TMOSA. Almost 100,000 victims of
Katrina went through two of these TMOSAs, with more than 15,000 on one busy day.
•

Hurricane Pam planning postulated the use of military bases for staging and
temporary housing. After Hurricane Katrina made landfall, many military bases
and military vessels were used including Camp Shelby, Fort McClellan, Lackland
AFB, NAS Belle Chase, NAS Meridian, Eglin AFB, Fort Polk, Maxwell AFB,
Barksdale AFB, Camp Beauregard, Keesler AFB and NAS Stennis, USS BATAAN,
USS IWO JIMA, USS TORTUGA, 14th Combat Support Hospital and USNS
COMFORT. These and other installations have housed evacuees in at least 16 states.

•

For Hurricane Pam, it was expected that 1,000 shelters would need to be
established and that 55,000 people would be in these shelters prior to landfall. In
Hurricane Katrina, responders were able to establish 956 shelters, and
approximately 60,000 people were in these shelters prior to landfall.

•

Hurricane Pam expected that temporarily housing storm evacuees would
require 200,000 trailers. After Katrina, 200,000 trailers were ordered for
housing evacuees. Over 140,000 travel trailers and mobile homes are expected to be
provided for displaced families, primarily in Louisiana (about 100,000) and
Mississippi (about 40,000).

•

IEM estimated that 252,327 children would be displaced from Louisiana schools
by Hurricane Pam. During the first Pam workshop, it became evident that there
was no plan for schooling displaced children, and plans to address this issue
began to be developed. Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 247,000 public and
private school students. The plans developed during Hurricane Pam and afterwards
appear to have helped place these children back into school.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, the Hurricane Pam planning was not complete. No
training or exercises had occurred using this planning document. The first test was
Hurricane Katrina—the deadliest hurricane to strike the United States in recent memory,
which would tax even the most mature plans. However, based on the examples presented
above, I would venture that, even though the plans and planning were incomplete,
Hurricane Pam helped save lives and reduce suffering after the massive catastrophe of
Hurricane Katrina.

Recommendations for Preparedness for Catastrophic Events
Managing emergencies is difficult; it has all the complexities of general management
with the added pressure of decision making measured not in quarterly returns but in
minutes and hours. And unlike in business, the bottom line of emergency management is
lives, not dollars. Managing catastrophic events is harder still. Nature and man alike can
throw major challenges our way; we need a more mature, robust, and flexible emergency
management and homeland security system to respond to these challenges.
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 From the vantage point of my 25 years working at the nexus of science and technology
and the operational world of emergency management, I would like, with all humility, to
offer a few recommendations for catastrophe management.
•

Homeland security and emergency management need to be results or outcomebased. The results from Hurricane Katrina were considered “unacceptable” by the
President, by Congress, and by the people of our country. What is acceptable? The
political and technical reality is that we cannot have 100% protection 100% of the
time. Elected officials, as the representatives of citizens, need to define what
outcomes are acceptable. We in Emergency Management and Homeland Security
then need to measure these outcomes in our planning, in our training, and most
importantly in our exercises. If we cannot produce the level of safety that our nation
desires, we need to loop back and see what combination of investments will produce
the desired end results.

•

Homeland security and emergency management need to be able to measure
levels of safety or protection. Too often, we look for more and more disastrous
scenarios in our planning and exercises without measuring the outcomes that our
investments in planning, training, equipment, and exercises have already produced.
No business would survive if it could not adequately measure how well or badly it
was doing on its bottom line measure. Our nation is spending about $1 million a
minute to keep citizens safe. We need to be able to quantify how our efforts are
resulting in protection or safety. The tools for making such measurements are
available from science and technology; it is time to seriously and comprehensively
harness these tools to measure progress. There are myriad ways to improve
emergency management capabilities. Some of these can provide large gains in
protection from small investments; other well-intentioned strategies can actually
lower protection levels. We must find ways to measure this protection.

•

A reliable and mature homeland security and emergency management system
needs to be developed that can consistently deliver results. There is, in the human
spirit, the desire to see individual heroes. But, it is far more important to develop a
system that can allow normal mortals to do their best and produce results with great
consistency. To make this happen, emergency management and Homeland Security
must become professions with rigorous educational, training and certification
requirements. Medicine, law, engineering, warfighting have all benefited from these
requirements. So can Emergency Management and Homeland Security. Together
with this, Emergency Management and Homeland Security organizations need to
undergo appropriate evaluation and certification. All of this requires consistent
investments in emergency management.

•

Community planning and development need to be integrated with hazards,
threats, and vulnerabilities. The American economy is vibrant and continues to
grow and expand. We need to find a sustainable balance between economic growth
and development, ecological and environmental hazards and threats, and the social
landscape. There are multiple agencies and organizations engaged in each of these
issues and there are few community-based, participatory processes to integrate these
together in a meaningful pro-growth, pro-people, scientific manner.

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 All of these recommendations are feasible and most of them have been accomplished in
one community or another. The Best Practices from these serendipitous test-beds can be
applied community by community throughout the nation, but especially for regions
vulnerable to catastrophic events.

Concluding Remarks
The National Response Plan is a good strategic document. However, integrated Incident
Action Plans with sufficient detail are required to handle catastrophic events impacting
specific communities. Catastrophes require coordinated action from Federal, State, and
local agencies, as well as the private sector. For catastrophic planning to be successful,
officials from all levels must be involved and committed to the process and the results.
This is not always easy to achieve. There are conflicting priorities, turf issues, and
resource concerns. A scenario-based planning exercise like Hurricane Pam makes the
disaster real and propels officials at all levels to cut through these concerns and focus on
meaningful results.
Hurricane Pam was a step toward this. More than 350 Federal, State, and local
personnel—both planners and operational personnel—began tackling the enormous
operational complexities involved in responding to catastrophic conditions in an
extremely vulnerable area. Historically adversarial relationships were set aside for a few
days to work toward the common good—protecting lives and property after a
catastrophic hurricane.
Though more workshops to continue the collaboration and planning effort were needed,
participants in each group were clearly focused on addressing the catastrophic
consequences they had been presented with. Working together, participants developed a
mission statement and concept of operations. They also identified response actions to be
taken as well as available resources needed to support these actions. They were
committed to producing results and there was very little finger-pointing or blame.
Not every region is vulnerable to natural catastrophes, but some are: the San Francisco
region, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the Florida Keys, and of course, New Orleans.
For these locations, a detailed and integrated catastrophic plan is the first layer of
protection for saving lives.
Hurricane Pam was the beginning of building such a catastrophic event plan. On August
29, 2005, it was at an Alpha stage of release, a version 1.0 of the final. Hurricane Katrina
demanded a version 10.0. I urge this committee to consider the value of the Hurricane
Pam process and the foundation it offers for other catastrophic plans. From the start,
Hurricane Pam was meant to serve as a test-bed for catastrophic planning for other
locations. Plans for those locations are yet to be developed. Planning for New Orleans is
yet to be finished—with only 127 days left before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.
In August 2005, time simply ran out for one iconic America city. We must not let this
happen again.

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