Guard ill-equipped for natural disasters

WASHINGTON – With much of their equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, state National Guards face profound shortages in responding to natural disasters, particularly as they get ready for the hurricane season, which begins June 1.

The potential impact of the equipment shortages became apparent over the weekend when a tornado devastated Greensburg, Kan. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that the state’s National Guard couldn’t respond as quickly as it should have because much of its equipment is overseas.

“Fifty percent of our trucks are gone. Our front loaders are gone. We are missing Humvees that move people,” Sebelius told NBC’s “Today” show. “We can’t borrow them from other states because their equipment is gone.”

That problem is likely to worsen in the event of a major hurricane, which generally affects a much larger area than a tornado does. Guard officials in hurricane-prone states say they’re ready, but only if they can get help from other states. That will slow critical response times, emergency managers say.

“Most of the units in the Army and Air National Guard are underequipped for the jobs and the missions that they have to perform” domestically, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard bureau, told Congress last month. “Can we do the job? Yes, we can. But the lack of equipment (means it takes) longer to do that job, and lost time translates into lost lives, and those lost lives are American lives.”

A Government Accountability Office report in January found that of 300 types of equipment needed in natural disasters, the guard had fewer in all categories than it did in 2001, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some of the equipment is unavailable for domestic disasters, the GAO found, including radios and dump trucks. Only 2 percent of the diesel generators needed are available, the study found.