Question about FEMA

[ck4829]

Why did it take FEMA so long to get ICE to people in New Orleans, if you remember the ice went halfway back and forth between at least a dozen states before it arrived in New Orleans, but they are acting fast and with a brutal efficiency to pull the carpet out from underneath the feet of the survivors, they are acting swiftly to remove the housing from the survivors etc., why?

Basically, it's like this.

Things that FEMA seems inefficient about:
Saving people
Retrieving the dead
Getting necessary supplies to people, like ice

Things that FEMA is moving very fast on and is very efficient about:
Cutting communications
Cutting free housing to people
And more unnecessary things

Something seems sort of suspicious around here.

Is it just me, or does it seem as though the incompetence on FEMA's part may have been malicious?

War on Christmas

War against Christmas

[babylonsister]

1. Things FEMA is/was inefficient about = EVERYTHING. nt

[waiting for hope]

2. From the people I know

that live there.....what basically happened is when FEMA stepped in , total Chaos ensued because no one on the ground had any:
1) Leadership Skills
2) Organizational Skills
3) Fucking Common Sense......

They were turning away trucks with ice because no one in FEMA knew what to do with it..

[Maddy McCall]

4. During Rita, a Texas judge authorized the county's deputies to go...

seize big generators (for the city's water system) at 8:00 the next morning, if the trucks had not started moving out of the FEMA staging lot. People had no water, and water system could not run without a generator. After about a week of no water service, the judge stepped in and threatened FEMA: Either you have those generators moving to the water system by 8 tomorrow morning, or my deputies will come sieze them.

That took balls of steel.

[Igel]

5. It was also very risky.

The choice wasn't 'keep generators nice and dry in a warehouse' or 'give them to Rita victims.' Granted, that's the indignation-based/sensationalist-media version, because, well, that's what people like to hear.

Much of Houston's water comes from a reservoir, but pumps move the water first into an intermediate reservoir. The intermediate reservoir was down to a few days's supply when they discovered that those pumps didn't have power. FEMA wasn't at all sure they'd be able to get more generators before the water ran out. So the *real* choice was 'keep the generators for Houston's water supply' or 'give them to Rita victims.' Waiting a day was, I think, prudent, not incompetent.

They'd been laying power lines frantically for a day or two before he issued his ruling--the local stations were reporting on it fairly frequently--and FEMA and the power and water folk were trying to form a basis for estimating when power would be restored to the pumps. The judge's order was going to be ignored, in all likelihood, if they needed the generators for Houston. Even if you don't think Houston was worth the bother--Houston's weren't good enough victims yet--remember that the water trucks for Rita victims filled up in Houston.

[Maddy McCall]

6. Maybe so, but the pumps were at the water station the next morning

and hooked up and running by noon.

[Maddy McCall]

3. It never arrived in NOLA. Those trucks, that did the cross-country...

tours never ended up in NOLA.

I learned after the hurricane that the only entity on which you can depend is yourself. And, sometimes, you can depend on local people and businesses to help out. In our area, we have a huge chicken processing plant. Rather than see all of the ice in their ice machines melt and the chicken spoil, they donated ice and chicken to anyone who wanted it. I'll depend on Sanderson Farms before I'll depend on FEMA again, unless there's a new president in office who appoints someone who actually knows what's going on.