work out other resources, they do get aid for a hearing. FEMA does provide that to them.

As to the impartiality obligation, they are made in the lawsuit as well. When we filed our responsive pleadings after the plaintiffs first filed. Now they say, "Now, we see that we do have different people living in fields." And they were not concerned at that point anymore. It is FEMA's position and it is my personal observation that our process is impartial and does have appropriate due process guarantees.

Now, as for innovations that we tried to do in this particular disaster to make our agency more responsive to the particular needs of populations after the earthquake, it is important to remember that an earthquake is very different than other kinds of disasters. When you have a hurricane or flood, you generally know that they are coming, even if only for a few days. When you have an earthquake, you have no notice. It cuts down on all your planning time, even though we consistently planned and in fact had earthquake exercises held with a lot of people's State and local governments, you just do not have the same kind of planning ability to keep yourself up and running, ready for when one of these disasters strike.

Similarly, unlike other disasters, when an earthquake is over, it is not over. There still may be aftershocks. With floods or hurricanes, you know the extent of the damage; with aftershocks, you may find something far worse. Or rain may also cause much flooding; it is rain that goes on for a long time.

In spite of all these difficulties and in spite of the fact that almost all of our disaster people in the region were working with Hurricane Hugo in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico when the earthquake hit, we were able to have many firsts in our responses to the disaster, of which FEMA is very proud. One of those is that we had a temporary office operating within 2 hours of the earthquake. I personally was one of the people who was back to work in 2 hours, beginning to coordinate the response. We had one of our representatives in Sacramento and the State representative in San Francisco with us at the time period. We had the declaration on the Governor's desk by midnight, and we had Presidential declaration by dawn. That is very good compared to what happens in other disasters.

It enabled us, then, to begin to provide relief immediately. We also had the fastest opening of the application process in our current state of disaster relief. We also hooked up our toll-free 800 application lines within 24 hours of the earthquake so that the people had the connection; they could make the call, they could apply and begin to get the assistance process running.

Chairman TORRES. Would you yield? And did you have bilingual operators?

MS. JEAN. Yes, absolutely.

Chairman TORRES. In 11 different languages?

MS. JEAN. When we initially started, we were not serving 11 languages. When we initially started, we had Spanish, English and a few Asian languages; those increased as we became aware of their needs. We had several different Vietnamese dialects that were

serviced; Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, the list is quite mind-boggling when you think about it.

Chairman TORRES. Thank you.

Ms. JEAN. In addition to that, we had several application centers open in only 4 days. In an area where you are concerned about safety, you have to make sure that you have not only a great deal of space for all the people that you might have, but that in fact the structures themselves are safe. That was also within an incredibly short period of time.

And for the first time, we also short-circuited the process for people whose homes were, in essence, entirely destroyed. The normal process is that people have to make applications, we send out an inspector. They look at the homes. They verify with expenses applied for, the paper work goes back and gets processed, and then relief is applied. In this disaster, we inspected with a check made out in advance to the people that they could hand to them directly if they verified the damage. So, they were on the spot, giving them the money when the inspector verified the damages.

We also brought together many of the State and Federal agencies that do have housing responsibilities, many beyond that which FEMA can provide, which has continued to deal with the very serious chronic housing problems that we have here.

Now, in regard to the problems faced and the lessons learned, I have just got a few listed here that I think are going to be dealt with, not only in May when we are having a symposium back in Baltimore to figure out how FEMA can be more responsive, but I am also flying back at the same time to revamp the regulations so that, to the extent that we have the authority, they can be more responsive to the needs of the population.

This is the first time ever that FEMA has faced the problems that we faced with the transient overpopulation; we have never had a disaster where we had to deal with that. Frankly, we are not prepared for how to deal with that. It was a new issue for us. We came up with ways to deal with it; we see some ways which will be more responsive and we will try to do so in the future.

We had very scarce, stretched resources; I have already talked about those. Now that we are all over the country, we had to pull back. We are doing more cross-training, but frankly, we need more resources. In these days of Gramm-Rudman, where we had very few full-time equivalent employee slots available for us, it makes it hard for us when we have needs. Our total personnel load is only about 70 people. Only about 20 of those are disaster people, people who work on disaster response and relief. The California Office of Emergency Services is three times FEMA's entire staff. And we cover the entire country and the South Pacific Islands. To the extent that you are going to go back to Washington and help us do better, we are going to need more resources.

We also had a problem. One thing that we learned is that when you open up a hotline in advance of your application centers and people call in and make application before you actually have your central processing facility open, you get a backlog. So, by the time we opened up our field office in Mountain View, we already had a backlog of thousands and thousands of applications.

We also need a visible presence of those agencies who are tasked with housing problems, particularly the long-term permanent housing problems. HUD was not even on the list. There are other agencies who are the agencies who should be dealing with this, and we need more visibility on their part.

And we know that we need a lot more in terms of pre-disaster preparation. We had done some of that here, but if we had been even more proactive in dealing with community groups and localities before the disaster, the response would have run even more smoothly than it did.

With that, I will conclude my remarks and try to answer any questions you have.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Jean can be found in the appendix.]

Chairman TORRES. Thank you, Ms. Jean, for a very good statement about your agency and what it represents and what it tried to do. Obviously, Ms. Pelosi and I, have sat here this morning and heard the record, and we conclude that there are some contradictions already in what we have heard from both sides.

I am going to ask once again if Mr. Mallory or Mr. Belloni are here. Mr. Belloni represents the Farmers Home Administration, a player in this disaster assistance, and Mr. Mallory represents the Small Business Administration. Are they here? They are not, they are absent. Yes, sir.

A Voice. If I may make a statement. Mr. Mallory represents Farmers Home Administration.

Chairman TORRES. Oh, I have got it the other way around?

A Voice. Right. And he was scheduled to be here for 1:00, so that is why he is not here now.

Chairman TORRES. I see. Maybe we are moving off the prescribed docket that we had for people.

I wonder if Ms. Pelosi would entertain a suggestion that I have. Nancy, we have some people here that we probably should have scheduled but we did not, and they are the affected people, the people living in the trailers that FEMA supplied. It would be interesting to have them join, perhaps, for a small colloquy with Ms. Jean and with us to see exactly how they got into this situation and some of the problems that they might have ensued along the way. Would you entertain that, Ms. Pelosi?

MS. PELOSI. Yes. I think that if we are ready to have an open mike, that would be wonderful, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TORRES. Yes. They are in the audience. I would like to invite three people up here to tell us about their experience. And Ms. Jean, you may join with us in this colloquy. How about Gloria Sanchez? Is she here? Gloria, would you join us at the table? And Evangelina Estrada and Dalila Guzman.

MS. PELOSI. While they are coming up, Mr. Chairman, I would like to say that our hearings will continue in San Francisco, so in the interest of time, I will not go into all the follow-up with Lorri Jean, but I was surprised by that number, that 100 people were denied temporary housing because of the 30-day regulation. That is a very interesting figure to me.

MS. JEAN. Yes, it is. I asked specifically that our housing people go through the files manually. It took over 6 weeks of staff time to

do that, and I specifically told them to do it. And that is the figure that they found.

MS. PELOSI. That is a very interesting figure.

Chairman TORRES. Yes. May I also invite Maria Corralejo, who represents the Watsonville Area Interfaith Disaster Recovery Project, who can perhaps help us in translating some of our witnesses' comments here.

Chairman TORRES. Ms. Corralejo, will you perhaps be the lead spokesperson for these three ladies?

Ms. CORRALEJO. I will not be the spokesperson for these three ladies, but I will help translate their remarks.

Chairman TORRES. You are just simply making the statement that you are not their spokesperson.

MS. CORRALEJO. In any disaster, the victims should be the ones that speak. Therefore, I feel that my representing them would take away their right to speak for themselves as to the facts they have suffered as a result of this disaster. They will speak for themselves on an individual basis and they will share with their experiences with you as a result of the earthquake. And we would like to begin with Gloria Sanchez.

Chairman TORRES. All right. Gloria, would you take that microphone there and speak into it? Loudly, please.

STATEMENT OF GLORIA SANCHEZ, LOMA PRIETA EARTHQUAKE VICTIM

Ms. SANCHEZ. My name is Gloria Sanchez. I am one of the earthquake victims.

Chairman TORRES. And I want you give a statement, but not a long one, because we want to hear from everybody. All right? Five minutes, like everybody else.

Ms. SANCHEZ. Yes. Since the night of the earthquake, we stayed where we were. We were not moved until about 3 days after. It was really awful. We were treated really, really badly. We were practically pushed out the door.

Some people called the hotline and never got an answer.

I gave this list of low-income people who spoke with the authorities and never received any aid.

We need houses. People have died in their cars because it was so warm, some were charcoaled.

A young boy was hit by a car. He died right there.

We are staying in those trailers. We pay $300 for electricity.

If they want to charge us rent, fine. That is OK. We can work. But please, leave us alone and we can do our jobs.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Sanchez can be found in the appendix.]

Chairman TORRES. Thank you, Ms. Sanchez. Thank you for your statement. Your list of available resources will be entered into the record as a document.

I would like to hear next, then, from Ms. Estrada.

STATEMENT OF EVANGELINA ESTRADA, LOMA PRIETA
EARTHQUAKE VICTIM

Ms. ESTRADA. Good afternoon. My name is Evangelina Estrada. I have been here many times. I am one of the victims of the earthquake. I am here more for my children than anything else.

We are not one of the families that were in the tents, but we were rebuilding our home. There were hard rains and our cars would get all wet. We did not want to be ignored because our children were suffering. I think they are the most traumatized by the earthquake because they ask us, "What is going to happen to us once we have to move into the trailers? Will we have to change schools? Will we have to then leave from the trailers? What will happen to us? Where are we going to go after we leave the trailers?"

We have heard that we can purchase the trailers. The problem is that we do not have the money to do so. One of the problems is that we need to purchase the land in order to do so. We do not have the money for this. But we realize that the trailers would be very essential to our housing shortage.

I know that because of section 8, families will not be allowed. I personally have seen this problem. We have this problem with a man who has a heart condition. And therefore, he will not be allowed to live within the housing project.

Chairman TORRES. Ms. Guzman.

STATEMENT OF DALILA GUZMAN, LOMA PRIETA EARTHQUAKE

VICTIM

Ms. GUZMAN. My name is Dalila Guzman. I am a victim of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I make $1,100 a month. My husband makes $800 a month. What is happening right now is pressure on the money that I make. Before, I was able to feed my family.

My hope is to receive some low-income housing. I have never asked for aid before. I like to work, and I like my family also to work. So now, we are in a mobile home. By saving money, making money, we are trying. We are paying $300 for electricity. Everything there is run by electricity. We appreciate the assistance from FEMA. Yes, the mobile homes are very nice. They are very comfortable. But for how long, we do not know.

We need housing. We need housing that we can pay for.
Chairman TORRES. Thank you very much.

STATEMENT OF MARY CORRALEJO, DIRECTOR, WATSONVILLE AREA INTERFAITH DISASTER RECOVERY PROJECT

MS. CORRALEJO. My name is Mary Corralejo, and I am the director of the Watsonville Area Interfaith Disaster Recovery Project. I have been working with FEMA since the beginning of the program. FEMA has projected that all of a sudden there was an earthquake. Families had to actually endure nights in a whole 2 months in tent cities in parks or at the beach. A total of 120 trailers were brought into this area, housing close to 150 families.

Historically, the effects of housing have affected the populace of this area. The deterioration of housing has taken place because there have been no Federal monies to be able to subsidize mainte