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The Forever Elsewhere Management Agency
... It was day 13 after Katrina struck, and no one was coordinating the relief effort in one of the poorest communities along the coast.We never found a resident who had ever seen even one FEMA official. No one had been able to successfully complete "Registration Intake" via the toll-free number. Most people we met still didn't have electricity or phone service. We finally heard of one man who got through to FEMA -- at 2:30 a.m. But when asked for insurance information he didn't have and didn't know how he could get since he'd lost everything and had no place else to turn, he just broke down and cried. The bureaucracy was killing him.
It's no wonder. The Sept. 11 Clarion-Ledger, Jackson's local paper, reported that U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering (R) had said FEMA needs 10,000 operators to properly staff the phones, but Homeland Security regulations require employees to pass security clearance, typically a months-long process. The paper quotes Pickering as concluding, "In other words, the phone line is useless."
Meanwhile, our efforts were complicated because our phones rarely rang -- spotty cell reception. Although I could usually call out, I wasn't able to receive calls.
Again, the Clarion-Leger provided some insight. Pickering's office reported that two days after the hurricane hit, a company offered to launch balloons that would restore cellular phone service in the region -- for free. FEMA told him the company would have to go through a typically months-long competitive bidding process. The bureaucracy simply could not be avoided. FEMA representatives were nowhere to be found, but their rules and regulations are everywhere.
...
The sympathetic workers in the county courthouse had few ideas for us. When asked where FEMA was, one responded, "Your guess is as good as mine."
The Forever Elsewhere Management Agency
Karen A. Lash, Salon.com, September 14, 2005
I am starting to entertain a thought that FEMA ought to be disbanded and then reconstituted from scratch in some form or another. I am starting to become more and more of an opinion that this organization is too useless, corrupt and incompetent to fix. I am not convinced of that yet but I do get an impression that all FEMA in its current form is capable of is oppressing some citizens, ignoring the needs of others, impeding the aid from getting to yet others and giving us a deadly illusion that we have a federal-level mechanism in place to deal with large-scale calamities.
Ooops, once again I am going to have to deal with Boris telling us he is
only the messenger.
Read the text - the baloons were offered free of cost. I doubt too many
people would have been aghast at this little bit of monopoly. And on top of
that you can't please everyone, especailly in an emergency situation -
you've got a mission. And FEMA's mission is going to shit, or at least so
it looks to pretty much all observers, near and far, left and right.
So the balloons were offered without cost? And did the providers stop there
or did they offer the services to someone higher in charge? Or were we
dealing with mayhem?
David,
Boris,
David,