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I'm not quite sure I understand the ideological sidestepping here to defend FEMA and the federal government’s response. Certainly one can concede that part of what led to the circumstances where some 60,000+ people were left stranded in New Orleans can be blamed on state and local officials. However, all of this was before the hurricane. After the hurricane, the state was clearly overwhelmed to adequately respond to the crisis and anyone with a tv, radio, or computer saw that it was quite clear that an urgent federal response was needed. For Christ’s sake, how many times did we see Blanco or the New Orlean’s mayor plead for help on tv and describe the chaotic deterioration of the situation? It’s completely unacceptable that Brown didn’t even know about the situation in New Orleans and the Superdome until Thursday when you, I, and everyone else in America who had half a brain to watch the news or use the internet knew about it by Tuesday.
So what’s the defense of FEMA and the federal government’s response? Justifiable bureaucracy prevented them from intervening because it’s primarily a state/local issue??? This is the defense the supposed "advocates" of limited, accountable government turn to? Well than what’s the fucking point of the assload of federal money that's going FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security if it’s their job to go in second or third? So you’re telling me that if 9/11 happened all over again, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security would do NOTHING until New York state and local officials appealed for federal help by submitting Form 5 Subform 13 and making sure to sign on the dotted line at paragraph 3 line 55? And once that were done, the federal government might finally respond a week after the twin towers fell? This is the kind of bloated government you want with your tax dollars? We now reward and defend agencies that are mandated to bureaucracy instead of agencies that take initiative??? This is analogous to the democrats suddenly supporting privatized social security if Hillary Clinton said it would be good for her “village”.
But yes, embrace the bureaucracy, the inefficiencies, and the ineptitude because that's exactly the kind of government we want and expect with our tax dollars. After all we can’t have good government that’s actually, you know, accountable. Why that’s just shocking to think that.
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Red Tape Snarls Katrina Volunteers
Sept. 5, 2005
(AP) From all corners of this country, hundreds of would-be rescuers are wending their way to the beleaguered Gulf Coast in buses, vans and trailers. But government red tape has hampered many who ache to help Katrina's victims.
Louisiana's Jefferson Parish is desperate for relief, but parish President Aaron Broussard says officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned back three trailer trucks of water, ordered the Coast Guard not to provide emergency diesel fuel and cut emergency power lines.
Why? FEMA has not explained. But the outraged Broussard said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the agency needs to bring in all its "force immediately, without red tape, without bureaucracy, act immediately with common sense and leadership, and save lives."
The government says it is doing the best it can in the face of a massive and complicated disaster.
"Even as progress is being made, we know that victims are still out there and we are working tirelessly to bring them the help they need," said Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Some of the delays can be explained by the need to control a volatile situation. Long lines of volunteers are being stopped on freeways on their way into New Orleans.
"Anyone who self-responded was not being put to work. The military was worried about having more people in the city. They want to limit it to the professionals," said Kevin Southerland, a captain with Orange Fire Department in Orange County, Calif., a member of one of eight 14-member water rescue teams sent to New Orleans at FEMA's request.
From the first hours of the disaster, FEMA has been using the National Incident Management System, a command structure to get millions of dollars worth of government resources and thousands of workers ranging from firefighters to public health teams to places in need. FEMA also has teams designed to support smaller communities.
FEMA is urging individuals and corporations to contact nonprofit organizations if they want to volunteer or donate.
It was FEMA's management system that brought in members of the Nebraska Air National Guard to deliver 66,000 MRE meals and extra fuel to hard-hit areas, and rescuers from Hamilton County, Ohio to search the rubble of Gulfport, Miss. for survivors.
And it was that system that dispatched a nine-member Disaster Medical Assistance Team from Hawaii to the New Orleans Airport where they triaged people evacuated from hospitals, nursing homes, the Convention Center and the Superdome.
The federal government actually wrote a "How To" book for national catastrophes after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The 426-page document, called the National Response Plan, was released in December, 2004.
Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said Hurricane Katrina is the first real test of the plan, and has exposed its strengths and weaknesses.
"Quite honestly, at the federal level, the coordination was quite robust," he said. "It's just the interface between federal, state and local where clearly we need to look to ways to improve the process."
But others were more critical. Beth Sharer, CEO of Washington County Memorial Hospital in Salem, Ind., said she was frustrated by a federal plan to create 40 new emergency medical centers with 250 beds each.
"It's not any one person's fault, but the system failed," she said.
Hospitals around the country were standing by with empty beds, staff, triage centers and air transportation to fetch patients, she said. But they couldn't launch the rescue flights without requests for help, and those requests never came.
"These victims could have been here a week ago, and now they're spending a lot of time and money making triage centers? In situations like this every minute counts, not every day counts. Why not get them to these open beds?" she said.
Even skilled volunteers with the best intentions can be more trouble than help if they arrive needing food, shelter or fuel, some say.
"Our biggest problem has been trying not to put more stress on the community, particularly with regards to gasoline. We want to make sure we've got enough gas for chain saws and transportation," said Larry Guengerich of the Mennonite Disaster Service, a Pennsylvania-based relief organization that has three small crews currently working along the Gulf Coast, cutting and clearing downed limbs and covering damaged roofs.
There are, at this point, several federal emergency command centers, as well as state and local command centers where coordinators are working to match nonstop requests with the appropriate nonstop offers of help.
Frank Russo of the Chicago Ambulance Alliance said his organization was ready to send help immediately. But the request didn't come until Thursday, three days after the hurricane struck.
"We didn't want to just up and go like everyone did after 9-11. We learned from that. After 9-11 everybody just went to New York and then they just sat there, they had no where to go."
Early Saturday, ten Chicago ambulances and their medical staff finally headed south with orders to report to a command center set up outside of New Orleans. By Sunday the Chicago ambulances were delivering patients from the New Orleans airport to regional hospitals.
"It makes sense to go through the government and have things set up," said Russo.
Others were still waiting for the official request. In New Jersey, for example, Gov. Richard Codey said he had a task force of 105 police officers and 55 vehicles and a medical task force of 55 physicians and 43 nurses standing by.
But other rescuers simply couldn't, or wouldn't, wait.
Early Sunday morning, for example, a convoy of more than 35 fire, police, transportation and public works vehicles left Baltimore for an 1,100-mile drive to Gretna, La.
Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley decided to send the help, including 40 firefighters and 28 police officers, without consulting FEMA "as a direct response to a direct request from the mayor of Gretna," said O'Malley's spokesman.
On Friday, Gary Maclaughlin of Santa Cruz, Calif., flew to Nashville, Tenn., where he bought a diesel-powered 1990 yellow school bus for $2,000. He charged $1,500 worth of water, diapers, granola bars and peanut butter crackers on his credit card and headed straight for the shelters.
By Sunday evening he was driving loads of evacuees from the New Orleans Airport to a rescue shelter in Covington, La.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005...611_page3.shtml
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Katrina medical help held up by red tape
Doctors waiting to treat victims in tax-funded, state-of-the-art unit
Monday, September 5, 2005; Posted: 12:16 p.m. EDT (16:16 GMT)
Manage Alerts | What Is This? BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (AP) -- Volunteer physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise.
Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi.
"The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.
While the doctors wait, the first signs of disease began to emerge Saturday: A Mississippi shelter was closed after 20 residents got sick with dysentery, probably from drinking contaminated water.
Many other storm survivors were being treated in the Houston Astrodome and other shelters for an assortment of problems, including chronic health conditions left untreated because people had lost or used up their medicine.
The North Carolina mobile hospital stranded in Mississippi was developed through the Office of Homeland Security after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. With capacity for 113 beds, it is designed to handle disasters and mass casualties.
Equipment includes ultrasound, digital radiology, satellite Internet, and a full pharmacy, enabling doctors to do most types of surgery in the field, including open-chest and abdominal operations.
It travels in a convoy that includes two 53-foot trailers, which as of Sunday afternoon was parked on a gravel lot 70 miles north of New Orleans because Louisiana officials for several days would not let them deploy to the flooded city, Rich said.
Yet plans to use the facility and its 100 health professionals were hatched days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, doctors in the caravan said.
As they talked with Mississippi officials about prospects of helping out there, other doctors complained that their offers of help also were turned away.
A primary care physician from Ohio called and e-mailed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services after seeing a notice on the American Medical Association's Web site about volunteer doctors being needed.
An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN that night, where U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt was to announce a Web address for doctors to enter their names in a database.
"How crazy is that?" he complained in an e-mail to his daughter.
Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University who has been in contact with the mobile hospital doctors, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, "There are entire hospitals that are contacting me, saying, 'We need to take on patients," ' but they can't get through the bureaucracy.
"The crime of this story is, you've got millions of dollars in assets and it's not deployed," he said. "We mount a better response in a Third World country."
Leavitt, U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, and Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were in Louisiana on Sunday. Gerberding planned to go to Texas, where many evacuees are now housed.
Many other doctors have been able to volunteer, and were arriving in large numbers Sunday in Baton Rouge. Several said they worked it out through Louisiana state officials.
Dr. Bethany Gardiner, a 36-year-old pediatrician who just moved to Santa Barbara, California, from Florida, had been visiting parents in Florida when the hurricane hit.
"I left my kids and just started searching places on the Web" to volunteer, eventually getting an invitation to come to Baton Rouge, she said.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/09/0...ick.redtape.ap/
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Offers of Aid Immediate, but U.S. Approval Delayed for Days
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 7, 2005; Page A01
Offers of foreign aid worth tens of millions of dollars -- including a Swedish water purification system, a German cellular telephone network and two Canadian rescue ships -- have been delayed for days awaiting review by backlogged federal agencies, according to European diplomats and information collected by the State Department.
Since Hurricane Katrina, more than 90 countries and international organizations offered to assist in recovery efforts for the flood-stricken region, but nearly all endeavors remained mired yesterday in bureaucratic entanglements, in most cases, at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In Germany, a massive telecommunication system and two technicians await the green light to fly to Louisiana, after its donors spent four days searching for someone willing to accept the gift.
"FEMA? That was a lost case," said Mirit Hemy, an executive with the Netherlands-based New Skies Satellite who made the phone calls. "We got zero help, and we lost one week trying to get hold of them."
In Sweden, a transport plane loaded with a water purification system and a cellular network has been ready to take off for four days, while Swedish officials wait for flight clearance. Nearly a week after they were offered, four Canadian rescue vessels and two helicopters have been accepted but probably won't arrive from Halifax, Nova Scotia, until Saturday. The Canadians' offer of search-and-rescue divers has so far gone begging.
Matching offers of aid -- from Panamanian bananas to British engineers -- with needs in the devastated region is a laborious process in a disaster whose scope is unheard of in recent U.S. history, especially for a country more accustomed to giving than receiving aid.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday that to his knowledge, all offers of foreign aid have been accepted and some have arrived, such as Air Canada's flights to relocate displaced people. But many others must be vetted by emergency relief specialists. "I think the experts will take a look at exactly what is needed now," he said.
FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule said the foreign complaints echo those from governors and officials "across the nation."
"There has been that common thought that because [offers of aid] are not tapped immediately, they're not prudently used," Rule said. "We are pulling everything into a centralized database. We are trying not to suck everything in all at once, whether we need it or not."
European diplomats said publicly that they understand the difficulty of coordinating such a massive recovery effort. In an open letter released yesterday, though, Ambassador John Bruton, head of the Delegation of the European Commission to the United States, wrote:
"Perhaps one of those lessons will be that rugged individualism is not always enough in such a crisis, particularly if an individual does not have the material and psychological means to escape the fury of a hurricane in time."
Soon after the flooding, the government of Sweden offered a C-130 Hercules transport plane, loaded with water purification equipment, and a cellular network donated by Ericsson.
"As far as I know, it's still on the ground," said Claes Thorson, press counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. He said that along with 20 other European Union nations that have pledged aid, "We are ready to send our things. We know they are needed, but what seems to be a problem is getting all these offers into the country."
So far, Thorson said, the State Department has denied Sweden's request for flight clearance. "We don't know exactly why, but we have a suspicion that the system is clogged on the receiving end," he said. "But we keep a request alive all the time, so we are not forgotten."
German telecommunications company KB Impuls contacted another company, Unisat, based in Rhode Island, with the idea of contributing an integrated satellite and cellular telephone system.
In a region with its communications systems in tatters, the $3 million system could handle 5,000 calls at once, routing them, if necessary, through Germany.
KB Impuls would contribute the equipment and two engineers, supplied with their own food, water and generator fuel, to set it up. Unisat contacted another firm, New Skies Satellite, with offices in Washington, which agreed to contribute satellite capacity.
New Skies even arranged transport, securing a C-130 cargo plane from the Israeli air force, to pick up the equipment and technicians from Germany and bring them to Louisiana. "With one call, I got an airplane," Hemy said. And then, over four days, she and the owner of Unisat, Uri Bar-Zemer, called contacts at FEMA, the American Red Cross, the State Department, even members of Congress, trying to find someone to accept the gift.
Finally the State Department told them that to receive flight clearance, the gift must have a specific recipient. "I was ringing, ringing, ringing -- and nothing," Hemy said. Finally, yesterday, she got a call from the U.S. Air Force's Joint Task Force Katrina Communication Operations division, thanking the companies for the gift and inquiring about the system's technical specifications.
As of late yesterday, the companies were waiting for a written order from the Northern Command to begin the mission. "I don't have a problem confirming that," Bar-Zemer said of the story. But he expressed concerns that disclosing the difficulties in donating could jeopardize the company's chances of actually delivering the aid.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...90601994_2.html
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The death of common sense continues to percolate ad nauseum.
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Retro ...
Last edited by occrider on Sep-08-2005 at 16:58
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Craig Martelle: FEMA is not a first responder
what was that shit about Mt. St. Helens parallel? fucking dumb.
