Todays blog is a little disturbing to talk about because we are discussing the effort “or lack of” put forth during Hurricane Katrina by the emergency relief organization known as FEMA. It makes me angry at the blatant apathetic approach towards helping relieve New Orleans after one of the nations biggest disasters. Due to outdated rules and unrevised policies FEMA has failed to handle their responsibilities when they were needed most.
With no way to communicate with the outside world it took FEMA 3 days to realize the gravity of the situation. When FEMA finally responded to the cries for help and sent in teams to perform search and rescue functions they redundantly searched buildings and neighborhoods that were already cleared by state personel. Some tend to wonder who trains these people. The ineptitude of FEMA doesn’t just fall on the men and women in the field but also to their support staff mainly being logistics. State worker claimed they had to order twice as many supplies to get half of what they needed, primarily because they had no confidence in the system. Who can we trust these days even the president of FEMA , Micheal Brown during an interview stated that FEMA’s workers were a close knit community highly trained in specialized areas and that the rescue effort was going well and according to plan. However in a later interview with Front Line he said the reason he said those things in the previous interview was to quell panic.
Nine months after the waters receeded and most of the Lower Nine was left in shambles a mere shadow of its former self half the area still had no electricity or potable water (Hiles). Some residents who did receive a FEMA trailers were pretty much left stranded with no power or water for six weeks. One resident stated “FEMA if your not gonna help get the hell out of here!.” These are the people that we trust to save us.
In short I would like to say thank you to FEMA for showing us what not do in a national crisis, maybe we will get it right the next time around. Good job Brownie is what Bush would always reference to in speaking about the most incapable, dimwitted, dolt to ever hold office in a federal agency. He managed to spend over 13 billion in tax payer dollars to fund this lame attempt , so thank you again.
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Hi wish you the best and that your holidays bring you lots of joy...
ReplyDeleteIn terms of FEMA i think that they fail to assist the needed the poor families that were left were the ones that did not have transportation and the government and other agencies were aware of the issue.
What i have learn from the assignment is that the government wanted to eliminate the poor people ( color people). What Katrina showed was that in catastrophic events the wealthy citizens will always survive, and the poor are left to die. All the government agencies fail and there wer few that did the right thing. But this is only my opinion..