"Most of these various predecessors to FEMA weren’t all that concerned with civilian natural disasters. They were primarily focused on responding to nuclear war; the evolution to being the first call after a hurricane, flood, or tornado came about in part because it turned out America doesn’t have all that many nuclear wars—and the equipment and supply stockpiles and disaster-response experts at FEMA’s predecessors were useful for something other than the apocalypse...
The Denton center, the first to open in 1964—and still in use today—was a 50,000-square-foot, two-level bunker that could have supported several hundred officials for 30 days. It had its own drinking well, laundry facilities, diesel generators, and 13-ton blast doors. The facility kitchen could have served 1,500 meals a day and its walk-in freezers could double as a morgue. The centers also included duplicates of vital records, to help affected agencies maintain continuity of operations...
The systems had preprogrammed crisis scenarios, each of which had clearly delineated steps and notified each stakeholder in turn as their role became critical; for the time, it was very advanced networking technology, containing early versions of what later generations would recognize as email, bulletin boards, and chat functionality. “The computer as a device to allow a human group to exhibit collective intelligence is a rather new concept,” Turoff said presciently in 1976...
Beginning during the Cold War and continuing up to the present day, FEMA’s Central Locater System tracks the whereabouts of all the officials who are in the presidential line of succession, 24 hours a day, ensuring the government is ready to whisk them away from their regular lives at a moment’s notice...
FEMA also devoted extensive planning in the 1980s to scout where the civilian population would live after a nuclear attack, embarking on a top-secret effort with the FBI known as Project 908 (or “Nine Naught Eight,” as it was called) to map the nation’s commercial buildings for possible refugee resettlement..
the original plan for placing FEMA inside DHS had been compelling—the 25-year-old agency would become larger, stronger, and more robust, by combining its existing resources with related offices from the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as the Department of Health and Human Service’s National Disaster Medical System. But none of that happened as planned, and the FEMA that became a component of DHS was actually weaker than it had been as a standalone agency."
FB: weird "few in the public understood that much of FEMA’s resources went instead to its primary mission—coordinating the nation’s post-apocalypse efforts—and that the majority of its funding and a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation’s classified black budget. The agency’s real focus and its real budget was known to only 20 members of Congress."
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