How on earth did FEMA decide to ship 78 trailer loads of block ice to Maine (and store the ice there, keeping the trucks waiting)? I have yet to read a full accounting of how much this idiocy cost the taxpayers, but it must have been a LOT of money. Think about it: FEMA decides that the NOLA refugees need ice-lots of it (to preserve corpses?), so they buy 800 tons of ice, and pay to have it shipped to NOLA. On arrival, they find:
there is not refrigerated storage available, the ice will melt away
There is no need for the huge quantity of ice-who decided they needed it anyways?
So, some dumb cluck at FEMA decided to have the trucks go to Maine (only 1900 miles away), where cold storage is available. Off they go, and I think, the ice was eventually discarded.
So, the question is:
-is FEMA a totally mindless bureaucracy? Is there some manual that says (in so many words:
“PROCEDURES; HANDLING of Perishable Goods:
-if perishable goods are delivered to a disaster area, and preservative storage is unavailable, such goods shall be shipped to an area where storage is available.
-if perishable goods are not needed, such goods are to be returned to the vendors for resale…see FEMA manual XC#-Xf&%, Edition XVII, Revision 20, page 267”
Of course, the cynical side of me says that certain “connected” people in FEMA made a ton of money on certain “no bid’ contracts for purchasing and transporting ice. But “Brownie” (as in, “you are doing a heckuva job, brownie”) couldn’t be as stupid as this.
Is FEM run by idiots?
Remember in the original X-Files movie FEMA is described as some hulking secret goverment menace just waiting to pounce at the first sign of danger and take over the country?
I think the problem may be that they called on the wrong FEMA – they ended up getting the Fumbling Emergency Moron Association, who serve all of your emergency moron needs.
I think FEMA has been treated rather harshly after the Katrina debacle. They’ve historically been no more or no less proficient than your average government agency. The few times I’ve been in contact with them I was amazed at how quickly they were on the scene helping people (hurricanes & tornados in NC & GA).
I would imagine that their organizational structure is designed to work with cooperative state & local governments. Their biggest failure to date has been an inability to compensate & react when presented with a situation out of their comfort zone.
It’s generally difficult to get great service out of an organization that 1) is run by government employees, and 2) has no real competition. There are exceptions, of course.
Papa Tiger was living in Guam when Typhoon Omar swept through, and swept all his belongings away. Even though he lived well up a hill, in a building of cement block construction, the windows and doors blew in and he had a flood running through his place and he lost everything he owned.
FEMA came to Guam to “help.” Except then Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. So guess where all the voters live? It ain’t Guam. They packed up and left en masse, never to be seen again.
He never got a cent’s worth of help from them.
FEMA is right up there as one of the dirtiest words available in our house.
Exactly. Competent and ethical people have been driven out of government in general for 8 years, either by being fired or by being unwilling to participate by principle.
My latest experience is it’s useless bureaucracy we could disband and never notice the difference, except that local dispatched services would function better. :mad:
The Red Cross and local government was helpful. Fema just wastes your time jumping through hoops and waiting to find it was all a waste of your time. At least they have more of your personal information for Homeland security to file away. Including the digital pictures they took.
No, no, see that’s just the public face of FEMA. Behind them is the Shadow FEMA, which is massing Russian Army troops in salt mines under Lake Michigan prepared to take over the United States for the UN Hegemony and the One World Order. And I have it on good authority that Voyager is behind it all; it’s all encoded in the page numbers of Foucault’s Pendulum.
In a recent congressional inquiry, the CEO of one the companies making FEMA trailers for post-Katrina relief testified that he knew the trailers would exude poisonous levels of formaldehyde.
