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Let's make a deal, if Bush apologists stop posting about those damn buses, moderates, liberals, progressives and all others have to quit posting about the damn ice.
Deal?
Or maybe we can make it Nagin or Governor Weepy's fault somehow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/na...ial/02ice.html
October 2, 2005
Stumbling Storm-Aid Effort Put Tons of Ice on Trips to Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - When the definitive story of the confrontation between Hurricane Katrina and the United States government is finally told, one long and tragicomic chapter will have to be reserved for the odyssey of the ice.
Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, that is, intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm. It would cost taxpayers more than $100 million, and most of it would never be delivered.
The somewhat befuddled heroes of the tale will be truckers like Mark Kostinec, who was dropping a load of beef in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 2 when his dispatcher called with an urgent government job: Pick up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mr. Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, was happy to help with the crisis. But at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala.
After a day and a half in Montgomery, he was sent to Camp Shelby, in Mississippi. From there, on Sept. 8, he was waved onward to Selma, Ala. And after two days in Selma he was redirected to Emporia, Va., along with scores of other frustrated drivers who had been following similarly circuitous routes.
At Emporia, Mr. Kostinec sat for an entire week, his trailer burning fuel around the clock to keep the ice frozen, as FEMA officials studied whether supplies originally purchased for Hurricane Katrina might be used for Hurricane Ophelia. But in the end only 3 of about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he said. So on Sept. 17, Mr. Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer the next day.
"I dragged that ice around for 4,100 miles, and it never got used," Mr. Kostinec said. A former mortgage broker and Enron computer technician, he had learned to roll with the punches, and he was pleased to earn $4,500 for the trip, double his usual paycheck. He was perplexed, however, by the government's apparent bungling.
"They didn't seem to know how much ice they were buying and how much they were using," he said. "All the truckers said the money was good. But we were upset about not being able to help."
In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Kostinec's government-ordered meandering was not unusual. Partly because of the mass evacuation forced by Hurricane Katrina, and partly because of what an inspector general's report this week called a broken system for tracking goods at FEMA, the agency ordered far more ice than could be distributed to people who needed it.
Over about a week after the storm, FEMA ordered 211 million pounds of ice for Hurricane Katrina, said Rob Holland, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which buys the ice that FEMA requests under a contract with IAP Worldwide Services of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Officials eventually realized that that much ice was overkill, and managed to cancel some of the orders. But the 182 million pounds actually supplied turned out to be far more than could be delivered to victims.
In the end, Mr. Holland said, 59 percent of the ice was trucked to storage freezers all over the country to await the next disaster; some has been used for Hurricane Rita.
Of $200 million originally set aside for ice purchases, the bill for the Hurricane Katrina purchases so far is more than $100 million - and climbing, Mr. Holland said. Under the ice contract, the government pays about $12,000 to buy a 20-ton truckload of ice, delivered to its original destination. If it is moved farther, the price is $2.60 a mile, and a day of waiting costs up to $900, Mr. Holland said.
Those numbers add up fast, and reports like Mr. Kostinec's have stirred concern on Capitol Hill, as more wearying evidence of the federal government's incoherent response to the catastrophe.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, expressed astonishment that many truckloads of ice had ended up in storage 1,600 miles from the Hurricane Katrina damage zone in her state, apparently because the storage contractor, AmeriCold Logistics, had run out of space farther south.
"The American taxpayers, and especially the Katrina victims, cannot endure this kind of wasteful spending," Ms. Collins said.
Asked about trips like Mr. Kostinec's, Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said: "He was put on call for a need and the need was not realized, so he went home. Any reasonable person recognizes the fact that it makes sense to prepare for the worst, hope for the best and place your resources where they may be needed."
Unlike an ordinary hurricane, which may leave a large population in still-habitable housing but without power for days or weeks, Hurricane Katrina destroyed neighborhoods and led to unprecedented evacuation, Ms. Andrews said.
"The population we ordered the ice for had been dispersed," she said, "which is good, because they are out of harm's way."
Ms. Andrews said FEMA realized it must improve its monitoring of essential items. The new report by the homeland security inspector general says that after last year's hurricanes million of dollars of ice was left unused in Florida because FEMA had "no automated way to coordinate quan ies of commodities with the people available to accept and distribute them."
Ms. Andrews said, "There are programs in the works that will help us better track commodities, not just ice, but water and tarps and food." One system would use bar codes and a global positioning system, "so literally we will know exactly where every bag of ice is."
Some people, including Michael D. Brown, the former FEMA director, have questioned why the agency spends so much money moving ice.
"I feebly attempted to get FEMA out of the business of ice," Mr. Brown told a House panel this week. "I don't think that's a federal government responsibility to provide ice to keep my hamburger meat in my freezer or refrigerator fresh."
But ice, even Mr. Brown agreed, at times plays a critical role, like helping keep patients alive at places like Meadowcrest Hospital, in Gretna, La. After the hurricane hit, the air-conditioning went out and temperatures inside climbed into the 90's.
"Physicians and staff attempted to cool patients by placing ice in front of fans," Phillip Sowa, the hospital's chief executive, wrote in an online account of the ordeal.
Archie Harris, a Wilmington, N.C., ice merchant who serves as disaster preparedness chairman for the International Packaged Ice Association, said that while FEMA had been criticized mostly as being underprepared, on the ice question it was being criticized for being overprepared. "FEMA can't win right now," Mr. Harris said. "Can you imagine what people would say if they'd run out of ice?"
Not all of the ice delivery trips, by an estimated 4,000 drivers, ended in frustration. Mike Snyder, a truck driver from Berwick, Pa., took an excruciating journey that started in Allentown, Pa., on Sept. 16 and did not end until two weeks later, on Friday morning, when he arrived in Tarkington Prairie, Tex.
The electricity was out in the small community. When Mr. Snyder pulled up in front of a local church and unloaded his ice, residents were overjoyed to see him. "I felt like I did a lot of good," he said.
Truck drivers who pinballed around the country felt differently.
Having almost lost his Florida home to a hurricane last year, Jeff Henderson was eager to help when he heard that FEMA needed truckers to carry ice. He drove at his own expense to Wisconsin to collect a 20-ton load and delivered it to the Carthage staging area.
Then he, too, was sent across the South: Meridian, Miss.; Selma; and finally Memphis, where he waited five days and then delivered his ice to storage.
"I can't understand what happened," Mr. Henderson said. "The government's the only customer that plays around like that."
Mike Hohnstein, a dispatcher in Omaha, sent a truckload out of Dubuque, Iowa, to Meridian. From there, the driver was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, to Columbia, S.C., and finally to berland, Md., where he bought a lawn chair and waited for six days.
Finally, 10 days after he started, the driver was told to take the ice to storage in Bettendorf, Iowa, Mr. Hohnstein said. The truck had traveled 3,282 miles, but not a cube of ice had reached a hurricane victim.
"Well," Mr. Hohnstein said, "the driver got to see the country."
His company's bill to the government will exceed $15,000, he said, but the ice was worth less than $5,000. "It seemed like an incredible waste of money," he said.
The next time FEMA calls for help, it may find the response far less willing. After two Universe Truck Lines drivers spent more than two weeks on the road to no purpose, the company decided it had had enough. When a FEMA contractor called and asked if the company could take some ice stored in Fremont, Neb., to Fort Worth, Tex., Universe said no.
"Our trucks had been tied up for 17 days," Sean Smal, a Universe dispatcher, said. "We couldn't take another trip like those."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Let's make a deal, if Bush apologists stop posting about those damn buses, moderates, liberals, progressives and all others have to quit posting about the damn ice.
Deal?
The problems are enormous, the solutions very difficult, requiring the best talents and organization, which are not qualities of dubya's cronified/corrupted/incompetent/politicized DHS/FEMA.
===================
washingtonpost.com
Housing Promises Made to Evacuees Have Fallen Short
Red Cross to Halt Hotel Stipends in 2 Weeks, And Hundreds of Shelters Have Closed
By Spencer S. Hsu and Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 2, 2005; A01
Two weeks before President Bush's mid-October goal for moving Hurricane Katrina victims out of shelters, more than 100,000 people still reside in such makeshift housing, and 400,000 more are in hotel rooms costing up to $100 a night.
Housing options promised by the federal government a month ago have largely failed to materialize. Cruise ships and trailer parks have so far proved in large part to be unworkable, while an American Red Cross program -- paid for by the federal government -- that allows storm victims to stay in motels or hotels is scheduled to expire Oct. 15. It is projected to cost the Federal Emergency Management Agency as much as $168 million.
Federal officials are struggling to launch an alternative interim housing program that would give families whose homes are destroyed or uninhabitable a lump sum of $2,358 in rental assistance, or $786 a month for three months, with the possibility of a 15-month extension. So far, 330,000 families have signed up for the housing assistance. But if evacuees have to use those stipends to pay for hotel rooms when FEMA stops covering such lodging, the funds will not last long.
Last week, the number of evacuees in hotels increased from 220,000 to more than 400,000 people, in 140,000 rooms. Many have no idea what they will do when the program ends in two weeks.
Ronnie Ashworth, a truck driver from Chalmette, La., east of New Orleans, currently lives at the Baton Rouge Marriott. If no other housing is forthcoming after Oct. 15, "I'll be sleeping in the back of my truck," Ashworth, 60, said. "I have no funds right now."
Red Cross spokeswoman Carrie Martin said, "We're administering the hotel program with the expectation that it ends on October 15th. . . . After that, we'll still have shelters open, but we definitely don't want to move backwards."
Meanwhile, more than 100,000 people remain in about 1,000 shelters operated by the Red Cross, smaller charities and churches, scattered across two dozen states as far-flung as New York and Washington.
The Red Cross has said it will keep its shelters open for as long as necessary, but many are in churches and public buildings that are needed for their primary functions. Hundreds of shelters have closed over the past two weeks, and many of their occupants, the Red Cross said, appear to be moving into hotels, in hopes of benefiting from the hotel program in its final days.
In search of temporary housing immediately after the hurricane, FEMA officials went on a $1.5 billion spending spree, buying out entire dealerships of recreational vehicles and signing contracts for more than $500 million with one manufacturer of mobile homes. But the plan to create "cities" of 500 to 600 RVs across the South has run into major logistical and political problems.
In FEMA lots in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, several thousand trailers stand empty, waiting for the agency to navigate land leases, zoning laws, local opposition and policy questions.
"We have 12,000 mobile homes with no place to put them," said Rosemarie Hunter, a FEMA spokeswoman in Baton Rouge.
To date, only 1,396 trailers in Louisiana house displaced people. About 1,100 are occupied by workers engaged in New Orleans's recovery effort, and 173 house families left homeless by the storm.
Policymakers say that warehousing tens of thousands of people in trailer park communities until New Orleans and other cities are rebuilt could lead to the creation of dysfunctional "FEMAvilles," as residents of past encampments have called them. Democrats go further, warning that they may become known as "Bushvilles," just as Depression-era shantytowns were called "Hoovervilles."
Refugee Council USA, which includes nine U.S. resettlement agencies that have integrated 2.5 million global refugees into the United States since 1975, said storm victims would be better off getting on with their lives -- finding housing, jobs and counseling services in new communities rather than waiting indefinitely for homes to be rebuilt.
FEMA officials agree. Evacuees, said FEMA spokesman Eugene Kinerney, "need to consider long-term housing in areas where there is available rental stock and prospects for employment to take care of other needs, such as food."
But some civic and political leaders worry that the alternative -- resettling storm victims -- will lead many to stay permanently in their host communities, fundamentally changing the nature and politics of Louisiana and possibly beyond.
FEMA initially estimated that the homes of 300,000 families were destroyed by Katrina and that 200,000 of them will need government help with housing but said only time would reveal the true scope of need. The lack of an effective strategy to manage the largest displaced population of Americans in at least 60 years has touched off a furious policy debate.
"The big picture is . . . everyone who has some scheme for how people should live is now living vicariously through the opportunity New Orleans offers" of a blank slate, said Ronald D. Utt, senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation. "All this push and pull is happening, and all of which can be lumped in with some notion of social engineering."
Policy think tanks from the Brookings Ins ution on the left to Heritage on the right have criticized FEMA for relying on trailers as it traditionally does for hurricane victims, saying Katrina's scale overwhelms that solution. By contrast, they say vouchers provide more choices to individuals, reduce the need for building public housing and take advantage of existing housing stock.
In a joint statement last week, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) criticized how long it took the Bush administration to implement its voucher program. "It wasn't until nearly one month after the disaster struck that the Bush Administration finally announced it would begin to provide rent payments to families displaced by the storm," as Democrats urged, they said. Under the FEMA housing assistance plan, families that remain eligible can get as much as 18 months of cash assistance for a maximum of $14,148, but the money would count against a cap of $26,200 per family that Congress has set for FEMA to give in cash, rental assistance and home repairs.
Even before FEMA announced the program, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) pushed a plan through the Senate last month to provide $3.5 billion in housing vouchers to 350,000 Katrina-displaced families. On Friday, Sarbanes called on Bush to transfer control of housing assistance from FEMA to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"The scope of this disaster calls for changes in how we think about disaster assistance," Sarbanes wrote the White House. "Hundreds of thousands of people may need housing assistance for 18 months or even longer. We cannot rely on FEMA, an emergency response agency, to provide on-going housing assistance to this large number of families," he said, citing HUD's "experience, staff and infrastructure."
Staff writer Jacqueline L. Salmon contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
===================
Earlier, there was talk of a surplus 1.1 million rental units in the southern region. What happened to that solution?
Some things are going right. The size of the problem is mind-boggling.
Dumping people in trailers only creates another crunch later when people get fed up living in trailers, as has happened now in Florida for people displaced by the 2004 hurricanes.
==========================
washingtonpost.com
City of RVs Is Ready For Families
Louisiana Site Has About 600 Trailers
By Dana Hedgpeth and Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 2, 2005; A15
BAKER, La. -- By Monday, families displaced by Hurricane Katrina will move here into a "mini city" of neatly spaced rows of about 600 white RV trailers that was, until eight days ago, a 65-acre cow pasture outside of Baton Rouge. A team of 200 engineers, plumbers, laborers, draftsmen and city officials have worked around the clock to install water and sewer pipes to the grassy fields, converting the area into what some evacuees working on the project call the "City of Hope."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency once envisioned "cities" of 500 to 600 RVs scattered across the South to house evacuees uprooted from their homes by Katrina. But those plans have bogged down as FEMA has tried to make its way through a maze of bureaucratic hurdles to lease land, comply with local zoning laws and overcome local opposition to "FEMA cities" within their borders.
"Our infrastructure cannot handle it," said Riley "Pee Wee" Berthelot Jr., president of West Baton Rouge parish, of FEMA's plans to install 700 mobile homes in his parish of 22,000 residents. The parish has already accepted more than 400 children in its schools, and Berthelot adds that many of the parish's rural residents are uncomfortable with the former city residents now moving in.
More than 330,000 families have applied for housing vouchers.
FEMA has set up some trailers in the driveways of homes destroyed by the hurricane so that residents can remain on their property as their permanent homes are rebuilt. But the bulk of trailers and mobile homes will be set up on large state-owned properties, the first of which is the one here about 10 miles north of Baton Rouge. A spokeswoman for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) said the state has identified 52,000 acres it can use for setting up temporary homes.
"They're nice, but some people say they're awfully small," said Jessie James, 57, of the RV city being set up a mile away. James is a New Orleans resident now living at Baker's City Hall, which has been converted into a shelter. "I would use the RV temporarily, but I want my family to go home," she said.
Stephen J. Saucier, an architect who is one of the lead project managers of the RV park in Baker, said local officials are doing more than just setting up rows of homes. They are trying to erect a semblance of a community with a large kitchen hall that will serve three meals a day, grassy areas for picnic tables, basketball courts and laundromats. His team had to install a complex system of underground sewer pipes, water and electrical lines, and a sewage treatment facility that can process 130,000 gallons of sewage a day.
There are two kinds of homes that displaced residents will get.
FEMA has purchased or ordered 125,000 travel trailers, the kind of RVs that are towed behind a truck. Each of them costs between $16,000 and $20,000 and is at least 30 feet long and contains a stove, a refrigerator, an air conditioner, a furnace and a bathroom with a shower.
The agency has also purchased or ordered thousands of mobile homes, also known as "manufactured homes," for about $30,000 each. They are similar to the temporary offices used at construction sites. These homes are not on wheels. They are 60 feet long and contain the same amenities as the travel trailers.
FEMA stores some trailers used in previous disasters in regional locations near rail lines, such as a site outside berland, Md. But in the days after Katrina, the agency scrambled to buy as many as it could find.
Phil Ornstein, sales manager for Gore's RV World in Jacksonville, Fla., received an e-mail from a FEMA official asking if he had 30-foot travel trailers. The agency bought the entire lot: 304 trailers for $6 million.
"I don't want to live on someone's misery," Ornstein said. But in Florida, the RV dealers have learned to order extra trailers every year for when FEMA comes calling. "Business is business. We were ready for this hurricane," Ornstein said.
RV dealers said they have hired dozens of truck drivers to deliver the trailers to FEMA -- in some cases filled with donated goods from Rotary Clubs or other groups -- only to find FEMA's staging areas clogged with supplies.
"We've got trailers coming out our ears," said Sheila Speights, the clerk for the city of Purvis, Miss., one of a handful of FEMA's designated cities that are taking in trailers from RV dealers in Indiana, Florida and as far away as New York.
FEMA has leased a large vacant lot near an interstate, Speights said, where truckers have lined up at least 3,000 of the white trailers until the agency can find a more permanent place. "It blowed me away the first time I saw it," Speights said. "They move about half of them a day and bring half that many in."
Staff writer Charles R. Bab contributed to this report. Bab and Goo reported from Washington.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
"talk of a surplus 1.1 million rental units in the southern region"
???
Here's the answer, ideology forcing the Repubs to force hurrincane victims into temporary public housing (bound to fail) rather than rental units (succeeded "too well" for Repubs in earlier disasers). As well as denying them medical care.
The ing assholes, looking after their ideologies even when it abandons people to disastrous fate. Nice ing country the Repubs are aiming for.
Inhumane, vindictive, puntive, leaving people to suffer and rot.
=============================
The New York Times
October 3, 2005
Miserable by Design
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Federal aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina is already faltering on two crucial fronts: health care and housing. Incompetence is part of the problem, but deeper political issues also play a crucial role.
Start with health care, where conservative senators, generally believed to be acting on behalf of the White House, have blocked bipartisan legislation that would provide all low-income victims of Katrina with health coverage under Medicaid.
In a letter urging Senate leaders to reject the bill, Mike Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, warned that it would create "a new Medicaid en lement." He asserted that victims can be taken care of by Medicaid "waivers," which basically amount to giving refugees the health benefits, if any, that they would have been en led to in their home states - and no more.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, many needy victims won't qualify for aid. For example, Medicaid doesn't cover childless adults of working age. In fact, surveys show that many des ute survivors of Katrina are being denied Medicaid, and some are going without medicines they need.
Local hospitals and doctors will often treat Katrina victims even if they can't pay. But this means that communities that have welcomed Katrina refugees will, in effect, be financially punished for their generosity - something local officials will remember in future crises. (The administration has offered vague, unconvincing assurances that it will do something to compensate medical caregivers. It has offered much more concrete assurances that it will reimburse religious groups that provide aid.)
What about housing? These days, both conservatives and liberals agree that public housing projects are a bad idea, and that housing vouchers - which help the poor pay rent - are much better. In the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, special housing vouchers issued to victims worked very well.
But the administration has chosen, instead, to focus its efforts on the creation of public housing in the form of trailer parks, which have been slow to take shape, will almost surely be more expensive than a voucher program and may create long-term refugee ghettoes. Even Newt Gingrich calls this "extraordinarily bad policy" that "violates every conservative principle."
What's going on here? The crucial point is that President Bush has been forced by events into short-term actions that conflict with his long-term goals. His mission in office is to dismantle or at least shrink the federal social safety net, yet he must, as a matter of political necessity, provide aid to Katrina's victims. His problem is how to do that without legitimizing the very role of government he opposes.
This dilemma explains the administration's opposition to Medicaid coverage for all Katrina refugees. How can it provide that coverage without undermining its ongoing efforts to reduce the Medicaid rolls? More broadly, if it accepts the principle that all hurricane victims are en led to medical care, people might start asking why the same isn't true of all American citizens - a line of thought that points toward a system of universal health insurance, which is anathema to conservatives.
As for the administration's odd insistence on providing public housing instead of relying on the market, The Los Angeles Times reports that Department of Housing and Urban Development officials initially announced plans to issue rent vouchers, then backed off after meeting with White House aides. As the article notes, the administration has "repeatedly sought to cut or limit" the existing housing voucher program.
This suggests that what administration officials fear isn't that housing vouchers would fail, but that they would succeed - and that this success would undermine the administration's ongoing efforts to cut back housing aid.
So here's the key to understanding post-Katrina policy: Mr. Bush can't avoid helping Katrina's victims, but he doesn't want to legitimize ins utions that help the needy, like the housing voucher program. As a result, his administration refuses to use those ins utions, even when they are the best way to provide victims with aid. More generally, the administration is trying to treat Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.
As the misery of the hurricane's survivors goes on, remember this: to a large extent, they are miserable by design.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
This was already posted a while back. Again I'd like to ask what experience any of you have in managing or coordination for large disaster relief efforts? I'd also like to point out the damned if you do damned if don't thast constantly goes on here. If there wasn't ice at the ready, people would be calling FEMA out for it's failure to preposition ice needed by the survivors and refugees. I guess it's better to have too much than too little.
"managing or coordination for large disaster relief efforts? "
It's "not my job", as Mike Brown would say.
It's just not the scale of Katrina, compared to earlier hurricane destructions, as late as last year. which were handled without widespread condemnation.
It's not just NO disaser, which was unique (and foreseen by FEMA in the preceding 12 months).
It's the wide-spread observation that FEMA has been run down and made ineffective by having been "manned" by incompetent, inexperienced, finger-pointing, respsonsiliby-dodging, politicized Repug assholes.
The ice episode is just one. As the story and post-mortem firms up, the evidence will continue mounting up.
Many people who were physically revolted by dubya still got behind him after 9/11 for the sake of the country. What did we get? Tons of lies, 9/11 exploited for partisan Repub objectives, incredible corruption from Delay and his accomplices, and the bogus Iraq war.
Your are wrong. Had FEMA handled Katrina with just average competence seen in previous hurricanes, there wouldn't be such damning.
And was it DHS/FEMA's job? More that a few think so:
==========================
October 2, 2005
Actually, It Was FEMA's Job
While the nation is pretty clear that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed miserably during Hurricane Katrina, people are confused about what it should - or shouldn't - have been doing. That's partly because of the high-decibel blame-shifting that has been going on. Exhibit A was the spectacularly disconnected "not-my-job" display by the former FEMA director, Michael Brown, at a Congressional inquiry last week.
FEMA's job is to coordinate disaster relief, broken into four areas: preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. The key word is coordinate, and Mr. Brown repeated it time and again during his hearing. "FEMA is a coordinating agency. We are not a law enforcement agency," he told lawmakers.
But according to emergency management experts across America, that is no excuse for Mr. Brown's failures. The federal role is to make things happen. That means being in the same room with state and local officials, anticipating and responding to their needs. It means making sure state and local officials get help, quickly. It means focusing on what is actually happening. Let's look at FEMA's mandate to see what should have been done differently, with an eye to doing better in the future:
Preparedness A little over a year ago, FEMA directed federal and state officials to conduct a $1 million simulation of what a Category 3 hurricane - this one was nicknamed Hurricane Pam - would do if it hit southeast Louisiana. The draft report, finished in December 2004, predicted that floodwaters would surge over levees, creating high casualties and forcing a mass evacuation. It said hundreds of thousands of homes would be destroyed, a half-million people left homeless, and "all 40 medical facilities in the impacted area isolated and useless," according to The Associated Press. Local officials, the report said, would quickly be overwhelmed.
Mr. Brown had the report for several months before Hurricane Katrina. Yet in the days before Katrina made landfall just east of New Orleans, with the National Weather Service saying it was a Category 4 storm, then a Category 5, then back to a Category 4, he decided against a wide-scale deployment of FEMA workers. He put small rescue and communications teams along the Gulf Coast. But it was not until Aug. 29, after the storm hit, that Mr. Brown asked the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, to send at least 1,000 federal workers to help with the rescue.
Response At 8:14 a.m. on Aug. 29, shortly after Katrina hit land, the New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning that predicted three to eight feet of water from a levee breach along the Industrial Canal at Tennessee Street. That was the flood that quickly submerged much of the Lower Ninth Ward and nearby areas, trapping thousands of people. Shortly after, the 17th Street Canal levee also was breached.
Despite the National Weather Service report, not to mention the Hurricane Pam simulation, it was not until the next day that federal officials in charge of response noticed that levees had been breached. Mr. Chertoff suggested on NBC that news coverage misled him. "I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,' " he said.
When the people in charge of responding to natural disasters ignore weather service bulletins, later claiming to have relied on local newspapers to tell them whether a city is flooded, bad things are going to happen. Once again, FEMA was supposed to be coordinating, but officials apparently did not even bother figuring out what they were supposed to be coordinating the response to.
Recovery No one can forget the mostly poor, mostly black refugees in New Orleans begging for help for days from the Superdome and convention center, where they ended up because many did not have the means to leave town. This is one of the points on which Mr. Brown was most eager to blame local authorities, even private citizens. "And while my heart goes out to people on fixed incomes, it is primarily a state and local responsibility. And in my opinion, it's the responsibility of faith-based organizations, of churches and charities and others to help those people," he said in one wildly cynical bit of sworn testimony before the House.
The New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, and the former police chief, Edwin Compass, share blame for Katrina's dreadful aftermath. But at the moment of crisis, the buck stops at FEMA. The quality of help that victims of a disaster receive cannot be determined by their location, or their incomes. If Mr. Brown was so dedicated to coordination, he should have been coordinating the effort to get those refugees to safety, not waiting for the church ladies and the Rotarians - who were also flooded out of their homes.
Mitigation It's too soon to judge FEMA on how well it helps Gulf Coast residents rebuild their lives. Its job is to pull together all the myriad elements of President Bush's program. Whether it does that satisfactorily remains to be seen.
One thing is certain: Mr. Brown's not-my-job strategy is not the answer.
=================
Last edited by boutons; 10-03-2005 at 09:20 AM.
[QUOTE=boutons]"managing or coordination for large disaster relief efforts? "
It's "not my job", as Mike Brown would say.
It's just not the scale of Katrina, compared to earlier hurricane destructions, as late as last year. which were handled without widespread condemnation.
It's not just NO disaser, which was unique (and foreseen by FEMA in the preceding 12 months).
It's the wide-spread observation that FEMA has been run down and made ineffective by having been "manned" by incompetent, inexperienced, finger-pointing, respsonsiliby-dodging, politicized Repug assholes.
That is just a funny paragraph!
Your are wrong. Had FEMA handled Katrina with just average competence seen in previous hurricanes, there wouldn't be such damning.
Boutons, when was the last time a disaster like Katrina hit the US?
The size of Katrina is no excuse for FEMA's bungling.
The NO levees breaking was a disaster that even FEMA had war-gamed for in the preceding 12 months.
FEMA just wasn't ing ready to do its ing job.
Last edited by boutons; 10-03-2005 at 02:40 PM.
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