Wallace Stickney

Wallace Elmer "Wally" Stickney (November 24, 1934 – June 27, 2019) was an American civil servant, most prominently as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President George H. W. Bush.

Stickney was born in Salem, New Hampshire. He graduated from New England College in 1959 (B.S.) and received master's degrees from Northeastern University (M.S.) and Harvard University (M.P.A.). He died on June 27, 2019, after a brief illness.

In 1965, Stickney was unanimously chosen as the first professional town engineer for Salem. He also served on the Southern Rockingham Regional Planning Commission. As Salem's town engineer, Stickney was instrumental in the planning of a new municipal core centered on Geremonty Drive. This included a new high school, a municipal office building, a new wastewater treatment plant, and three elementary schools.

He was nominated to lead FEMA in 1990. At the time, a significant portion of FEMA's budget dealt with Cold War issues of nuclear survivability. Stickney was later quoted "The evil empire had crumbled, the Warsaw Pact nations were becoming independent, and it became clear that the most difficult situation we would have to handle wouldn't be a maximum lay-down but a partial one, in which only a part of the country was knocked out," said Stickney. "It was a time of transition on the world scene." Stickney faced considerable resistance in his efforts to transform FEMA from a secretive organization focused on doomsday preparations into one capable of effectively responding to natural disasters. According to Stickney, his efforts "...met with the full resistance of the security industry, as well as what might even be called a 'Security Cult' -- people who believed strongly in what they'd been doing for ten years and longer. There are many ways to make things move slowly when there are a lot of people working against it, and only a few trying to make it happen."