The room packed with university students was probably not the toughest crowd FEMA Di­rector R. David Paulison has met with, but students had more questions than he could answer Wednesday night.

R. David Paulison

About 150 students crowded into a room in the University of North Texas’ Wooten Hall to pick the brain of Paulison, who was appointed to the Federal Emer­gency Management Agency position last spring.

UNT’s International Emer­gency Man­agement Student As­sociation and public administration department hosted Pauli­son to hear about upcoming organizational chan­ges in the agency and the challenges confronting emergency managers.

Derek Tra­bon, vice president of the student organization, said the group wanted to bring Paulison, who had just laid out a new vision for FEMA, to raise awareness of UNT’s emergency administration and disaster-planning program. The program was the first of its kind in the nation when it started in 1983.

Paulison began by dissecting the failures of the agency’s res­ponse to Hurricane Katrina, the greatest of which was communication. The ability to track supplies and evacuees, and the business practices of FEMA were also areas that needed ad­dressing after Katrina, he said.

Paulison said he bought 20,000 global-positioning system units, which use satellites, to help track trucks loaded with supplies. The agency also has heightened its abilities to register people displaced in a natural disaster, but Paulison said the organization also is looking at ways to continue to help people who cannot get to a registration center.

“People with 6 feet of water over the tops of their cars, they couldn’t make it to our registration centers,” he said.

The agency also is depending more on “career” employees — people who have worked for several years in emergency-management positions, such as law en­forcement — who know how to handle emergency situations, he said. Those people also will be able to keep the agency stable as “political administration,” people such as Paulison who were appointed by government officials, come and go.

To keep communication open and current, a reconnaissance team will work with all levels of government agencies to keep them on the same page, he said.

“If CNN can do it, if Fox can do it, we should be able to do it,” he said. “We’re the federal government.”

Paulison said he spent most of 2006 equipping the agency for future service and will continue that effort in 2007.

“The American public has to have confidence that FEMA is going to bring value to the table, and we’re going to take care of them,” he said.

Part of the problem is emphasizing each person’s own responsibility in preparing for a disaster, Paulison said. People should have enough food and supplies to survive on their own for at least three days, he said.

“You should have that right now, folks,” he said. “Anything can happen.”

Ashby Negus of Dallas, a public-administration graduate student specializing in emergency management, said Paulison has a history of working on the frontlines of disasters and seems to have a reasonable take on America’s disaster preparation.

Before becoming head of the U.S. Fire Administration in 2001, Paulison had several years of fire-and-rescue service experience, including his time as chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department. Born and raised in Miami, Fla., Paulison also survived several hurricane seasons.

“It’s good to know that the top guy has an idea of what’s going on at the bottom,” said Negus, a registered nurse. “I think we have the right guy.”

SARAH CHACKO can be reached at 940-566-6876. Her e-mail address is schacko@dentonrc.com .