"FEMA has taken a serious look at its stumbling points from the last year. We have made serious efforts to retool those areas that need to be worked on," said agency spokesman Aaron Walker. "FEMA is confident in our capabilities looking at the upcoming hurricane season."

President George W. Bush has been more cautious. "We pray there is no hurricane this coming year, but we are working together to make sure that if there is one, the response will be as efficient as possible," he said last month.

FEMA was severely criticized for its slow response to Katrina, in which tens of thousands of people were stranded for days in a lawless city without essential supplies.

John Copenhaver, a former senior FEMA official under former President Bill Clinton, said the agency still had fundamental problems, including too much bureaucracy.

"The really hard stuff is to change the culture that allowed Katrina to happen in the first place," said Copenhaver, president of the Disaster Recovery Institute.

"I don't see that they've taken any major steps to simplify the command structure," he said. "It's been pretty well demonstrated that the more layers of bureaucracy that you add ... the more difficult a time you're going to have when you really need to make things happen quickly."

FEMA, once an independent agency, was absorbed into the sprawling Homeland Security department, but many politicians and experts could like to see it become independent again, or at least completely revamped within the department.

ACTIVE STORM SEASON SEEN

Experts expect the 2006 Atlantic storm season beginning June 1 to be another active one. One prediction by scientists from Colorado State University estimated a 47 percent probability that the Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle would experience a major hurricane.

Analysts say FEMA has made progress since last year but there is still more work to do.

"They're not done yet; there are still a lot of bureaucratic issues, and a lot of training to do," said David Heyman, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"But I think that they're well positioned, better than any time in the last four years, to handle hurricanes," he said.

The FEMA overhaul started at the top. Director Michael Brown, initially praised by Bush for doing "a heckuva job", quit amid harsh criticism and was replaced by David Paulison, a former firefighter with experience in emergency management.

FEMA adopted some recommendations from scathing reports by Congress and the White House. It has set up a tracking system using global positioning satellites to keep an eye on supply trailers. Much of the aid for Katrina sat idle because no one knew where it was.

Essential disaster supplies have been stocked in staging areas and FEMA is working with vendors to restock if the supply is depleted.

The agency has doubled the number of people it can register after a disaster and is developing a better plan for long-term housing for the displaced. It will deploy teams to disaster zones able to transmit live pictures to its operation center.

"That will increase situational awareness, because that was one thing we were absolutely lacking last year," said Walker. FEMA relied on television coverage to find out some of what was happening during Katrina.